Jewish Heritage Europe

Calendar

Feb
23
Tue
Legacy of the Shtetl: Investigating Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian Borderlands @ Online Zoom event
Feb 23 @ 18:00 – 19:00
Legacy of the Shtetl: Investigating Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian Borderlands @ Online Zoom event | Bentonville | Arkansas | United States
The Legacy of the Shtetl: Investigating Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian Borderlands
with Dr Magdalena Waligórska, and Dr Natalia Romik, respondent, and with Prof François Guesnet, Chair 
 
Co-organized by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and  the UCL Institute of Jewish Studies
 
Magdalena Waligórska takes us on a journey to the post-1945 Polish-Ukrainian-Belorusian borderlands where she explores small towns which had a predominantly Jewish population before the Second World War and the Holocaust. Here, Jewish property both entirely fell under the control of the new ethnic majority and remained a “disinherited heritage” that continues to cause dissonance and psychological discomfort to its current “heirs.”
 
The unsettling presence of Jewish ruins, resurfacing human remains, walled-in objects, collapsing cellars, and the recycled tombstones constitutes an “intrusion of the past into the present” that, decades after the war, still demands action and results in different local responses.
 
The respondent, Natalia Romik, is an artist, urban historian, and architect from Warsaw who has undertaken similar but different explorations of the Jewish heritage in small Polish towns.
 
Apr
20
Tue
“Judapest”: Austria-Hungary and its Jews at the Fin-de-Siècle @ Online Zoom event
Apr 20 @ 18:00 – 19:30
"Judapest": Austria-Hungary and its Jews at the Fin-de-Siècle @ Online Zoom event

Lecture by Michael Miller, of CEU

Budapest is sometimes called the “Paris of the East,” but in the 1890s, it acquired a new, less flattering nickname: “Judapest.” Karl Lueger, the antisemitic mayor of Vienna – who hated Hungarians more than he hated Jews – is often credited with coining this derogatory nickname for a city that he thought had become more “Jewish” than “Hungarian.”  Budapest was Europe’s fastest-growing city at the time, with a flurry of cultural and commercial activity that fascinated — and sometimes appalled — contemporary residents and visitors. This talk will examine the image of Budapest in the decades before and after the First World War, exploring the ways in which Hungary’s capital city was imagined by Jews and non-Jews alike as a quintessentially Jewish metropolis.

The evening will be chaired by Professor Mark E. Smith, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton. It will be hosted by Professor Mark Cornwall (University of Southampton, Parkes Institute)

The event will be held on Zoom. Please register by Monday 19th April 16:00 here:

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/parkes/news/events/2021/04/20-parkes-lecture-2021.page

Speaker biography: Michael L. Miller is Associate Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and co-founder of the university’s Jewish Studies program. He received his PhD in History from Columbia University, where he specialized in Jewish and Central European History. Michael’s research focuses on the impact of nationality conflicts on the religious, cultural, and political development of Central European Jewry in the long nineteenth century. His articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Austrian History Yearbook, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, Múlt és Jövő , The Jewish Quarterly Review and AJS Review. Miller’s book, Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation, was published by Stanford University Press in 2011. It appeared in Czech translation as Moravští Židé v době emancipace (Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2015). He is currently working on a history of Hungarian Jewry, titled Manovill: A Tale of Two Hungarys.

Mar
20
Sun
80th Anniversary of Destruction of Jewish Rohatyn @ Jewish cemetery
Mar 20 @ 13:00 – 14:00
80th Anniversary of Destruction of Jewish Rohatyn @ Jewish cemetery | Rohatyn | Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast | Ukraine

Commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the destruction of Jewish Rohatyn.

On March 20, 1942, the largest and deadliest of the Nazi “aktions” resulted in the final liquidation of Rohatyn’s Jewish population. 3,500-5,500 victims, half of which were children, were executed and buried in a common grave in the fields south of city center. Rohatyn Jewish Heritage invites all those who wish to remember the victims on-site at 13.00 on 20 March 2022 for prayer and a moment of silence led by Rabbi Kolesnik of Ivano-Frankivisk.

GPS: 49°24’12.7″N 24°37’39.4″E

(Photo shows longtime local activist, the later Mykhailo Vorobets, at the south mass grave in Rohatyn in 2012. Photo © RJH)

Apr
23
Sat
Yearning for Baden: Jewish Houses tell (Hi)stories @ Kaiserhaus
Apr 23 – Nov 6 all-day
Yearning for Baden: Jewish Houses tell (Hi)stories @ Kaiserhaus | Baden | Niederösterreich | Austria

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

 

Apr
26
Tue
Reopening of the Kobersdorf Synagogue @ Kobersdorf Synagogue
Apr 26 all-day
Reopening of the Kobersdorf Synagogue @ Kobersdorf Synagogue | Kobersdorf | Burgenland | Austria

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.

 

Jun
9
Thu
Synagogues as tangible and intangible cultural heritage @ Kobersdorf synagogue
Jun 9 all-day
Synagogues as tangible and intangible cultural heritage @ Kobersdorf synagogue | Kobersdorf | Burgenland | Austria

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

 

Jun
11
Sat
Synagogues as tangible and intangible cultural heritage @ Kobersdorf synagogue
Jun 11 all-day
Synagogues as tangible and intangible cultural heritage @ Kobersdorf synagogue | Kobersdorf | Burgenland | Austria

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

 

Jun
11
Sun
Resorts, Spas, and Sommerfrische — Jewish Cultures of Rest and Recreation @ Josef Fröhlich Saal, Congress Ausseerland
Jun 11 @ 16:00 – Jun 13 @ 14:00
Resorts, Spas, and Sommerfrische — Jewish Cultures of Rest and Recreation @ Josef Fröhlich Saal, Congress Ausseerland | Bad Aussee | Steiermark | Austria

This international conference aims to explore the Jewish experience in Sommerfrische (Summer holiday) destinations, summer resorts, and spas, focusing on the particular urban processes that led to their emergence and the factors that transformed them into spaces of possibility in a rural or small-town context.

JHE’s Ruth Ellen Gruber will speak about “Those Who Stayed (and One Who Came Back” about Jewish cemeteries in health resort towns, focusing on Merano/Merano, Italy.

Click here for the Program

 

 

Jan
25
Thu
Sataniv: the lost world of the ancient Jewish cemetery @ “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine" Museum
Jan 25 – Mar 3 all-day
Sataniv: the lost world of the ancient Jewish cemetery @ “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine" Museum | Dnipro | Dnipropetrovs'ka oblast | Ukraine

An exhibition of art-enhanced photographs by Dmytro Polyukhovich based on the carvings on the centuries-old matzevot in the Jewish cemetery in Sataniv (which unfortunately has suffered extensive damage in recent years by a self-appointed Haredi man claiming to restore it).

The images for the exhibition focus on specific details of the carved iconography, which combines religious tradition with folk art — floral motifs, animals (and imaginary animals), symbols, religious allegories, and more.

To create the exhibition pieces, Polyukovich manipulated his original photos of the matzevot in Adobe Photoshop, cutting away everything except for the specific detail of the carving  that he wanted to highlight and then adding color.

NOTE: The exhibition will be open every Wednesday and every Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. It is also possible to organize group tours every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.

 

Mar
1
Fri
Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival @ Jewish Museum Frankfufrt
Mar 1 – Sep 1 all-day
Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival @ Jewish Museum Frankfufrt | Frankfurt am Main | Hessen | Germany

A multimedia exhibition by the artist, architect and historian Natalia Romik dedicated to the creativity of Polish Jews seeking to survive the Shoah in hiding.

In Poland and Ukraine during World War II, approximately 50,000 people survived persecution by the German occupying forces in hiding. The majority of them were Jewish. They found refuge in tree hollows, closets, basements, sewers, empty graves, and other precarious locations. Natalia Romik’s exhibition “Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival” pays tribute to these fragile places of refuge and explores their physicality. The show poses basic questions about the relationship between architecture, private life, and the public sphere: it addresses the protective function of spaces and emphasizes the creativity those in hiding brought to bear in their attempt to survive.

In a research project extending over several years, Natalia Romik and an interdisciplinary team of researchers consulted oral histories to identify several hiding places, which they explored using forensic methods. The multimedia exhibition “Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival” presents the results of this research. It consists of sculptures bearing a direct connection to the sites and includes documentary films, forensic recordings, photos, documents, and objects found in the hiding places.

“Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival” is presented in cooperation with the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin. On the occasion of the show at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, a catalogue will be published in German and English editions by Hatje Cantz Verlag.

The exhibition was curated by Kuba Szreder and Stanisław Ruksza with the help of Aleksandra Janus (scientific collaboration). For the presentation in Frankfurt, Katja Janitschek, curator of the Judengasse Museum, was responsible for the curatorial project management. We would like to thank the Evonik Foundation for their generous support.

 

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