Calendar

Lecture by Joanna Beata Michlic.

Since the fall of Communism, Łódź, the third-largest city of Poland, has embarked on a process of cultural reorientation. This process aims at reshaping it into a forward-looking twenty-first century European city. A close look at this process reveals that the reinvention of the city depends on what might be called an archaeological project of rediscovering the local pre-1939 multi-ethnic and multicultural heritage. In this lecture, Dr. Michlic examines the dynamics of the rediscovery of the Jewish heritage in Łódź from the perspective of mutual relations between a physical space and various social agents. She focuses on how the city draws on, reworks and articulates the forgotten Jewish heritage.

As part of its “House of Life” project to open the cemetery to the public, nine families will be coming to the historic Willesden Jewish cemetery on May 26 to tell stories of people buried there.

In the Synagogue is a short film by young Ukrainian director Ivan Orlenko based on an unfinished story by Franz Kafka. One of few works by Kafka to deal with Jewish culture overtly, the story describes a strange vision of a beast that a Jewish boy experiences while praying in a synagogue, a metaphor which could be interpreted in several ways. Young Ukrainian director Ivan Orlenko has adapted Kafka’s fragment into a 30-minute film, shot entirely in Yiddish, and transposed its action to a synagogue in western Ukraine.

The screening will be preceded by a talk by Dr Uilleam Blacker of UCL SSEES on the ways in which the rich Jewish cultural heritage of Ukraine is remembered and reimagined in the country today, and the challenges which this process of recovery faces.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the director.

The event is co-organised by Ukrainian Institute, London and UCL SSEES, with the support of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.

A Lecture by Prof David Newman OBE

It will be followed by a viewing of the David Hillman ‘Purim’ window from the Old Bayswater Synagogue, now in The Stained Glass Museum in Ely Cathedral.

Click here to read our 2014 article about Hillman’s magnificent windows

In this talk Prof. Newman will shed light on the life and work of David Hillman (1894-1974), a prolific Anglo-Jewish artist who understood the deep connection between art and religion. Hillman was born in Glasgow and his father was Dayan Samuel Isaac Hillman, of the London Beth Din. He created stained glass windows for many London Synagogues, and one of his windows made for the old Bayswater Synagogue (demolished 1966) is on display at The Stained Glass Museum.

Prof. David Newman is a great nephew of  David Hillman, and a researcher of political geography and geopolitics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

Historian David Jacobs speaks about the history of the Willesden Jewish Cemetery, during an exhibition about the cemetery at the Library

This lecture by Cantor Eliot Alderman will consider some of the main musical developments since then, beginning with the Sephardi and Ashkenazi synagogues which stood practically side-by-side in the City of London for 250 years. He will examine the birth of the Anglo-Jewish choral tradition, the split with the Reform movement and its musical consequences, and the new music brought more recently by immigrants from Eastern Europe and Arab lands.

No reservations are required for this lecture. It will be run on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.
Doors will open 30 minutes before the start of the lecture 

Lecture by Michael Miller, of CEU

Budapest is sometimes called the “Paris of the East,” but in the 1890s, it acquired a new, less flattering nickname: “Judapest.” Karl Lueger, the antisemitic mayor of Vienna – who hated Hungarians more than he hated Jews – is often credited with coining this derogatory nickname for a city that he thought had become more “Jewish” than “Hungarian.”  Budapest was Europe’s fastest-growing city at the time, with a flurry of cultural and commercial activity that fascinated — and sometimes appalled — contemporary residents and visitors. This talk will examine the image of Budapest in the decades before and after the First World War, exploring the ways in which Hungary’s capital city was imagined by Jews and non-Jews alike as a quintessentially Jewish metropolis.

The evening will be chaired by Professor Mark E. Smith, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton. It will be hosted by Professor Mark Cornwall (University of Southampton, Parkes Institute)

The event will be held on Zoom. Please register by Monday 19th April 16:00 here:

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/parkes/news/events/2021/04/20-parkes-lecture-2021.page

Speaker biography: Michael L. Miller is Associate Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and co-founder of the university’s Jewish Studies program. He received his PhD in History from Columbia University, where he specialized in Jewish and Central European History. Michael’s research focuses on the impact of nationality conflicts on the religious, cultural, and political development of Central European Jewry in the long nineteenth century. His articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Austrian History Yearbook, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, Múlt és Jövő , The Jewish Quarterly Review and AJS Review. Miller’s book, Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation, was published by Stanford University Press in 2011. It appeared in Czech translation as Moravští Židé v době emancipace (Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2015). He is currently working on a history of Hungarian Jewry, titled Manovill: A Tale of Two Hungarys.

Barnet Libraries presents: The History and Residents of Willesden Jewish Cemetery.

The cemetery is a designated Heritage Site and celebrated its 150th anniversary in June this year.

Many of the people who are buried there were prominent in the fields of industry, commerce, science and the arts.

It is hoped that this talk will be a catalyst to people visiting the grounds and seeing the work delivered by the cemetery’s small team and dedicated volunteers.

Open Day to share plans for Welsh Jewish Heritage Centre in Merthyr Tydfil.

The public is invited to explore Merthyr Tydfil’s historic synagogue and help shape plans to create a Welsh Jewish Heritage Centre.

There will be tours of the synagogue throughout the day, along with music from a Welsh klezmer band and a talk on the history of Merthyr’s once-thriving
Jewish community.

The project team will be on hand to find out what local people think of the plans for the future of the building, and record their memories of its past life.

Merthyr Tydfil Synagogue was built in the 1870s and is the oldest purpose-built synagogue surviving in Wales. After the congregation left in 1983, its condition deteriorated. The Foundation for Jewish Heritage purchased it in 2019 and the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, visited in 2021. The following year, the Foundation secured funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Welsh government and Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council to develop the plans.

Since 2007, forensic archaeological investigations have revealed new evidence of the crimes undertaken at the notorious Treblinka Extermination Camp in Poland.