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
Following a full-scale renovation, there will be an official public rededication ceremony for the synagogue in Alessandria, Italy.
Click here to read our post about the synagogue’s restoration
“Case di vita. Sinagoghe e cimiteri in Italia” — “Houses of Life: Synagogues and cemeteries in Italy”
The exhibit, curated by Andrea Morpurgo and the MEIS director Amadeo Spagnoletto, focuses on the architectural, ritual, and social dimensions of the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Italy.
It displays architectural plans, documents from state archives and Jewish communities, family heirlooms, and prestigious loans such as the Ark of the Jewish Community of Vercelli.
An exhibition marking the 80th anniversary of the torching of the Sinagoga Tedesca by local fascist squads. The synagogue now houses the Jewish Museum in Padova.
The exhibit will feature historic photographs and archival documents, and there will be explanatory talks at the opening.
The even is free, but please reserve here – museo@padovaebraica.it or Tel. 049661267 – Whatsapp 3756347243
Archive documents, drafts and testimonies restore personal and professional dignity to nine stories interrupted by racial laws.
On 14 July 1938, the Race Manifesto was published in Il Giornale d’Italia, signed by ten scientists and professors, which was to become the ideological basis of the regime’s racist policy. This document was followed by the Racial Laws, aimed at increasingly stripping non-members of the ‘Italian race’ of their rights. In this escalation of the curtailment of freedoms and subtraction of civil rights, other laws were promulgated on 29 June 1939 regulating ‘the exercise of professions by citizens of the Jewish race’.
The exhibit features these architects:
Daniele Calabi, Angelo Di Castro, Romeo Di Castro, Enrico De Angeli, Vito Latis, Gino Levi Montalcini, Alessandro Rimini, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Nina Livia Viterbo
The exhibition is conceived as part of the project ‘Architecture and Remembrance. The discrimination of architects in nazi-fascist regimes”.
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 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
Guided tour of the Jewish Museum Lecce and the ancient Jewish district, with Fabrizio Ghio (architect and archaeologist, member of the Scientific Committee of the Jewish Museum Lecce), Fabrizio Lelli, director of the Jewish Museum Lecce and professor of Hebrew language and literature at the Sapienza University (Rome), and Claudio Fano, direct witness of the racial laws and the Jews deportation from the Ghetto of Rome on October 16th 1943.
Free admission, reservation required.
Telephone Number & WhatsApp: + 39 0832 247016
Email: info@palazzotaurino.com
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.
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