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.
Experts from Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Great Britain will meet for a Herrenhausen Symposium at Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover to discuss the issue of reusing church buildings from a European comparative view. The intention is to develop new perspectives.
See details and program at web site
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.
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.
The annual “Open Jewish Homes” Holocaust commemoration event in more than a dozen towns and cities in the Netherlands.
Small-scale, locally organized commemorative events takes place in homes where Jews (or members of the resistance) lived before, during, or just after World War II.
The web site states:
The focus is on Jewish life in these houses before, during and immediately after the war. History comes to life during Open Jewish Homes. Direct witnesses, descendants and connoisseurs tell stories about persecution, resistance and liberation on the basis of photographs, films, diary fragments, poems, literature and music. […]
The Jewish Cultural Quarter organised in 2012 the first edition of Open Jewish Homes in Amsterdam. Since then local work groups have been organising Open Jewish Homes in various other cities in the country as well. Everyone is free to initiate Open Jewish Homes in his or her place of residence.
Open Jewish Homes was conceived as a way to engage “in real life” with the interactive Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands, which personalizes the more than 104,000 victims of Holocaust in the Netherlands. Every victim has a personal page — with their home address as well as photos and other material.
Click here to see the program in the various locations
The conference aims to explore the development, role, influence and shape of virtual spaces in different forms related to contemporary European Jewry. How are digital practices related to real-life practices and spaces performed and inhabited by Europe’s Jewry? What do virtual spaces reveal about Jewish engagement with the geographical location and the idea of Europe? And, ultimately, what do virtual spaces tell us about the existence and future of a “Jewish Europe”? What do they say about transcending the borders of “Jewish Europe” and fostering membership in a global Jewish presence?
Announced keynote speakers are JHE’s Ruth Ellen Gruber and independent scholar Diana Pinto.
The conference is organised by the University of Gothenburg and the Parkes Institute of Southampton University.
Program:
Tuesday 3 May
09.00 – Welcome and introductions, Joachim Schlör, Maja Hultman and Klas Grinell
09.30 – Keynote: Ruth Ellen Gruber (Jewish Heritage Europe) Life after Life: Shifting Virtualities (and Realities) 20 Years after Virtually Jewish
10.45 – Break and coffee
11.15 – Panel 1: Jewish contribution to Europe – Chair: TBC
- Itai Apter (University of Haifa) – Jewish Legal-Political WWII Era Scholars in the European International Law Space of the Past and Contemporary Virtual Spaces
- Marcela Menachem Zoufalá (Charles University Prague) – TBC
- Vladimir Levin (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) – European Values, Post-Soviet States, and Jewish Heritage
12.45 – Lunch
14.00 – Panel 2: Jewish/non-Jewish Spaces in Europe (J444) – Chair: TBC
- Susanne Korbel (University of Graz) – Jewish Spaces in Vienna Today: A Relational, Hybrid Approach
- Magdalena Abraham-Diefenbach (European University Viadrina) – The Legacy of German Jews in Western Poland: Jewish Cemeteries as Places Between “Jewish Space” and “Virtual Jewishness”
- Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė (Vilnius University) – The Process of Learning About the Jews and Their Heritage: Influence of Challenges in Post-Soviet Lithuania to the Contemporary Understanding of the Jewish Culture
15.30 – Break and coffee
16.00 – Panel 3: Jewish Europe from Near and Afar (J444) – Chair: TBC
- Jennifer Cowe (University of British Columbia) – Rootless Nostalgia, Yekke Identity and Intergenerational memory Curation/Creation in Mor Kaplansky’s Café Nagler
- Libby Langsner (independent researcher) – Nostalgia Networks: The Potential of Built Heritage Digitization in European American Jewish Identity Formation and Social Belonging
- Judith Vöcker (University of Leicester) – The Muranów District as a Memorial of the Former Jewish Community of Warsaw
18.00 – City walk of Jewish Gothenburg
19.00 – Tour and dinner @ Gothenburg’s Synagogue
Wednesday 4 May
09.00 – Panel 4: Virtual Heritage Spaces of Jewish Europe – Chair: TBC
- Susanne Urban (University Marburg) – Storytelling in Jewish Spaces: Creating a Bond Between Spaces, History and Present
- Kyra Schulman (University of Chicago) – Memory Space: Probing the Limits of Holocaust Memorialization Projects on Digital Versus Physical Topographies
- Kinga Frojimovics and Éva Kovács (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies) – Tracing the Holocaust in the Kaiserstadt
10.30 – Break and coffee
11.00 – Panel 5: Digital Practices in Today’s Europe – Chair: Klas Grinell
- Tyson Herberger (University of Southeastern Norway) – Impacts of Norwegian Jewry’s Digital Turn Under Corona
- Dekel Peretz (Heidelberg University) – Searching for Belonging: Jewish-Muslim Dialogue in Virtual Spaces
- Alla Marchenko (The Polish Academy of Sciences) – Virtual Representation of Real Jews and Jewishness in Contemporary Poland
12.30 – Lunch
13.45 – Heritage Session: Jewish Spaces in Sweden – Chair: Maja Hultman
- Yael Fried (Jewish Museum in Stockholm)
- Anna Grinzweig Jacobsson and Karin Brygger (Judiska salongen)
- Lukasz Gorniok (Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden and Ivana Koutniková (Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden/Paideia folkhögskola)
- Tom Shulevitz (Jewish Congregation of Gothenburg)
15.15 – Break and coffee
15.45 – Bus trip Gothenburg-Marstrand
17.00 – Guided tour of Marstrand
19.00 – Dinner @ Grand Tenan
21.30 – Bus trip Marstrand-Gothenburg
Thursday 5 May
09.00 – Panel 6: Being Jewish in Today’s Europe – Chair: TBC
- Katalin Tóth (Institute of Ethnology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Eötvös Loránd Research Network) – “But We Are Also Here – the Descendants of the Survivors”: Everyday Life of a Synagogue in Budapest for the Past Thirty Years
- Stanislaw Krajewski (University of Warsaw) – The Concept of De-Assimilation as a Tool to Describe Present-Day European Jews: The Example of Poland
- Phil Alexander (University of Edinburgh) – “The Most Saving Slum in Glasgow, and the Most Abandoned”: Scotland’s 20th Century Jewish Neighbourhoods as 21st Century Virtual Spaces
10.30 – Break and coffee
11.00 – Virtual Keynote: Diana Pinto (independent researcher) Jewish Spaces in a Topsy Turvy Europe
12.15 – Closing remarks by Joachim Schlör and Maja Hultman
The annual “Open Jewish Houses/Houses of Resistance” commemorative program takes place in a score of towns and cities around the Netherlands.
Storytellers, visitors and residents share stories in houses where Jews or members of the resistance lived and worked before, during and just after the Second World War.
This international conference aims to explore the Jewish experience in Sommerfrische (Summer holiday) destinations, summer resorts, and spas, focusing on the particular urban processes that led to their emergence and the factors that transformed them into spaces of possibility in a rural or small-town context.
JHE’s Ruth Ellen Gruber will speak about “Those Who Stayed (and One Who Came Back” about Jewish cemeteries in health resort towns, focusing on Merano/Merano, Italy.
Closing event of the conservation and restoration camps held this year in the Jewish Cemetery of Alba Iolia, as part of the project Conservation and restoration of the monumental funeral stones of the Jewish cemetery in Alba Iulia.
The Conference will focus on Sephardic Jews, between Messianism and Modernity
The conference gathers some 70 international researchers of Sephardic social, cultural, and art history, languages, and literature from before and after the Expulsion of 1492.
There will be papers on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim attitudes toward Jewish messianism as reflected in the scholars’ particular areas of interest. In addition, the Conference will focus on the overlooked Sephardic embracement of modernity and Virtual Sepharad’s gradual yet unwavering secularization, whether in the expanse’s south—the ex-Ottoman realms—or its northern extremities – Holland, England, and the Americas.
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