Are there Jewish Heritage sites close to your heart and memory? What are they? And what do they mean to you?
With the new #MyParallelTraces campaign launched by the AEPJ (European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage) in cooperation with us at JHE — you can send a virtual post card and let us know.
Click here to find out details and send us a card.
It’s an online, participatory way to keep rediscovering and exploring Jewish heritage throughout Europe — even at a time when travel is difficult (or impossible), museums, exhibitions, and heritage sites are closed, and most of us are staying put at home.
Even though we can’t physically visit the places we hold dear, we can still engage with them – telling their stories and our own — through digital postcards.
Everyone likes to get postcards, and Jewish heritage sites have long been featured on picture postcards in many countries. (See this web site devoted to them.)
#MyParallelTraces lets you create, send and receive them online.
There’s a fill-in form where you can post a picture of a Jewish heritage site and add both a brief explanation of its historical context and – importantly – a brief personal reflection on your own connection with that site. It can be a family connection, a historic connection, or a connection that is religious, urban, literary, or one rooted in memory, work, art, or – indeed – anything else. Think of it as a picture postcard with a printed caption and your own personal message you’re sending to a friend or loved one.
The postcards we receive – with their photos and reflections – will be uploaded to the #MyParallelTraces web site as a growing gallery: an open and pluralistic approach to Jewish heritage that offers a more personal perspective. It will provide space to interpret and reinterpret the heritage, and to ask ourselves about the meaning of each site – not just in the past, but also in the present and future.
Click here to find out more. see postcards already received, and send your own
#MyParallelTraces carries forward Parallel Traces: A New Lens on Jewish Heritage, a project initiated by the AEPJ that organized a pan-European contest to select a series of artworks presenting the reality of Jewish heritage. It hosted local exhibitions presenting the selected works of the contest, but these have had to be put on hold because of COVID-19 restrictions.
Parallel Traces is co-funded by the European Union within the framework of the Creative Europe program.