Calendar

Baden bei Wien – Baden by Vienna – was long a popular spa and summer guests were originally attracted by the glamorous presence of the Imperial Court.

Many of these families who spent their summers in Baden had Jewish roots. They built villas in a variety of styles – historicist, art nouveau and modernist – a fascinating mixture and shaped summer life in Baden until 1938.

This exhibition  is dedicated to ten families and their villas.

Click here for an interactive map with the villas

The Synagogue in Kobersdorf reopens after a three-year restoration process. It will be a cultural and educational centre, with a focus on local Jewish history and heritage.

The conference aims to explore the development, role, influence and shape of virtual spaces in different forms related to contemporary European Jewry. How are digital practices related to real-life practices and spaces performed and inhabited by Europe’s Jewry? What do virtual spaces reveal about Jewish engagement with the geographical location and the idea of Europe? And, ultimately, what do virtual spaces tell us about the existence and future of a “Jewish Europe”? What do they say about transcending the borders of “Jewish Europe” and fostering membership in a global Jewish presence? 

Announced keynote speakers are JHE’s Ruth Ellen Gruber and independent scholar Diana Pinto.

The conference is organised by the University of Gothenburg and the Parkes Institute of Southampton University.

Program: 

Tuesday 3 May

09.00 – Welcome and introductions, Joachim Schlör, Maja Hultman and Klas Grinell

09.30 – Keynote: Ruth Ellen Gruber (Jewish Heritage Europe) Life after Life: Shifting Virtualities (and Realities) 20 Years after Virtually Jewish

10.45 – Break and coffee

11.15 – Panel 1: Jewish contribution to Europe – Chair: TBC

• Itai Apter (University of Haifa) – Jewish Legal-Political WWII Era Scholars in the European International Law Space of the Past and Contemporary Virtual Spaces
• Marcela Menachem Zoufalá (Charles University Prague) – TBC
• Vladimir Levin (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) – European Values, Post-Soviet States, and Jewish Heritage

12.45 – Lunch

14.00 – Panel 2: Jewish/non-Jewish Spaces in Europe (J444) – Chair: TBC

• Susanne Korbel (University of Graz) – Jewish Spaces in Vienna Today: A Relational, Hybrid Approach
• Magdalena Abraham-Diefenbach (European University Viadrina) – The Legacy of German Jews in Western Poland: Jewish Cemeteries as Places Between “Jewish Space” and “Virtual Jewishness”
• Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė (Vilnius University) – The Process of Learning About the Jews and Their Heritage: Influence of Challenges in Post-Soviet      Lithuania to the Contemporary Understanding of the Jewish Culture

15.30 – Break and coffee

16.00 – Panel 3: Jewish Europe from Near and Afar (J444) – Chair: TBC

• Jennifer Cowe (University of British Columbia) – Rootless Nostalgia, Yekke Identity and Intergenerational memory Curation/Creation in Mor Kaplansky’s Café Nagler
• Libby Langsner (independent researcher) – Nostalgia Networks: The Potential of Built Heritage Digitization in European American Jewish Identity Formation and Social Belonging
• Judith Vöcker (University of Leicester) – The Muranów District as a Memorial of the Former Jewish Community of Warsaw

18.00 – City walk of Jewish Gothenburg

19.00 – Tour and dinner @ Gothenburg’s Synagogue

Wednesday 4 May

09.00 – Panel 4: Virtual Heritage Spaces of Jewish Europe – Chair: TBC

• Susanne Urban (University Marburg) – Storytelling in Jewish Spaces: Creating a Bond Between Spaces, History and Present
• Kyra Schulman (University of Chicago) – Memory Space: Probing the Limits of Holocaust Memorialization Projects on Digital Versus Physical Topographies
• Kinga Frojimovics and Éva Kovács (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies) – Tracing the Holocaust in the Kaiserstadt

10.30 – Break and coffee

11.00 – Panel 5: Digital Practices in Today’s Europe – Chair: Klas Grinell

• Tyson Herberger (University of Southeastern Norway) – Impacts of Norwegian Jewry’s Digital Turn Under Corona
• Dekel Peretz (Heidelberg University) – Searching for Belonging: Jewish-Muslim Dialogue in Virtual Spaces
• Alla Marchenko (The Polish Academy of Sciences) – Virtual Representation of Real Jews and Jewishness in Contemporary Poland

12.30 – Lunch

13.45 – Heritage Session: Jewish Spaces in Sweden – Chair: Maja Hultman

• Yael Fried (Jewish Museum in Stockholm)
• Anna Grinzweig Jacobsson and Karin Brygger (Judiska salongen)
• Lukasz Gorniok (Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden and Ivana Koutniková (Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden/Paideia folkhögskola)
• Tom Shulevitz (Jewish Congregation of Gothenburg)

15.15 – Break and coffee

15.45 – Bus trip Gothenburg-Marstrand

17.00 – Guided tour of Marstrand

19.00 – Dinner @ Grand Tenan

21.30 – Bus trip Marstrand-Gothenburg

Thursday 5 May

09.00 – Panel 6: Being Jewish in Today’s Europe – Chair: TBC

• Katalin Tóth (Institute of Ethnology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Eötvös Loránd Research Network) – “But We Are Also Here – the Descendants of the Survivors”: Everyday Life of a Synagogue in Budapest for the Past Thirty Years
• Stanislaw Krajewski (University of Warsaw) – The Concept of De-Assimilation as a Tool to Describe Present-Day European Jews: The Example of Poland
• Phil Alexander (University of Edinburgh) – “The Most Saving Slum in Glasgow, and the Most Abandoned”: Scotland’s 20th Century Jewish Neighbourhoods as 21st Century Virtual Spaces

10.30 – Break and coffee

11.00 – Virtual Keynote: Diana Pinto (independent researcher) Jewish Spaces in a Topsy Turvy Europe                                      

12.15 – Closing remarks by Joachim Schlör and Maja Hultman

A symposium connected with the reopening of the Kobersdorf synagogue after its restoration as a cultural venue

The program will be posted here: http://www.forschungsgesellschaft.at/synagoge/index.html

The photo shows the synagogue before restoration

A special exhibit marking the 20th anniversary of the underground complex designed by the architect Martin Kvasnica containing remnants of Bratislava’s Old Jewish Cemetery, which was destroyed in 1944, — 23 graves surrounding the Chatam Sofer’s tomb.

Rabbi Moshe Schreiber, known as the Chatam Sofer (or Chasam Sofer), was a renowned rabbi and scholar who was born in Frankfurt am Main on 26 September 1762 (7 Tishrei 5523).

Open

Friday 10:00 – 16:00
Sunday 10:00 – 16:00

A symposium connected with the reopening of the Kobersdorf synagogue after its restoration as a cultural venue

The program will be posted here: http://www.forschungsgesellschaft.at/synagoge/index.html

The photo shows the synagogue before restoration

The 4th International Conference Architectures of the Soul aims at promoting the scientific study and discussion around the architecture and landscape connected to religious and spiritual practices, grounded on the experience of seclusion and solitude.

It’s not focussed on Jewish heritage, but many preservation and other issues are common to religious built heritage as a whole, and we hope that the program includes Jewish heritage, too.

The conference is structured around two main topics, in order to understand the historical and current values of these places and how they can shape the future, through a renewed knowledge and new ways of turning them culturally meaningful:  

1. History of religious experience;

2. Future of Religious Heritage. 

The conference aims to establish the platform for a multidisciplinary approach on the subject, gathering and crossing history, architecture, landscape architecture, cultural heritage, art history, computing science, among others. 

The conference will be hosted by the Monastery of Santa Maria da Vitória, in the municipality of Batalha. This is a former dominican monastery,  on the initiative of the Avis dinasty at the end of the 14th century. The complex is recognised as UNESCO World Heritage Site.