On the first Sunday of each month, there is a guided tour of the synagogue, an imposing domed building designed in predominantly Moorish style by the Swiss architect Jean-Henri Bachofen and built in 1857-59.
The Duomo & The Great Synagogue: An Evening of Italian Culture
An evening of Jewish and Florentine architecture, culture, music, and food.
• Informal talks about the history and architecture of two of Florence, Italy’s grandest and most iconic structures — the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral (the Duomo) and the Great Synagogue — by Ross King, author of the national bestseller Brunelleschi’s Dome, and noted scholar Professor Francesco Spagnolo, Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.
• Q&A session moderated by Gail Price, former Executive Director of The American Institute of Architects Santa Clara Valley Chapter.
•The San Jose Chamber players with Cantor Sharon Bernstein presenting both Jewish and Italian songs.
• Italian appetizers and ice cream.
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 Belarusian-Jewish Cultural Heritage Center and The Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton are organizing the first international conference on ‘The history, culture and heritage of Jews in Belarus across the ages.’
The aim of the conference is to discuss the latest findings on all aspects of the history, culture and heritage of Jews in Belarus, including the emergence of a distinctive Belarusian-Jewish identity.
NOTE: The conference will be ‘hybrid’, allowing participants and audience to attend either on site if they can go to Minsk, or remotely, through the conference platform.
The conference will bring together specialists from Eastern Europe and other parts of the world to discuss the latest findings on all aspects of the history, culture and heritage of Jews in Belarus.
There will be panels on art, pre-revolutionary history, ethnography, heritage, Holocaust, interwar period, language and literature. The keynote speakers are Professor Mikhail Krutikov and Dr Inna Gerasimova. There will also be round-tables about heritage and national identities in contemporary Belarus.
Click here for the conference web page
I-Tal-Ya is a collaborative effort to identify and catalogue every Hebrew book in Italy. It is being carried out by the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy (UCEI), the Rome National Central Library (BNCR), and the National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem, with the support of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe.
The project includes cataloguing an estimated 35,000 volumes from 14 Jewish communities and 25 state institutions and will take approximately three years to complete.
The event is held within the program of Ferrara’s annual Jewish Book Festival.
An online conference on two Sundays about Jewish identity and cultural heritage in Belarus, organized by TheTogether Plan within the context of the European Days of Jewish Culture. The Together Plan is engaged in various Jewish communal, heritage, and identity projects in Belarus, including organising a Jewish heritage route.
It calls Belarus “the unexplored and unknown root of modern day Ashkenazi Jewry.”
The conference “will be exploring hidden history, overcoming severe challenges and taking a look at modern day solutions.”
Click here to register, buy ticket, and see program
An online conference on two Sundays about Jewish identity and cultural heritage in Belarus, organized by TheTogether Plan within the context of the European Days of Jewish Culture. The Together Plan is engaged in various Jewish communal, heritage, and identity projects in Belarus, including organising a Jewish heritage route.
It calls Belarus “the unexplored and unknown root of modern day Ashkenazi Jewry.”
The conference “will be exploring hidden history, overcoming severe challenges and taking a look at modern day solutions.”
Click here to register, buy ticket, and see program
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.
A conversation with Yechiel Weizman on his book
Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust (Ithaca, 2022)
In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust. He asks how postwar Polish society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources and anthropological field work, the book uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of Poland’s material Jewish remnants and shows how their presence became the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation. Leading the conversation with Weizman will be Monika Rice, and joining them will be Alon Confino and Amos Goldberg.
This event will be held via ZOOM Webinar.
Registration is required, register in advance here.
Dr. Pieter Vlaardingerbroek will present an illustrated talk live from Amsterdam on the architecture and interior of the 1675 Portuguese Synagogue (the Esnoga) in Amsterdam and the synagogue’s direct influence on the architecture of the 1763 Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island.
Pieter Vlaardingerbroek, Ph.D., is a leading expert on Dutch architecture and material culture. He is an architectural historian for the City of Amsterdam, having served in a similar position for the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. He is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Conservation at the University of Utrecht. Professor Vlaardingerbroek is the author of many articles and books and served as editor for the definitive volume on the Portuguese Sephardic synagogue, The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, published by the City of Amsterdam in 2013.
There is no fee to participate, but reservations are required to receive the Zoom login information.
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