Edmund de Waal is creating a major new two-part exhibition to be displayed in the 500-year-old Jewish Ghetto in Venice, coinciding with the opening of the 58th Biennale.
The first part is located in the spaces surrounding the Canton Scuola, the beautiful 16th century synagogue in the Ghetto Nuovo, which is now part of the Jewish Museum.
New installations of porcelain, marble and gold will reflect the literary and musical heritage of this extraordinary place. The intention is to animate spaces that are little known and little understood by visitors to the Biennale and to bring new audiences into the Ghetto.
The second part of the work will be a pavilion based at the Ateneo Veneto, the fifteenth-century building near the Fenice Opera House that has been an historic centre for cultural debate in Venice. Here, de Waal is constructing a small building within the main space that will house 2,000 books by exiled writers, from Ovid to the present day.
A major exhibit at the Bologna Jewish Museum will focus on the city’s “lost” medieval Jewish cemetery: it was destroyed in 1569 by order of Pope Pius V and was rediscovered during excavations in 2012-2014.
the exhibit features material found in the graves — including gold, silver, and bronze jewelry incorporating gemstones and amber, as well as other precious artifacts, using them to tell the story of medieval Jewish life in the city.
It was curated and organized by the Bologna Jewish Museum and the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for Bologna and the provinces of Modena, Reggio Emilia and Ferrara, in collaboration with the Jewish Community of Bologna.
See our JHE article about the exhibition
The Colours of Judaism in Italy: Precious textiles and fabrics from ancient Jerusalem to contemporary ready-to-wear
The exhibition at the famed Uffizi Gallery explores various aspects of the Jewish world’s relationship with fabrics and textiles for both religious and secular use, up to and including fashion and business in the 20th century, via such themes as the role of writing as an ornamental motif, the use of textiles to adorn synagogues, embroidery as secret labor, and the role of women. .
The exhibit is included in the general admission ticket to the Uffizi.
Cemetery clean up summer camp
The Summer Camp in Vištytis aims to preserve the town’s Jewish heritage and prepare information and material for the inventory process of the local Jewish cemetery. Ultimately, it will help to understand about the situation of the cemetery as well as people who had been buried there. The inventory process will cover cleaning and tidying the cemetery from debris and excess of vegetation; digitisation and identifying coordinates of graves; identifying and copying legible inscriptions. Your volunteer work will be a vital part in making this almost lost information accessible to the public again.
The initiative is organized by the NGO Maceva- Litvak cemetery catalogue and Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, with the cooperation of the NGO Goodwill Foundation.
Dedication ceremony of the restored tomb of Hungarian Jewish Olympics hero Alfred Hajos, an architect who also designed the monumental Holocaust memorial in the Kozma utca Jewish cemetery.
One-day seminar to discuss ideas for the future use of the former synaogue in Pacov, CZ, followed by a tour of the building.
Program:
5–6pm: Synagogue tour
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