Calendar

In the 2019 Kirker lecture, given in aid of Venice in Peril, Edmund de Waal considers the Venice Ghetto as a place which is simultaneously at the margins of the city whilst also being at the centre of world culture.

Edmund de Waal is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer,  renowned for his family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) which won many literary prices. He was made an OBE for his services to art in 2011. He lives and works in London.

Buy Tickets online or download a Booking Form or Telephone 020 7736 6891

Lecture by Joanna Beata Michlic.

Since the fall of Communism, Łódź, the third-largest city of Poland, has embarked on a process of cultural reorientation. This process aims at reshaping it into a forward-looking twenty-first century European city. A close look at this process reveals that the reinvention of the city depends on what might be called an archaeological project of rediscovering the local pre-1939 multi-ethnic and multicultural heritage. In this lecture, Dr. Michlic examines the dynamics of the rediscovery of the Jewish heritage in Łódź from the perspective of mutual relations between a physical space and various social agents. She focuses on how the city draws on, reworks and articulates the forgotten Jewish heritage.

As part of its “House of Life” project to open the cemetery to the public, nine families will be coming to the historic Willesden Jewish cemetery on May 26 to tell stories of people buried there.

In the Synagogue is a short film by young Ukrainian director Ivan Orlenko based on an unfinished story by Franz Kafka. One of few works by Kafka to deal with Jewish culture overtly, the story describes a strange vision of a beast that a Jewish boy experiences while praying in a synagogue, a metaphor which could be interpreted in several ways. Young Ukrainian director Ivan Orlenko has adapted Kafka’s fragment into a 30-minute film, shot entirely in Yiddish, and transposed its action to a synagogue in western Ukraine.

The screening will be preceded by a talk by Dr Uilleam Blacker of UCL SSEES on the ways in which the rich Jewish cultural heritage of Ukraine is remembered and reimagined in the country today, and the challenges which this process of recovery faces.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the director.

The event is co-organised by Ukrainian Institute, London and UCL SSEES, with the support of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.

A Lecture by Prof David Newman OBE

It will be followed by a viewing of the David Hillman ‘Purim’ window from the Old Bayswater Synagogue, now in The Stained Glass Museum in Ely Cathedral.

Click here to read our 2014 article about Hillman’s magnificent windows

In this talk Prof. Newman will shed light on the life and work of David Hillman (1894-1974), a prolific Anglo-Jewish artist who understood the deep connection between art and religion. Hillman was born in Glasgow and his father was Dayan Samuel Isaac Hillman, of the London Beth Din. He created stained glass windows for many London Synagogues, and one of his windows made for the old Bayswater Synagogue (demolished 1966) is on display at The Stained Glass Museum.

Prof. David Newman is a great nephew of  David Hillman, and a researcher of political geography and geopolitics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

Historian David Jacobs speaks about the history of the Willesden Jewish Cemetery, during an exhibition about the cemetery at the Library

This lecture by Cantor Eliot Alderman will consider some of the main musical developments since then, beginning with the Sephardi and Ashkenazi synagogues which stood practically side-by-side in the City of London for 250 years. He will examine the birth of the Anglo-Jewish choral tradition, the split with the Reform movement and its musical consequences, and the new music brought more recently by immigrants from Eastern Europe and Arab lands.

No reservations are required for this lecture. It will be run on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.
Doors will open 30 minutes before the start of the lecture