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.
A Zoom webinar in English introducing the current temporary exhibition at MEIS — the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara— Houses of Life; Synagogues and Jewish Cemeteries in Italy.
The exhibition mainly features plans and architectural drawings of synagogues, as well as gravestones, tombs, and other architecture features, through the ages.
A historic ark and other Judaica are also featured.
Speakers in the webinar include the two curators of the exhibition, Andrea Morpurgo and MEIS director Amadeo Spagnoletto, as well as Dr. Jessica Del Russo.
Click here to receive the Zoom link
The annual Day of Jewish Monuments in the Czech Republic, sponsored by the Prague Jewish Community, the Federation of Jewish Communities and others.
Click to see the preliminary program
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.
The history of the Jewish ghetto of Florence, which existed in the city between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, is an exhibition organized by the Uffizi Galleries and arranged in the Gallery of Modern Art of Pitti Palace. Curated by Piergabriele Mancuso, Alice S. Legé and Sefy Hendler (The Medici Archive Project), the exhibition can be visited until January 28, 2024.
The ghetto of Florence was established in 1570 by Cosimo I and Carlo Pitti, and was demolished between 1892 and 1895. For almost three centuries the ghetto was the gravity point of Hebraism in Florence.
Subdivided into five sections,the exhibition draws from the extraordinary cultural heritage of Florence as well as from important international loans. It reveals a significant and forgotten chapter of the Medici’s political strategy in a centuries-old context of conflicts, diplomacy and cultural exchanges.
The exhibition starts with the Florence of Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent; illuminated manuscripts commissioned by Jewish and Medici patrons, which was the result of the interaction between Jewish scribes and Christian artists of the early Tuscan Renaissance; loans from the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York and many Italian libraries. Republican and Medicean imagery intertwine in the depiction of paradigmatic biblical figures, “Jewish heroes” such as Donatello’s bronze David (on loan from the Berlin Museums), or Joseph from the series of tapestries woven in Flanders for Cosimo I. The exhibition places mythical figures alongside real ones, revealing little-known pieces of the history of Florentine Judaism, such as the activity of the explorer Moisè Vita Cafsuto or that of the Jewish painter Jona Ostiglio, whose pantings were all commissioned by the Medici court, together with the self-portrait of Isaia or David Tedesco, a little-known author who was probably a pupil of Ostiglio in the first ever art workshop inside an Italian ghetto.
A place of segregation, but also the fulcrum of an important human, cultural and spiritual microcosm, the ghetto of Florence is also reconstructed through a three-dimensional model, the result of a decade of research conducted by the Eugene Grant Jewish History Program of The Medici Archive Project.
Caring about the multiplicity of audiences and the need to break down prejudices and stereotypes, the exhibition investigates the way in which the history of the Grand Duchy is intertwined with that of the Jewish minority, finally shedding light on the events of an important and so far little known chapter of the Renaissance Florence.
An exhibit that documents the urban and architectural experience of the historic ghetto in Verona. It is mounted in connection with Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27.
Opening hours are:
Mondays 14:00 – 19:00
Tuesday-Saturday 9:00 – 19:00
Special opening
Sunday January 28 9:00 – 19:00
The latest edition of the exhibit Neviditelné Synagogy — Invisible Synagogues, photographs by Štěpán Bartoš.
Bartoš photographs the blank spaces in the Czech Republic where destroyed synagogues once stood and adds a ghostly silhouette of the destroyed synagogue to the exhibition photos of the places where they once stood.
On the Invisible Synagogues project web site (which is in German and Czech) you can see galleries of his photos, without the added silhouette, arranged according to region. They include sites in big cities, small towns, and tiny villages; there are fields and rural spaces as well as modern buildings, crowded city streets, and even artificial lakes.
Read our November 2021 post about his Invisible Synagogues project.
Jewish cemetery clean-up, organised by the oPŘISe, z. s. NGO
Work will entail removal of ivy from gravestones and other necessary activities. Bring your own tools (sickles, scissors, machetes). Men need to wear head covering. Refreshments will be provided.
The exhibit showcases Italian Jewish experience in the 20th century, beginning with the destruction of the ghettos at the end of the 19th century, through the Shoah, and up until almost the present day.
It includes contemporary artworks; photographs from public and private archives; historical documents, and family objects.
For Italian speakers — a meeting with architect and historian Andrea Morpurgo who last year curated a major exhibition on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries at the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara.
You can attend in person or via streaming:
In presenza:
Biblioteca Nazionale dell’Ebraismo Italiano “Tullia Zevi” – Lungotevere Sanzio 5, Roma
In streaming:
Facebook e YouTube della Fondazione per i Beni Culturali Ebraici in Italia
Webtv dell’Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane
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