Calendar

As part of its “House of Life” project to open the cemetery to the public, nine families will be coming to the historic Willesden Jewish cemetery on May 26 to tell stories of people buried there.

Presentation of the project documenting and restoring the Jewish catacomb in Venosa, Italy.

Click here to see the program.

Following its discovery and restoration, an elaborate 16th century Aron ha-Kodesh from Pisa, believed to be the oldest Ark in Tuscany, will be displayed as part of a program during which its history and the restoration process will be discussed.

Exhibition of Photographs by Vincent Giordano.

The photographs are part of a multi-media archive, created by Giordano, who died in 2010, that was sponsored by International Survey of Jewish Monuments and in 2019 will find a new home at the Hellenic American Project and Special Collections at the Library of Queens College, New York.

Giordano’s photographs document two related communities of Greek Romaniote Jews – in Ioannina, in northwestern Greece and on Broome Street on New York’s Lower East Side. Romaniote Jews trace their religious and cultural heritage to the Judaism of the ancient Greco-Roman world two-thousand years ago, and these two tiny congregations are among the few remaining to follow these traditions. Romaniotes have their own liturgy and cultural traditions, as well as their own language, a dialect of Greek that combines words and phrases from Hebrew and Turkish. This luminous black and white photo essay includes a poignant exploration of liturgy and ritual, conveying how people engage with religious space and carry on their time-honored sacred traditions.

The exhibition will open on Thursday, September 19th , 2019 at 6:00 p.m. it will continue through October 3rd, 2019. 

A panel discussion by experts will take place at the Consulate on Wednesday, September 25^th, 2019 at 6:00 p.m.

Lecture and panel discussion about Romaniote Jews, linked to the exhibition “Romaniote Memories – A Jewish Journey from Ioannina, Greece to Manhattan: Photographs by Vincent Giordano.”

A commemoration of Theodor Schreier, the architect of the synagogue in St. Pölten, will include the unveiling of a commemorative plaque to the architect and his wife — both Holocaust victims who died in the Terezin ghetto/camp north of Prague — and a memorial symphonic concert featuring the music of Brahms, Bloch, Dvorak, Janacek, and Schulhoff.

The synagogue is now the home of the Institut für jüdische Geschichte Österreichs — Institute for Austrian Jewish History.

A panel discussion about the Milan’s main synagogue, designed by the architect Luca Beltrami and originally built in 1892. It was severely damaged in 1943 but fully rebuilt, conserving the original facade. (In Italian.)

Click here to see program

Dr Sofiya Dyak, Nikita Kadan and Professor Philippe Sands  discuss the evolution of the practices of Holocaust remembrance and its public discourse in Ukraine: How are these tragic events remembered across different communities and why? How to deal with histories of lands subjected to multiple occupations and mass murder across communities? How to write a historic narrative for the country, which is still in a state of war?

This event is part of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Dr Sofiya Dyak is the Director of the Lviv Centre of Urban History, a private institution which initiated a number of important initiatives commemorating Jewish community presence in Lviv in partnership with Lviv’s municipality, including the Space of Synagogues memorial. In 2017, the centre hosted the “Un-named” project, reflecting on mass violence in Ukraine between 1931 and 1945. The project included visual work by Nikita Kadan, Ukraine’s contemporary artist. Similarly, Professor Philippe Sands traced his family history back to Lviv, with the city becoming the focus of much of his literary work and intellectual reflection.