Calendar

Are you in southwest Poland?

You can volunteer to help clean up the New Jewish Cemetery on ul. Lotniczej in Wroclaw.

The 25th edition of the “Preserving Memory” awards honoring non-Jewish Poles who care for Jewish heritage in Poland.

BIAJS Conference 2022: “Unfolding Time: Texts – Practices – Politics”

There’s quite a bit of material on Jewish (built) heritage at this year’s conference of the British and Irish Association of Jewish Studies.

12 July 2022, 15.15-16.45  The state of Jewish tangible heritage in Ukraine: Buildings, monuments, museums and libraries 

organised by: Eva Frojmovic (Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Leeds, clsef@leeds.ac.uk) 

EUGENY KOTLYAR (Associate Professor at Department of Art History of Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, eugeny.kotlyar@gmail.com):  

Jewish Heritage in Independent Ukraine: Discovery, Study, Preservation and Presentation. Thirty Years of Experience and Challenges 

 SOFIA DYAK (Director of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, website:www.lvivcenter.org, E-mail: s.dyak@lvivcenter.org):  

Jewish Urban Heritage and Diversity in Lviv 

 TETYANA BATANOVA (Research Fellow, Acting Head of the Judaica Department of Institute of Manuscripts, V. I. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, taniabatanova@gmail.com ) 

The Judaica Department at V. I. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine: Revival, Study, and Preservation 

VITALY CHERNOIVANENKO (Senior research fellow, Judaica Department; Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine; President, Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies; Chief editor, Judaica Ukrainica; E-mail: chernoivanenko@gmail.com and president@uajs.org.ua; Website: uajs.org.ua):  

Ukraine’s Hebraica collections in international perspective 

NADIA UFIMTSEVA (Department of History at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy,nadia.ufimtseva@gmail.com) 

Title: the Jewish printed books collection in the Kamianets-Podilskyi state museum and Judaica objects in Ukrainian museums.  

MIA SPIRO (Glasgow) and EVA FROJMOVIC (Leeds) 

Click here to see full conference program

To register securely, please visit: https://estore.kcl.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/academic-faculties/faculty-of-arts-humanities/department-of-theology-and-religious-studies/biajs-conference-unfolding-time-texts-practices-politics

The “Zoom in on the Forum” series of webinars by the School of Dialogue, presents a discussion about the restoration work at the Bagnowka Jewish cemetery in Bialystok Poland — we have posted a number of times about the project.

Amy Degen and Heidi M. Szpek will share  their work as members of the Bialystok Cemetery Restoration project (BCRP). Both have been involved in salvaging, documenting, and restoring headstones in the cemetery as well as raising awareness about Jewish history of Bialystok.

This summer, the BCRP carried out work at the cemetery for the first time since the pandemic began.

Among other things, more than 100 headstones dating from the early 19th century and originally located in the destroyed Rabbinical cemetery, were unearthed and rescued from under a mound of earth where they had been buried during communist times, when the cemetery was turned into a park.

Click here to register

A round-table discussion, plus optional walking tours through the “invisible” medieval Jewish history of Winchester. The Roundtable is free, the walking tours — at 10:30-11:30am or 11:30-12:30pm, cost £5. 

The event event focuses on Licoricia of Winchester and the heritage and memory of medieval Anglo-Jewry.

The bronze statue of the remarkable Anglo-Jewish woman, Licoricia, was unveiled in Winchester in 2021. This is the most prominent heritage work carried out relating to medieval Anglo- Jewry. 

The event, through a walking tour (£5) and free round table discussion, will consider the achievements of the Licoricia project, and the challenges of creating heritage in the absence of the built heritage that directly reflects the presence of medieval Winchester Jewry. It will also consider the public and educational issues raised when dealing with questions such as the Jewish role in medieval finance and hostile representations of Jews from the period based on religious bigotry. Addressing the key aims of the Licoricia project, participants will explore the potential of such commemoration to consider the roots of prejudice and discrimination, using this to promote tolerance, diversity, and female empowerment.

Please note that if you wish to attend both the walking tour and the roundtable event, you will need to register for each event separately.

Click here for booking and other details

Click here to read an April 2017  JHE Have Your Say essay about invisible medieval Jewish heritage by one of the Roundtable speakers, Dr. Toni Griffiths

Volunteer to help clean up the old Jewish cemetery in Gliwice

The conference starts on the 12th of September at 18:00 at German Historical Institute and ends on the 14th of September at 16:30 in POLIN – Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

The synagogues that remained standing after World War II have facedan uncertain destiny. As abandoned buildings,they were susceptible to decay quickly and, as former buildings of worship, for legal, cultural and architectural reasons, posed a great challenge in terms of their reuse. Consequently, many synagogues simply fell into ruins, some were turned into secular buildings of various purposes, and few could have been used as houses of prayer again. 

In postwar Europe, synagogue architecture was culturally categorized as an element of Jewish heritage that appeared to be isolated from the common heritage of a city or town – wherever a synagogue stood.

At first, synagogues were not considered a shared but a distinct patrimony of a place. A shift in such a state of affairs could have been observed in the last three decades that witnessed a ‘rediscovery’ of synagogues. Though one can still find abandoned synagogues in small towns, in most of the bigger municipalities, these buildings were ‘rediscovered’ as a part of local history and culture and thus became part of the common heritage. In many regions of Europe, the ‘rediscovery’ of the former synagogues led to their restoration and opening to the public, and in rare cases, to their reuse by Jewish communities.

The aim of the conference is a historicization of the processes of rediscovery in the recent past.