Calendar

There were more than a thousand shtetls in today’s territories of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus.  The Second World War and the Holocaust obliterated the world of shtetls completely. Today, in Opatów—as well as in tens of other Polish towns—there are no more Jews left.

The OPOLIN Museum’s  new temporary exhibition titled (post) JEWISH… demonstrates that Polish towns hide two parallel histories. The history of their Polish inhabitants is well known and remembered. The one of their Jewish neighbours who are no more is forgotten or left unsaid. 

Guide in the exhibition will be the late Mayer Kirshenblatt, a painter who emigrated to Canada with his mother and brothers as a teenager, in 1934. Mayer recalls the shtetl of his youth, restoring vivid memories of the people, events, daily life and customs. His paintings—full of color, imagination and humor—show us a world that is no more. Looking at them, we learn about our shared Polish-Jewish history.

The exhibition also features a documentation of artistic interventions carried out in today’s Opatów, aimed at discovering and restoring the vestiges of the pre-war Jewish life.

Click here to buy tickets

The 26th annual Jewish Culture Festival in Budapest.

Main venues are the synagogues on Dohány Street, Hegedűs Gyula Street, Frankel Leó Street, and Rumbach Street, the Golem theatre, and the Balint Haz JCC.

Click here to see the program

While the historical shtetl has been studied extensively, the post-Jewish town, as a historical phenomenon and evolving site of contested memory, has received less attention. After the Holocaust, the many towns where Jewish communities had lived for centuries and where they had created a distinctive way of life became places without Jews. We want to explore this process of transforming shtetls into post-Jewish space.

The conference is organized as part of the events accompanying the new temporary exhibition of POLIN Museum “(post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt” opening on May 17, 2024. The exhibition will juxtapose postwar memories of prewar Jewish life in Polish Opatów, as recorded in words and paintings by a self-taught artist – Mayer Kirshenblatt, with the postwar post-Jewish town.

Program: 

Day 1: Sunday, September 8

• • 14:30–15:30 Tour of post-Jewish: Shtetl Opatów through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt (registration limit exhausted)

• • 15:30–16:00 Coffee break

• • 16.00–17:00 Opening Roundtable – Defining the post-Jewish Town
    Moderator: Aleksandra Jakubczak
     Dariusz Stola, Antony Polonsky, Natalia Romik
  • 17:00–17:30 Joanna Król-Komła presenting “Virtual Shtetl”
    Moderator: Aleksandra Jakubczak

• • 17:30–18:00 Coffee break

• • 18:00–19:30 Keynote: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Jewish Memories of Small-Town Life in Post-1945 Ukraine

• 19:30 Dinner for the conference speakers

Day 2: Monday, September 9

• • 9:30–11:00 The Shtetl as Material Witnesses
    Chair: Magdalena Waligórska
     Małgorzata Michalska-Nakonieczna, Elements of Jewish Architectural Heritage within the Urban Structures and Cultural Landscapes of Small Towns in the Lublin Region

    Emil Majuk, Destination Shtetl: Traces of Jewish Heritage in Towns in the Borderlands of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine

    Yechiel Weizman, Golgotha in Paradise: Rajgród and the Memory of its Jews

  • 11:00–11:30 Coffee break

• • 11:30–13:00 Post-Jewish Topographies
    Chair: Antony Polonsky
     Aleksandra Szczepan, Tender Geographies and Communities of Memory: Intimate Cartographies of Polish shtetlekh

    Joanna Kabrońska, Post-Jewish Urban Space in Kartuzy/Karthaus, Pomerania

    Clare Fester, Scavenging for Traces in the Post-Jewish Town: A Case Study of Memorial Book Maps

  • 13:00–14:00 Lunch

• • 14:00–15:30 Roundtable – The Dead Remain: Cemeteries in Former Shtetls
    Moderator: Yechiel Weizman
     Krzysztof Bielawski, Monika Tarajko, Aleksandra Janus
  • 15:30–15:50 Szymon Lenarczyk, Archeological Finds
    Moderator: Natalia Romik

• • 15:50–16:20 Coffee break

• 16:20–18:20 Becoming post-Jewish Towns
  Chair: Jeffrey Veidlinger
   Karolina Panz, “Died […] [at the Hands] of True Poles”: How Nowy Targ Became a Non-Jewish Town [cancelled]

  Anna Wylegała, Doctors, Craftsmen, and Shoemakers: The Changing Economy of the Shtetl and its Surroundings During and After World War II

  Mikhail Mitsel, Former Jewish Towns during Late Stalinism in Ukraine

  Tomasz Rakowski, Anthropology of Thrift in the Shtetl

Day 3: Tuesday, September 10

• • 10:00–11:30 The Shtetl: Transnational Perspectives
    Chair: Barbara Tornquist-PlewaKamil Kijek, The Last Polish Shtetl? The Jewish Community of Post-war Dzierżoniów: Continuity/Discontinuity of Jewish Life in Early Post-Holocaust Poland, 1945-1950

    Hune Margulies, Configuration of Space in Contemporary Shtetls in Metropolitan New York: Between Territorial Positioning, Cultural Resistance, and New Ethnicities

    David Assaf and Yael Darr, A Vanished Community and Its Changing Memory: The Case of Nowy Dwόr

  • 11:30–11:50 Jewish Heritage Europe, Natalia Romik in conversation with Ruth Ellen Gruber

• • 11:50–12:20 Coffee break

• 12:20–14:00 Things Left Behind
  Chair: Anna WylegałaMarta Frączkiewicz and Przemysław Kaniecki, Items Left Behind: Post-Jewish Objects in POLIN Museum’s Collection

  Magdalena Waligórska, Prêt-à-priver: Plundered Jewish Clothing in Post-Jewish Towns: A History of Intimate Dispossession

  Marta Duch-Dyngosz, Social Transactions Involving Jewish Property in Post-Jewish Towns: Jewish Agency vs. the Social Order

• 14:00 Closing Remarks: Future Directions

The international conference officially kicks off the project “Digital Stone Witnesses. German-Jewish Sepulchral Culture between the Middle Ages and Modernity – Space, Form, Inscription,”  a major project aimed at documenting the inscription on gravestones in Jewish cemeteries in Germany.

The project  is being carried out by the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History at the University of Duisburg-Essen in collaboration with the Professorship of Jewish Studies and the Competence Center for Monument Studies and Monument Technologies at the University of Bamberg and is co-led by Lucia Raspe, Mona Hess and Susanne Talabardon.

PROGRAM:

Sunday, 8 September 2024

Keynote Lecture 
18:00–18:30 Welcome
18:30–19:30 Carsten Wilke (Vienna): Lapidary Exuberance: European Variations on the Baroque Style in Hebrew Inscriptions
19:30–21:00 Reception

Monday, 9 September 2024

Steinerne Zeugen digital: An Introduction
10:00–10:15 Lucia Raspe (Duisburg-Essen): Research Program and Objectives
10:15–10:30 Mona Hess (Bamberg): Digitisation Methods for Jewish Graveyards
10:30–11:00 Nicola Kramp-Seidel (Essen): Introductory Remarks

Material Evidence
11:30–13:00 Tobias Arera-Rütenik (Bamberg): Formal Features of Gravestones and Possibilities of their Analysis
12:15–13:00 Vladimir Levin (Jerusalem): The Phenomenon of Signed Tombstones in Central Europe: Networks and Mental Maps

Recent Developments in Cemetery Documentation
14:30–15:15 Daniel Polakovič (Prague): Returning Names to People. The Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries in the Czech Republic
15:15–16:00 Marcin Wodziński (Wrocław): Researching Jewish Cemeteries in Poland: From Sepulchral Phonebooks to Quantitative Analysis

The German Context
16:30–17:15 Ulrich Knufinke (Hannover/Braunschweig): Jewish Cemeteries in the Focus of Monument Preservation since the Nineteenth Century
17:15–18:00 Christine Magin (Greifswald): The German Epigraphy Project Die Deutschen Inschriften des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: Objects – Sources – Methods

Tuesday, 10 September 2024

Jewish Sepulchral Culture of the Middle Ages
10:00–10:45 Michael Brocke (Essen): Elites of Different Status: Inscriptions from the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century in Search of their Author
10:45–11:30 Ortal-Paz Saar (Utrecht): Emotions on Medieval Jewish Epitaphs
12:00–12:45 Karin Sczech (Erfurt): The Excavation of the Medieval Jewish Cemetery of Erfurt

Text and Intertext
14:00–14:45 Nathanja Hüttenmeister (Essen): Formula and Freedom: The Walsdorf Cemetery in Comparative Perspective
14:45–15:30 Avriel Bar-Levav (Ra’anana): Tombstone Inscriptions and Jewish Textual Intimacy

Settlement Patterns and Cemetery Network
16:00–16:45 Rotraud Ries (Herford): Organization and Spatial Distribution – Early Modern Jewish Cemeteries in Southern and Northern Germany
16.45–17:30 Christiane Müller (Essen): Cemeteries in the Duchy of Cleves and their Inscriptions: Levels of Belonging

Wednesday, 11 September 2024

Archival Sources
09:30–10:15 Inka Arroyo Antezana (Jerusalem): Theodor Harburger’s Private Collection for Epigraphers (with a Brief Overview of the CAHJP Holdings on Epigraphy)
10:15–11:00 Susanne Talabardon (Bamberg): Labours of a Long Journey. The Chevra Qadisha in Bamberg and their Cemetery Far Away

Jewish Cemeteries and the Larger Historical Picture
11:30–12:15 Rachel Greenblatt (Waltham, Mass.): Cemetery & Synagogue; Women & Men: Prague Gravestones as Historical Source Material
12:15–13:00 Debra Kaplan (Ramat-Gan): Plotting Communal Hierarchies: Records of Jewish Death and Burial in Early Modern Europe
13:00–13:30 Concluding Discussion

Six month “Heritage Season” of Events (Ceremonial, Concerts, Lectures, Meal, Performances, Talks, Tours, and Walks) to mark the 150th Anniversary of Princes Road Synagogue.​ 

Themes: 

September 2024 – People & Place; 

October 2024 – Charity & Philanthropy and Rituals;

November 2024 – Civil life; December 2024 – Education & Learning; 

January 2025 – Trade & Occupations; February 2025 – Art & Culture

The program is evolving.

Click here to see the program as events are confirmed.

NOTE: Tickets for all events must be reserved in advance.

To apply for tickets, please complete the application for tickets form here.

FRH Conference 2024 – Religious Heritage in Transition: Challenges and Solutions

Religious heritage must respond to the changes brought about by the emergence of new digital technologies, the effects of climate change and the way we understand, relate to and value our historic buildings and intangible heritage in 21st-century Europe. Our conference will explore existing initiatives and possible future solutions so that the various actors involved in religious heritage, including heritage professionals, academics, policy makers at all levels, religious bodies and European citizens, do not fall behind in this triple transition (green, digital and social).

The conference will address this overarching topic through four thematic sessions:
-Resilient Heritage
-Sustainable Solutions
-Digital Futures
-Quality of Life

With the financial support of the German Foreign Ministry and in cooperation with the International Interdisciplinary Certificate Program in Judaica and the Jewish community of Ivano-Frankivsk, the ESJF organizes a seminar designed for historians, local activists, school teachers, employees of non-governmental organizations, volunteers and other interested persons who care about the problem of preservation of historical heritage, in particular, Jewish cemeteries.

Participation in the seminar is free.

Participants from outside Ivano-Frankivsk will be compensated for transportation costs and booked one night of hotel accommodation.

Click here for the registration form.

\The number of participants is limited.

The conference aims “to foster debate on the strategies applied by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the field of Jewish cemetery preservation, as well as the research methods used by specialists and examples of the preservation of Jewish cemeteries from the perspective of their signification as cultural heritage of living communities.”

The conference is supported by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, the Alba Iulia Jewish Community, Bar Ilan University, and Alba County Council, among others.

It is seen as a follow up to several other conferences, including European Jewish Cemeteries: An Interdisciplinary Conference, co-organized by JHE in Vilnius, 2015 and Urban Jewish Heritage: Presence and Absence, Kraków, 2018; as well as published research such as Rudolf Klein’s Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries of the 19th and 20th Centuries in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Study, 2018; and projects devoted such as those by the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, initiated in 2015.