Calendar

The UMass Amherst Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies hosts a daylong symposium honoring the work of James Young, Distinguished Professor emeritus of English and Judaic and Near Eastern studies and founding director of the institute.

The symposium, “Edges, Textures, Stages: James Young and the Field of Memory Studies,” will be followed by a reception until 6:30 p.m. The symposium and reception are free and open to the public.

Young, an important figure in the field of memory studies, taught at UMass Amherst from 1988 until his retirement in 2018. He also has consulted with municipal agencies in developing memorials and was a jury member for the National 9/11 Memorial competition.

He is the author of “Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust,” “The Texture of Memory,” “At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture,” and “The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between.”

The symposium will feature panel talks by visiting scholars, including:

• Lawrence Douglas, James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College and author of “The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial”
• Alice M. Greenwald, president and chief executive officer of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum
• Debórah Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History, founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University and co-author of “Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946” and “Auschwitz”
• Horst Hoheisel, sculpture artist and designer of “counter-monuments” such as “The Crushed Brandenburg Gate”
• Laura Levitt, professor of religion, Jewish studies and gender at Temple University and author of “American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust”
• Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College and author of “Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive”

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.

Presentation of the project documenting and restoring the Jewish catacomb in Venosa, Italy.

Click here to see the program.

One-day seminar to discuss ideas for the future use of the former synaogue in Pacov, CZ, followed by a tour of the building.

Program:

Exhibition of Photographs by Vincent Giordano.

The photographs are part of a multi-media archive, created by Giordano, who died in 2010, that was sponsored by International Survey of Jewish Monuments and in 2019 will find a new home at the Hellenic American Project and Special Collections at the Library of Queens College, New York.

Giordano’s photographs document two related communities of Greek Romaniote Jews – in Ioannina, in northwestern Greece and on Broome Street on New York’s Lower East Side. Romaniote Jews trace their religious and cultural heritage to the Judaism of the ancient Greco-Roman world two-thousand years ago, and these two tiny congregations are among the few remaining to follow these traditions. Romaniotes have their own liturgy and cultural traditions, as well as their own language, a dialect of Greek that combines words and phrases from Hebrew and Turkish. This luminous black and white photo essay includes a poignant exploration of liturgy and ritual, conveying how people engage with religious space and carry on their time-honored sacred traditions.

The exhibition will open on Thursday, September 19th , 2019 at 6:00 p.m. it will continue through October 3rd, 2019. 

A panel discussion by experts will take place at the Consulate on Wednesday, September 25^th, 2019 at 6:00 p.m.

Lecture and panel discussion about Romaniote Jews, linked to the exhibition “Romaniote Memories – A Jewish Journey from Ioannina, Greece to Manhattan: Photographs by Vincent Giordano.”

A panel discussion about the Milan’s main synagogue, designed by the architect Luca Beltrami and originally built in 1892. It was severely damaged in 1943 but fully rebuilt, conserving the original facade. (In Italian.)

Click here to see program

Dr Sofiya Dyak, Nikita Kadan and Professor Philippe Sands  discuss the evolution of the practices of Holocaust remembrance and its public discourse in Ukraine: How are these tragic events remembered across different communities and why? How to deal with histories of lands subjected to multiple occupations and mass murder across communities? How to write a historic narrative for the country, which is still in a state of war?

This event is part of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Dr Sofiya Dyak is the Director of the Lviv Centre of Urban History, a private institution which initiated a number of important initiatives commemorating Jewish community presence in Lviv in partnership with Lviv’s municipality, including the Space of Synagogues memorial. In 2017, the centre hosted the “Un-named” project, reflecting on mass violence in Ukraine between 1931 and 1945. The project included visual work by Nikita Kadan, Ukraine’s contemporary artist. Similarly, Professor Philippe Sands traced his family history back to Lviv, with the city becoming the focus of much of his literary work and intellectual reflection.