A gathering of Lithuanian Jews and descendants, which includes an academic conference, a cultural fest, guided tours to Jewish heritage in several towns and cities around the country — Vilnius, Kaunas, Panevėžys, Šeduva, Pakruojis — and more.
Click here to see the full program
Pre-registration is required by filling out the following form:
The annual Day of Jewish Monuments in the Czech Republic opens Jewish heritage sites all over the country to visitors.
(It does not seems to be coordinated within the umbrella of the European Day of Jewish Culture).
On the web site, you can find lists of events and an interactive map with a list of participating sites and opening hours.
Jewish Country Houses and the Holocaust In History and Memory
This conference will investigate the fate in the Holocaust of Jewish country houses and the people who inhabited them. It will explore memory cultures that emerged afterwards and the Cold War context that shaped them. The conference will address and support curatorial, artistic, and narrative practices telling the difficult stories of genocide linked to these properties. As it does so, it will bring together academic historians, heritage professionals, and artists over three days at the Methodological Centre of Modern Architecture at the Villa Stiassni in Brno, Czech Republic. The built heritage of the Villa Stiassni, visits to the nearby villas Tugendhat and Löw-Beer, and an exploration of the experiences and memories of the Czech Jewish industrialist families who inhabited and fled from them will be an integral part of the conference.
The restoration of the long-ruined synagogue in Vidin, Bulgaria, a historic town overlooking the Danube, has been completed and the building will be rededicated Sept. 4.
The long-stalled, long-awaited restoration of the long-derelict synagogue in Vidin begun in 2021 after many delays. The building will become a multipurpose cultural center dedicated to the Vidin-born Jewish artist Jules Pascin, to include a museum, library, meeting hall, park area, and spaces for prayer and for the commemoration of the Holocaust.
Photo: Svetoslav Tsvetanov/Radio Vidin
The Conference will focus on Sephardic Jews, between Messianism and Modernity
The conference gathers some 70 international researchers of Sephardic social, cultural, and art history, languages, and literature from before and after the Expulsion of 1492.
There will be papers on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim attitudes toward Jewish messianism as reflected in the scholars’ particular areas of interest. In addition, the Conference will focus on the overlooked Sephardic embracement of modernity and Virtual Sepharad’s gradual yet unwavering secularization, whether in the expanse’s south—the ex-Ottoman realms—or its northern extremities – Holland, England, and the Americas.
The seventh edition of the annual Day of Jewish Monuments in the Czech Republic will take place on Sunday, August 11, 2024. This year, some 58 selected Jewish monuments in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia will be made available visitors (free of charge or for a voluntary contribution) between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m..
Some of the other sites are well known, but some are out of the way and well off the beaten track — in Prague, only the Jerusalem (or Jubilee) synagogue is on the roster. Some of the sites are generally closed to the public; some have recently undergone extensive renovation or are in the process of restoration. In some places, such as in Pacov, Mikulov, and Černovice, there are programs such as guided tours and concerts.
The conference will focus on all aspects of Jewish life as it existed in the Baltic region before, during, and after the Holocaust on topics which include, but are not limited to, culture, art, politics, literature, religion, music, photography, history, law, philosophy, restitution, memory, family studies, and material culture. All aspects of Jewish life that existed in the region from the beginning of the 20th century up until the present will be considered, though emphasis will be given to those topics that address how the Holocaust impacted Jewish life.
An expert colloquium RESTORATION, CARE AND DOCUMENTATION: Jewish cemeteries in the Czech Republic, held with the support of ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative.
The colloquium will focus on Jewish cemeteries in the Czech Republic, and their protection, restoration, care, documentation and research methodology.
The conference aims “to foster debate on the strategies applied by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the field of Jewish cemetery preservation, as well as the research methods used by specialists and examples of the preservation of Jewish cemeteries from the perspective of their signification as cultural heritage of living communities.”
The conference is supported by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, the Alba Iulia Jewish Community, Bar Ilan University, and Alba County Council, among others.
It is seen as a follow up to several other conferences, including European Jewish Cemeteries: An Interdisciplinary Conference, co-organized by JHE in Vilnius, 2015 and Urban Jewish Heritage: Presence and Absence, Kraków, 2018; as well as published research such as Rudolf Klein’s Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries of the 19th and 20th Centuries in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Study, 2018; and projects devoted such as those by the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, initiated in 2015.
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