Jewish Heritage Europe

Calendar

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

 

 

May
15
Sat
Explore former ghetto, Finale Emilia @ former Jewish ghetto
May 15 @ 09:00 – 17:30

Every half hour there will be a guided walking tour of the former Jewish ghetto in Finale Emilia.

Participants must wear masks and follow other COVID-19 health measures.

The tours are presented as part of the Italian Environment Fund’s Springtime Open Days events around the country.

 

Click here to learn more and register — reservations are necessary

May
16
Sun
Explore Jewish cemetery Finale Emilia @ Jewish cemetery Finale Emilia
May 16 @ 09:00 – 17:30

There will be a guided walking tour every half hour of the Jewish cemetery, founded in the 17th century. The cemetery had been abandoned for decades until a major restoration and clean-up in 1987 and a further restoration in 2015.

Participants must wear masks and follow other COVID-19 health measures.

The tours are presented as part of the Italian Environment Fund’s Springtime Open Days events around the country.

Click here to register — reservations are required

 

 

May
19
Wed
Jewish Bialystok virtual tour @ Online event
May 19 @ 19:00 – 20:00
Jewish Bialystok virtual tour @ Online event

Take a a virtual tour of Bialystok with Tomasz Wisniewski, an expert in Jewish history of Podlasie region, who will guide viewers through the city space and history of Bialystok, a home to Jewish community from the mid-17th century. Join in to listen to the history of Jewish community of Bialystok: its role in the rapid development of the town in the 19th century, social and cultural life in early 20th century, and the fate of Jews during Soviet and Nazi occupation.

The tour is part of the regular “Zoom in” program of the Forum for Dialogue NGO.

Wisniewski has been working for more than 30 years to preserve the memory of the Jewish communities of Poland’s eastern borderland. He created the web site jewishbialystok.pl as an online museum of Jewish history in the region and he received the POLIN museum award in 2018.

He has written several books, including a guidebook to Jewish Bialystok and surroundings, and on his YouTube channel  you can find more than 2,000 films presenting Jewish history of the region. He has documented Jewish cemeteries and runs the site bagnowka.pl, which collects data on almost 40,000  tombstones, mainly Jewish ones, and also presents other heritage information.

Click here to register

 

 

Jun
10
Thu
Virtual Reconstructions of Synagogues in Germany @ NS Documentation Center
Jun 10 @ 19:00 – 20:00
Virtual Reconstructions of Synagogues in Germany @ NS Documentation Center | Köln | Nordrhein-Westfalen | Germany

The opening of an exhibition of virtual reconstructions of synagogues destroyed by the Nazis.

It is mounted at the the NS Documentation Center in cooperation with the Technical University of Darmstadt.

The exhibition “Synagogues in Germany – A Virtual Reconstruction” runs from from June 11th to September 19th.

The TU Darmstadt has been working on the virtual reconstruction of synagogues that were destroyed in Germany for 25 years. The initial spark for this long-term project was the attack by neo-Nazis on the synagogue in Lübeck in 1994. In 2019, an attack was carried out on the synagogue there in Halle. With this project, the TU Darmstadt shows the cultural loss, the importance of synagogues in the cityscape and the beauty of the architecture. 

The exhibition also shows synagogues that were built in Germany after 1945. 

Read our article about virtual reconstructions

Jun
13
Sun
Synagogue in Gleusdorf opens @ Synagogue in Gleusdorf, Germany
Jun 13 all-day
Synagogue in Gleusdorf opens @ Synagogue in Gleusdorf, Germany | Untermerzbach | Bayern | Germany

The tiny former synagogue in the village of Gleusdorf, out of use for more than a century, opens as an information center about local rural Jewish life and history.

The inauguration ceremony will be a closed event for invited guests because of COVID restrictions.

The synagogue has been owned since 2016 by the Untermerzbach municipality, which sponsored and oversaw the €174,000 project. Funding included a €87,500 grant from the EU’s LEADER funding program for the development of the rural economy. 

The synagogue will be operated in cooperation with the Friends of the Synagogue association in nearby Memmelsdorf, and the preservation concept accords with that of the Memmelsdorf synagogue –“conservation instead of reconstruction” —  that is, not to reconstruct or restore the building, but to conserve it in a way that shows the history of what it has gone through.

Click to read our article about the restoration and project

 

Jul
12
Mon
Görlitz Synagogue reopens @ Synagogue Görlitz
Jul 12 all-day

The former synagogue in Görlitz reopens after  around 30 years of gradual renovation as the “Kulturforum Görlitz Synagogue.” 

The Görlitz synagogue is the only community synagogue in saxony that survived Kristallnacht in 1938.

According to the city administration, the total cost of the renovation was 12.6 million euros.

 The opening had been postponed several times due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Aug
25
Wed
Architecture of Devotion – The Plans of Lipót Baumhorn for the Szeged New Synagogue @ Pava utca synagogue
Aug 25 2021 @ 16:30 – Jan 20 2022 @ 16:30

An exhibition presenting the construction history of the Szeged New Synagogue. The opening event is at 16:30 on August 25 (see the picture for the program).

The Hungarian Museum of Architecture and Monument Protection Documentation Center (MÉM MDK), in cooperation with the Jewish Community of Szeged and the Holocaust Memorial  Center, is commemorating Lipót Baumhorn and the 120 year-old synagogue in Szeged with an exhibition.

Baumhorn letter with drawing of Szeged synagogue. Photo: Szeged Jewish community/Rediscover

The exhibition on the ground floor of the Páva Street Synagogue, which is part of the Holocaust Memorial Center, focuses on the New Synagogue in Szeged, built between 1900 and 1903. In addition to the construction plans and the documents on the building created at the time of its construction, the sacred textiles made for the inauguration of the synagogue, including the Torah Ark curtain (parochet) and the Torah mantel will also be on display. The Jewish Community of Szeged has had the richly embroidered silk objects restored for this occasion.

Besides these objects, rich photographic material also illustrates the oeuvre of Lipót Baumhorn, who was born 160 years ago. The exhibits will not only present the twenty-six synagogues he designed, but visitors will also be able to see examples of his secular architectural work, as interpreted by the photographer Krisztina Bélavári. The synagogue that houses the exhibition was also designed by Lipót Baumhorn, so he is being commemorated in a worthy setting.

New Synagogue, Szeged

Curator: Ágnes Ivett Oszkó, Ph.D., art historian of the Hungarian Museum of Architecture and Monument Protection Documentation Center

Director of the restoration project for the Jewish Community of Szeged: Dóra Pataricza, Ph.D., historian

Professional consultants: Vera Ábrahám, head of the Archives of the Szeged Jewish Community; Dr. Rudolf Klein, Head of Department, University of Óbuda Ybl Miklós Faculty of Architecture; Pál Ritoók, art historian, head of the Museum Department of the Hungarian Museum of Architecture and Monument Protection Documentation Center

Sep
26
Sun
I-Tal-Ya Jewish books presentation @ Meis museum (and online streaming)
Sep 26 @ 11:30 – 12:30
I-Tal-Ya Jewish books presentation @ Meis museum (and online streaming) | Ferrara | Emilia-Romagna | Italy

I-Tal-Ya is a collaborative effort to identify and catalogue every Hebrew book in Italy. It is being carried out by the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy (UCEI), the Rome National Central Library (BNCR), and the National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem, with the support of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe.

The project includes cataloguing an estimated 35,000 volumes from 14 Jewish communities and 25 state institutions and will take approximately three years to complete. 

The event is held within the program of Ferrara’s annual Jewish Book Festival.

 

Oct
7
Thu
Judaica in open-air museums conference; official opening of replica of wooden synagogue of Połaniec @ Ethnographic Museum in Sanok, Poland
Oct 7 – Oct 8 all-day
Judaica in open-air museums conference; official opening of replica of wooden synagogue of Połaniec @ Ethnographic Museum in Sanok, Poland | Sanok | Podkarpackie | Poland

The full-scale replica of the wooden synagogue of Połaniec one of the hundreds of East European wooden synagogues destroyed during WW2, will be formally opened — it has been installed at Poland’s largest open-air ethnographic museum, or skansen, the Folk Architecture Museum in Sanok, in the far southeast corner of Poland.

Click here to see our September 13 article and photos about the synagogue and replica.

The two-day opening event includes the inauguration on-site on October 7, plus an excursion to the masonry synagogue and historic Jewish cemetery in nearby Lesko.

The day-long conference takes place October 8, at another location in Sanok, the Jan Grodek State Vocational Academy —  ul. Mickiewicza 21.

Click here to see the full program

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