Jewish Heritage Europe

Calendar

Sep
21
Wed
Białystok Cemetery Restoration Project webinar @ online-zoom
Sep 21 @ 19:00 – 20:00
Białystok Cemetery Restoration Project webinar @ online-zoom

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

Nov
30
Wed
“Unsettled Heritage” event @ online
Nov 30 @ 20:00 – 21:30
"Unsettled Heritage" event @ online

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.

Apr
19
Wed
80th Anniversary Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Apr 19 all-day
80th Anniversary Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

A number of events are marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, including a conference, exhibit, monument dedication, at the POLIN Museum, Warsaw’s Okopowa Jewish cemetery, and elsewhere.

 

 

Jun
22
Thu
Webinar: Italian Synagogues and Jewish Cemeteries @ Online
Jun 22 @ 17:00 – 18:00
Webinar: Italian Synagogues and Jewish Cemeteries @ Online

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

 

Jul
16
Sun
Jewish cemetery clean-up @ Old Jewish cemetery Gliwice, Poland
Jul 16 @ 11:00 – 16:00
Jewish cemetery clean-up @ Old Jewish cemetery Gliwice, Poland | Gliwice | Województwo Śląskie | Poland

Volunteer to help clean up the old Jewish cemetery in Gliwice

Sep
10
Sun
Giornata della Cultura Ebraica
Sep 10 all-day
Giornata della Cultura Ebraica @ Italy

Instead of September 3, as in other participating countries, the European Days of Jewish Culture is centered on September 10 — with the theme “Beauty,”  not “Memory” as in the other countries.

It takes place in scores of localities up and down the Italian peninsula, with Florence as the lead city.

Click here to see the program

 

Dec
11
Mon
When Memory Meets Dialogue – Role of Remembrance Sites and Contemporary Challenges. @ Oskar Schindlers enamel factory museum
Dec 11 – Dec 12 all-day
When Memory Meets Dialogue – Role of Remembrance Sites and Contemporary Challenges. @ Oskar Schindlers enamel factory museum | Kraków | Małopolskie | Poland

On December 11-12, the Liberation Route Europe Foundation is organizing a memory project conference titled “When Memory Meets Dialogue – Role of Remembrance Sites and Contemporary Challenges” in Krakow, Poland. This event, in partnership with Oscar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, a branch of the Museum of Krakow, is part of the EU-funded European Days of Jewish Culture (EDJC) 2023, coordinated by the AEPJ. 

The conference agenda encompasses sessions focusing on Jewish and WWII heritage. Discussions will revolve around memory transmission and the contemporary significance of remembrance sites. The primary goal is to offer a meaningful platform for idea exchange, nurture cross-cultural understanding, and stimulate international discourse on historical memory and contemporary challenges. As part of the programme, participants can also explore guided tours and historical city walks in Krakow. 

Click here to register

Jan
25
Thu
Places of Difficult Heritage, Education, and Human Rights @ online
Jan 25 @ 18:00 – 20:00
 
The webinar will discuss issues such as:
 
Can places of difficult heritage—such as areas of former forced labor/concentration/death camps, prisons, juvenile detention centers, sites of executions, desecrated cemeteries, or prayer houses—play a role in today’s education about human rights and in shaping civic attitudes? How to adapt such institutions and places accordingly? How do we manage them to use their educational potential fully? Can they become spaces for civic mobilization and sensitization of different generations to the past, present, and future experiences of persecuted minority groups, discriminated against, or exposed to social exclusion? Does such a model work in Norway and is there a way that it could also be implemented in Poland and CEE? What can we learn from each other? Is there a wider EU perspective we can learn from?
 
🔎 Speakers will look for answers to these and other questions during the webinar, entirely devoted to the role that places of difficult heritage can play in multidimensional education about human rights. They include memory activists, the academia, and individuals actively working with difficult heritage sites on a daily basis.
 
Guests/presenters will be: Agnieszka Jabłońska (Urban Memory Foundation), Aleksandra Janus (Fundacja Zapomniane), Magdalena Rubenfeld (FestivALT), Karolina Jakowenko (Brama Cukermana), Mats Jørgen Nesjø (Falstad Centre), and Johannes Börmann (European Comission).
 
🇬🇧 The meeting will be conducted in English with simultaneous interpretation to Polish. 🇵🇱
 
🕒 PROGRAM 🕒
18.00–18.15: Welcome and introduction of the discussed terminology
18.15–18.35: Falstad Centre
18.35–19.00: Engaged Memory Consortium Poland & NeDiPa
19.00–19.15: The EU perspective: site-specific education about past violences and Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme of the EU?
19.15–19.45: Discussion – what the Polish and Norwegian partners can learn from each other? Is there a universal model?
19:15–20.00: Q&A
 
 
Mar
20
Wed
Journeys to Treblinka @ Holocaust Centre North Huddersfield, and online
Mar 20 @ 17:00 – 18:00

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

In this talk, Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls will outline some of the key findings of this research and discuss the ways they have inspired Holocaust survivors and their descendants based in the UK to undertake their own journeys to commemorate their loved ones.

Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls’ pioneering research focuses on the application of interdisciplinary approaches to the investigation of Holocaust landscapes. She conducted the first forensic archaeological investigations at Treblinka Extermination and Labour Camps, the results of which will be presented in her forthcoming book Finding Treblinka. She is also the author of several other books including Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (2015), the Handbook on Missing Persons (2016) and ‘Adolf Island: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney (2022).

 

Mar
28
Thu
Memory Activism webinar @ Online
Mar 28 @ 18:30 – 19:30
Memory Activism webinar @ Online
A webinar on the topic of memory activism related to Jewish heritage and Jewish history in Poland.
 
Participation in the event is free of charge.
 
Registration is required, at this link: https://tinyurl.com/MemoryActivism
 
Discuss will include the results of qualitative research on memory activism in Poland conducted in 2023. The panel will consider the importance of their key findings and try to answer a number of important questions: what are the motivations of people engaging in such activities? What do they need and what kinds of challenges do they face on a daily basis? How the wider phenomenon is impacted by the fact that most activists work on a voluntary basis?
 
Also: the perspective of activists. How do they perceive their actions, how do they define them and what kind of changes do they want to bring about?
 
Participants will include: Agnieszka Jabłońska (managing director of the @urbanmemoryfoundation), Aleksandra Janus (president of the @fundacjazapomniane), Magda Rubenfeld Koralewska (co-director of FestivALT), and Katarzyna Fereniec-Błońska, member of the research team that carried out the study under under the aegis of the „Curiosity” agency.
 
The meeting will be conducted in English.
 
The event is co-organized with the @galiciajewishmuseumkrakow and the Research Center for Memory Cultures as part of the „NeDiPa: Negotiating Difficult Pasts” project, which FestivALT implements together with the Zapomniane Foundation and the Urban Memory Foundation, thanks to the support of the European Union under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values program (CERV).
 
 

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