As part of events marking the 20th anniversary of the Auschwtiz Jewish Center in Oswiecim, Poland, this web event will explore the Center’s commemoration efforts in Oświęcim and their impact on descendants of the town’s Jewish residents.
The Auschwitz Jewish Center (AJC) is a branch of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in New York.
The program will feature Barbara Posner, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor from Oświęcim, and Shlomi Shaked, the grandson of another survivor from Oświęcim, who have both reconnected with the town over the past two decades.
The Symposium on Swedish Synagogue Architecture (1795–1870) and the Cultural Milieu of the Early Jewish Immigrants to Sweden will take place on Zoom, on April 19, 2021.
It is organized by the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University, the University of Potsdam, and the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, with the support of the Stockholm Jewish Museum.
To attend, click this link to register:
The opening presentation will be of particular interest, an overview by Daniel Leviathan of his PhD dissertation project, “Jewish Sacred Architecture in the Nordic Countries 1684-1939.”
Besides Leviathan, speakers will include Vladimir Levin and Sergey Kravtsov, of the Center for Jewish Art in Jerusalem; Ilia Rodov of Bar Ilan University; Maja Hultman, of the Centre for European Research and Department of Historical Studies at University of Gothenburg Centre for Business History in Stockholm; Mirko Przystawik, of Bet Tfila – Research Unit for Jewish Architecture in Europe, Technische Universität Braunschweig; Yael Fried, of The Jewish Museum of Stockholm; and Carl Henrik Carlsson, of The Hugo Valentin Centre, Department of History, Uppsala University.
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.
A Zoom seminar about the project to restore the Jewish cemetery of Gorizia, Italy, that now lies across the border outside Nova Gorica, Slovenia. The twin cities will jointly be the European Cultural Capital in 2025, with their shared Jewish heritage playing a role. In Italian
Click here for details and to register
Read our 2017 article about the shared Jewish heritage of the towns
Read an Italian perspective about the project
The Task Ahead: a two-hour webinar on preserving Jewish cemeteries in Poland, to be held online July 1.
Confirmed keynote speakers include :
- Michał Laszczkowski, President of the Coalition of Guardians of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland
- Ronald S. Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress
The webinar is sponsored by the Friends of Jewish Heritage in Poland, The Matzevah Foundation, the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, the World Jewish Restitution Organization, and the Chief Rabbinate of Poland.
It is a follow-up to a webinar held in August 2020.
A one-day international online conference called “Jewish Crossroads: Between Italy and Eastern Europe” organized by the Foundation for Jewish Cultural Heritage in Italy and the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The close contacts between Italy and eastern Europe have evolved over the centuries and Jews have been an integral part of this relationship.
The most known examples of Italian influences on eastern European Jews are the construction of synagogues in Poland and Lithuania by Italian architects; Jewish medics from Italy practicing in noble east European courts; or the selling of Hebrew books printed in Italy.
The interaction obviously was in the opposite direction: many Polish and Lithuanian rabbis moved to Italy or transferred their texts to be published there; the Council of the Four Lands sent emissaries to Rome; and many eastern European Jewish artists spent years in Italy.
The conference is planned to concentrate on those contacts and interactions, during the Early Modern and Modern periods.
The conference will be conducted in English. The keynote lecture will be given by Prof. Ilia Rodov of Bar-Ilan University.
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.
An interdisciplinary online conference (on the Gridaly platform) that will bring together scholars in a wide range of fields: anthropology, sociology, history, memory studies, museology, art history, and political science, among others; organized by the POLIN museum in Warsaw.
It will explore new directions in the study of East and Central European Jews.
Several specific questions will be raised: What constitutes Jewish studies today and in which direction should we be heading? Which paradigms are guiding the field today? How are theoretical and methodological developments in the humanities and social sciences shaping Jewish studies? How are scholars working in a broad range of disciplines – history, social sciences, literature, visual and performing arts, and other disciplines – contributing to the field? What are interdisciplinary approaches contributing to the field? What is the impact of studies of Jewish life in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on a wider understanding of world history?
4 Keynotes
- François Guesnet, “The Narcissism of Small Differences? Reflections on Jewish Studies and Jewish Area Studies”
- Havi Dreifuss, “Beyond traditional methods: Five Thoughts of what is New and What is Next in Jewish Studies”
- Marcin Wodziński, “What’s Next in Jewish Studies: Prospects and Challenges”
- Gerben Zaagsma, “Exploring Jewish History in the Digital Age”
21 Panels
- Theory
- Paradigms, methodologies, and sources
- Issues, emphases, and gaps
- Digital resources and methods
- Ethics and politics
- Academic and cultural institutions
- Legacies
1 Poster session
- PhD candidates will present methodological, theoretical, and source issues related to their dissertations.
2 Roundtables
- “Creating a Legacy: The Impact of Jewish Studies in Poland”
- “The Future of Museum Architecture”
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.
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.
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