Jewish Heritage Europe

Calendar

Feb
23
Tue
Legacy of the Shtetl: Investigating Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian Borderlands @ Online Zoom event
Feb 23 @ 18:00 – 19:00
Legacy of the Shtetl: Investigating Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian Borderlands @ Online Zoom event | Bentonville | Arkansas | United States
The Legacy of the Shtetl: Investigating Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian Borderlands
with Dr Magdalena Waligórska, and Dr Natalia Romik, respondent, and with Prof François Guesnet, Chair 
 
Co-organized by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and  the UCL Institute of Jewish Studies
 
Magdalena Waligórska takes us on a journey to the post-1945 Polish-Ukrainian-Belorusian borderlands where she explores small towns which had a predominantly Jewish population before the Second World War and the Holocaust. Here, Jewish property both entirely fell under the control of the new ethnic majority and remained a “disinherited heritage” that continues to cause dissonance and psychological discomfort to its current “heirs.”
 
The unsettling presence of Jewish ruins, resurfacing human remains, walled-in objects, collapsing cellars, and the recycled tombstones constitutes an “intrusion of the past into the present” that, decades after the war, still demands action and results in different local responses.
 
The respondent, Natalia Romik, is an artist, urban historian, and architect from Warsaw who has undertaken similar but different explorations of the Jewish heritage in small Polish towns.
 
Mar
15
Mon
Connecting Small Histories: a Festival of Local Heritage @ Online Zoom event
Mar 15 – Mar 25 all-day
Connecting Small Histories: a Festival of Local Heritage @ Online Zoom event

The Festival brings together both the work of the National Lottery Heritage project “Connecting Small Histories” and 12 other major Jewish Heritage projects.

“Connecting Small Histories” draws the footprint of Jewish life in what are now small or former communities across the United Kingdom. Through stories and memories it identifies the Jewish legacy in the local economies and culture, beginning with six very different locations, Eastbourne, St Annes, Bradford, Sunderland, Cumbria and Somerset.

After almost twelve months of work, the History Festival begins the telling of these “Small Histories”, bringing both them and a wide selection of projects from the project’s Heritage Hub to a wider public.

The program brings together story tellers, academics, our volunteer researchers and the research team, to paint a picture of Jewish life and heritage spread wide across the country, in towns and countryside.

Jewish Heritage Europe is delighted to be one of the partners of this event!

Click here to see the program and register for the online events

 

 

Mar
17
Wed
Architecture and Assimilation: Anglo-Jews, Alien Jews and the Politics of the Fin de Siècle Synagogue @ webinar
Mar 17 @ 16:00 – 17:30

A seminar that will be held online on Microsoft Teams. Guests can register, and gain access, by emailing TRS@chester.ac.uk

Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Chester.

 

Apr
20
Tue
“Judapest”: Austria-Hungary and its Jews at the Fin-de-Siècle @ Online Zoom event
Apr 20 @ 18:00 – 19:30
"Judapest": Austria-Hungary and its Jews at the Fin-de-Siècle @ Online Zoom event

Lecture by Michael Miller, of CEU

Budapest is sometimes called the “Paris of the East,” but in the 1890s, it acquired a new, less flattering nickname: “Judapest.” Karl Lueger, the antisemitic mayor of Vienna – who hated Hungarians more than he hated Jews – is often credited with coining this derogatory nickname for a city that he thought had become more “Jewish” than “Hungarian.”  Budapest was Europe’s fastest-growing city at the time, with a flurry of cultural and commercial activity that fascinated — and sometimes appalled — contemporary residents and visitors. This talk will examine the image of Budapest in the decades before and after the First World War, exploring the ways in which Hungary’s capital city was imagined by Jews and non-Jews alike as a quintessentially Jewish metropolis.

The evening will be chaired by Professor Mark E. Smith, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton. It will be hosted by Professor Mark Cornwall (University of Southampton, Parkes Institute)

The event will be held on Zoom. Please register by Monday 19th April 16:00 here:

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/parkes/news/events/2021/04/20-parkes-lecture-2021.page

Speaker biography: Michael L. Miller is Associate Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and co-founder of the university’s Jewish Studies program. He received his PhD in History from Columbia University, where he specialized in Jewish and Central European History. Michael’s research focuses on the impact of nationality conflicts on the religious, cultural, and political development of Central European Jewry in the long nineteenth century. His articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Austrian History Yearbook, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, Múlt és Jövő , The Jewish Quarterly Review and AJS Review. Miller’s book, Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation, was published by Stanford University Press in 2011. It appeared in Czech translation as Moravští Židé v době emancipace (Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2015). He is currently working on a history of Hungarian Jewry, titled Manovill: A Tale of Two Hungarys.

Aug
3
Tue
World War I Jewish Soldiers – Willesden Jewish Cemetery @ online webinar
Aug 3 @ 20:00 – 21:00
World War I Jewish Soldiers - Willesden Jewish Cemetery @ online webinar

Willesden Jewish Cemetery volunteer researchers Corinne Van Colle and Jackie Asher spent 2½ years uncovering the stories of the many Jewish soldiers killed in action during World War 1 who are buried or commemorated in the cemetery. Encountering many challenges including worn headstones, inconsistent records, and changed names, they eventually discovered commemorations relating to over 350 servicemen (and one woman!). Research revealed, too, their many different family backgrounds: these were the sons of Edwardian Anglo-Jewish engineers, bootmakers and bankers. In this webinar, Corinne and Jackie will share some of the forgotten stories of the young Jewish men, memorialised in the cemetery in moving inscriptions and poems, who went to war in 1914.

Oct
18
Mon
A World Beyond: Jewish Cemeteries in Turkey 1583-1990 @ online
Oct 18 @ 16:00 – 19:30
A World Beyond: Jewish Cemeteries in Turkey 1583-1990 @ online

An international conference to officially launch the massive website and digital database of Jewish cemeteries in Turkey, A World Beyond: Jewish Cemeteries in Turkey 1583-1990.  

The database and web site are a project of the The Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University. We wrote about it when it first went online last year as a beta version — though the site still says it’s in beta, the kinks that some users experienced appear to have been worked out, and we find it easy to search and use. 

Dedicated to the memory of  the oriental studies scholar Bernard Lewis, who died in 2018, the database is the culmination of decades of research by Prof. Minna Rozen (and others) and comprises digital images and detailed textual content of more than 61,000 Jewish gravestones from a variety of communities in Turkey from 1583 until 1990. Rozen’s onsite documentation of the cemeteries was carried out in 1988-1990. The material was digitized in the 1990s but until the web site was uploaded, it had not been publicly accessible.

Oct
19
Tue
Jewish Heritage in Bratislava Region @ BSK office
Oct 19 all-day
Jewish Heritage in Bratislava Region @ BSK office | Bratislavský kraj | Slovakia

Organised by the Bratislava Regional administration, the conference will mark recent developments and future plans regarding Jewish heritage in the Bratislava region, including the restoration of the synagogue in Senec and plans to restore the synagogue in Svaty Jur.

Topics will include:

  • The importance of Slovak monuments in Europe
  • Plans for the abandoned synagogues and cemeteries
  • The story of the synagogue in Senec
  • The monumental value of the synagogue in Svätý Jur
  • Symbolism of tombstones in Jewish cemeteries

Click here to see the full program

 

The  conference is organized by the Bratislava self-governing region on the occasion of 2021 European Cultural Heritage Days, with input from the SNM – Museum of Jewish Culture,  the Academia Istropolitana Nova, the Monuments Office of the Slovak Republic and the Municipal Office for the Protection of Monuments in Bratislava.

 

Nov
4
Thu
Jewish Identity Engraved on Stones @ Zulfaris synagogue
Nov 4 – Nov 21 all-day
Jewish Identity Engraved on Stones @ Zulfaris synagogue | İstanbul | Turkey

The exhibition focuses on the archaeological findings that demonstrate a Jewish presence in what is now Turkey that goes back more than  2,500 years.

The exhibit includes photos, diagrams, information panels, a 3D reconstruction, and a video that document archaeological finds including inscriptions, gravestones, and the remains of ancient synagogues.

Nov
9
Tue
Slovakia Jewish Cultural Heritage conference
Nov 9 @ 09:00 – 12:00

The annual conference on Jewish cultural heritage in Slovakia can be followed online at https://www.facebook.com/zidianaslovensku.

The annual Eugen Barkany prize will be awarded.

Mar
20
Sun
80th Anniversary of Destruction of Jewish Rohatyn @ Jewish cemetery
Mar 20 @ 13:00 – 14:00
80th Anniversary of Destruction of Jewish Rohatyn @ Jewish cemetery | Rohatyn | Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast | Ukraine

Commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the destruction of Jewish Rohatyn.

On March 20, 1942, the largest and deadliest of the Nazi “aktions” resulted in the final liquidation of Rohatyn’s Jewish population. 3,500-5,500 victims, half of which were children, were executed and buried in a common grave in the fields south of city center. Rohatyn Jewish Heritage invites all those who wish to remember the victims on-site at 13.00 on 20 March 2022 for prayer and a moment of silence led by Rabbi Kolesnik of Ivano-Frankivisk.

GPS: 49°24’12.7″N 24°37’39.4″E

(Photo shows longtime local activist, the later Mykhailo Vorobets, at the south mass grave in Rohatyn in 2012. Photo © RJH)

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