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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JEWISH HERITAGE TRAVEL: A Guide to Eastern Europe
Completely Updated and Expanded, New Edition Features Hundreds of Synagogues, Cemeteries, Monuments, Museums and Jewish Communities in Europe's Historic Jewish Heartland
WASHINGTON (Feb. 20, 2007)--The travel itinerary into Europe's historic Jewish heartland was born with the publication in 1992 of Ruth Ellen Gruber's acclaimed guidebook, "Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern and Central Europe." Widely acknowledged as the best and most comprehensive book of its kind, it unveiled astonishing traces of a civilization almost totally annihilated in the Holocaust. Since then, the fall of communism has opened the region to millions of visitors and brought tremendous changes in access to and recognition of long-forgotten sites ranging from monumental synagogues to medieval ghettos to elaborate sculptural tombstones. The new freedoms also sparked an extraordinary revival of Jewish life in the region.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JEWISH HERITAGE TRAVEL: A Guide to Eastern Europe (National Geographic Books, March 2007, ISBN: 978-1-4262-0046-5, $18.95) is the long-awaited, completely updated and expanded edition of Gruber's groundbreaking book. An indispensable guide to a rediscovered world, it includes new coverage of Ukraine and Lithuania in addition to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and all of the former Yugoslavia. Taking readers to small towns, remote villages and bustling major cities, Gruber reveals, in poignant and intimate detail, the remarkable vestiges of the rich and dynamic Jewish culture that flourished for centuries in the region. On-site adventurers and armchair travelers alike will find a wealth of practical travel information, including up-to-date details on sites, tips on how to visit them, important Web sites, addresses of kosher restaurants and a glossary.
"This is the book that renewed and redrew the map of Jewish Eastern Europe for the descendants of Eastern European Jews and anybody else interested in a culture that refuses to go away," writes Michael Wex, author of "Born to Kvetch," in the guidebook's foreword.
Gruber, an American writer based in Europe, was a foreign correspondent with UPI for more than a decade. Author of several books on Jewish culture, she is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow and has won two Simon Rockower awards for excellence in Jewish journalism. She writes a Jewish travel column for www.centropa.org and has contributed to The New York Times, BusinessWeek, International Herald Tribune and many other publications. She is available for interviews.
JEWISH HERITAGE TRAVEL is at the vanguard of a wave of new titles catering
to the growing appetite of travelers eager to explore their own cultural heritage and to find destinations that offer more insightful, deep and personally rewarding travel experiences. Elizabeth Newhouse, editorial director for travel books at National Geographic, states in Publishers Weekly's Jan. 29, 2007, travel feature, "We believe that experiential travel is important, because the closer people feel to the places they visit, the more careful they will be in preserving them. Having an authentic experience that includes cultural and natural elements has always been at the forefront of the society's travel ideals." Newhouse pointed to JEWISH HERITAGE TRAVEL as the latest National Geographic title to exemplify that ideal.
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Contacts:
Penelope Dackis
National Geographic
(202) 857-7335
pdackis@ngs.org
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