Dzialoszyce, Poland

The first time I visited Dzialoszyce, a dusty village about 50 kilometers northeast of Krakow, an elderly woman approached as I stood with several companions, gazing at the gaping roofless ruin that had once been the town's grand synagogue.

She mumbled a few words of Yiddish in our direction, then apologized that it had been such a long time since she had spoken that language.

 A mighty hand reaches out and, forming a tight fist, grasps the bough of a tree and breaks it sharply off. The image is extraordinary, even surreal. It is so vivid that you can almost hear the crack of the wood.
     The tree is the Tree of Life and the hand is the hand of God -- or maybe that of the Angel of Death. The portrayal, found repeated over and over in the Jewish cemetery in Radauti, in northern Romania, is one of the remarkable sculpted images found on Jewish tombstones in several counties in East-Central Europe.

(Gustav Mahler, 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911)

The years 2010 and 2011 mark a memorable double anniversary for the great conductor and composer Gustav Mahler -- 150 years since his birth in an out-of-the-way Czech village and 100 years since his untimely death in Vienna at the age of 50.

Mahler conducted in great cities all over Europe -- among them Hamburg, Budapest, Prague, Leipzig, London, Moscow and, most notably, Vienna, where he directed the Court Opera for 10 years.

It's more than ten years since the end of the bloody series of wars that broke apart the former Yugoslavia and made much of the Balkan peninsula a strictly no-go area for tourists.

Happily by now, most parts of the region are once again wide open to visitors. The stunningly beautiful Dalmatian coast of Croatia in particular has again become a summer playground for hundreds of thousands of foreign holiday-makers, many of them from Israel, and even Bosnia-Hercegovina has upgraded its tourism infrastructure in a bid to welcome guests.

PRAGUE -- Lying between the Vltava River and the Old Town Square, Prague's medieval "Jewish Town," Josefov, is one of the most popular attractions in a magical "golden city" that draws millions of tourists a year. Here, amid historic synagogues, the Old Jewish Cemetery, the Jewish Town Hall and other major sights, is the Ground Zero of Jewish Prague: the stomping ground for heroes and villains and the evocative background setting for a host of old legends, not to mention the cradle of present-day Jewish life.

On an overcast afternoon not long ago, two friends and I found ourselves plodding to and fro amid a forest of crooked gravestones in the centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Bolekhiv, a small town in western Ukraine south of L'viv.We were on a sort of pilgrimage, methodically pushing through weeds and peering closely at eroding epitaphs, trying to find the tomb of a man we knew had been buried there more than 200 years earlier.Dov Ber Birkenthal, an intrepid wine merchant and Jewish community leader, had been born in Bolekhiv -- known in Polish as Bolechow -- i

Krakow, Poland's historic royal capital, lives and breathes historic memory.

Its magnificent main market Square, the Rynek Glowny, serves as a vast urban living room at the heart of a medieval Old Town that rivals that of Prague.

There, each hour on the hour, day and night, a trumpeter climbs to the top of St. Mary's Basilica and plays a fanfare that is cut off abruptly in mid-note to recall a trumpeter who was killed by invading Tartars while playing the very same call to arms in 1241.

Slovenia is a spectacular lozenge of territory smack in the heart of central Europe. 
From its Alpine peaks to its Adriatic beaches, from its mirrorlike lakes to its bustling baroque cities, it encompasses a wealth of natural beauty, fascinating folkways and deep-rooted history – all crammed into an area the size of Israel that is still enough off the beaten track to make a visit seem like a discovery.

In the 14 years since the Velvet Revolution toppled the old communist regime, Prague has become one of Europe's top travel destinations. But there is so much to see and do in that glorious, golden city, that the vast majority of visitors never get a chance to explore other parts of the Czech Republic.

On the one hand, this is a pity, for the country boasts an extraordinary wealth of historic sites and natural beauty, all within a few hours drive of the capital.

photo taken by Miroslav Petrasko, on January 29, 2002, CC licensing

TRNAVA, SLOVAKIA -- Slovakia lies in the heart of Europe and boasts magnificent scenery, gems of architecture, vivid folk traditions and as many as 300 spectacular castles, but it remains little known in the collective consciousness as a tourist destination.