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”
Learn about (and help support) the ongoing project to restore the Bagnowka Jewish cemetery in Bialystok, Poland, the only remaining Jewish cemetery in the city.
This two-day conference, co-sponsored by Catholic Theological Union and the University of Notre Dame, will focus on issues of scholarship and community which are at the heart of Jewish-Christian dialogue. It includes panels and presentations from 13 scholars at the forefront of Jewish-Christian studies, both here in the United States and internationally.
Presentations include a panel on: Synagogues, Churches, Shrines: Interacting Sacred Spaces in Antiquity
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 25th, 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.”
Lecture by architectural historian Clare Lise Kelly.
The depth of Maryland’s Jewish heritage is reflected in its wide range of synagogue architecture. With a history extending from the early settlement of German Jews to the influx of Russian Jews, to a post-war suburban population, this presentation explores the evolution from traditional revivalist styles to modern functional design, drawing on examples in Baltimore City and Montgomery County.
Clare Lise Kelly, retired M-NCPPC Architectural Historian, is the author of Montgomery Modern: Modern Architecture in Montgomery County, Maryland, 1930-1979, and recipient of the Paul H. Kea medal for Architectural Advocacy, the highest honor of AIA Potomac Valley, a chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
As part of the 2019 Doors Open Baltimore festival, take a special tour of the historic Lloyd Street Synagogue with an architecture focus! Admission on October 6th is FREE.
Lecture on the past, present, and future of Jewish museums by Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Chief Curator of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University.
Dr. Maroš Borský, director of the Jewish Community Museum in Bratislava, Slovakia will give an overview of the remarkable life of Jewish heritage pioneer Eurgen Bárkány, the collection he built, and its future. He will also discuss current synagogue restoration projects in Slovakia and major achievements of the past decade.
Eugen Bárkány (1885–1967) was a civil engineer and successful entrepreneur during the interwar period – and passionate collector in Eastern Slovakia. In 1928, he became a director of the Slovakia´s first Jewish museum in Prešov, which was a private initiative of the Jewish museum association, which Bárkány chaired. The museum assembled a remarkable collection, which survived the war and from 1952–1993 was stored at the State Jewish Museum in Prague, before it was returned to the Jewish Community of Prešov.
Bárkány hid in Budapest in 1942–1945 and returned to Prešov in 1945, where he was subsequently persecuted by the Communist regime, which expelled him from his city. In 1955, Bárkány settled down in Bratislava, where he lived in humble conditions. He continued his survey of Jewish heritage and travelled extensively around Slovakia. In Bratislava, Bárkány assembled another Judaica collection in the Neolog synagogue, and in 1966 a new Jewish museum was planned. This project was not fulfilled, the synagogue was demolished in 1969 and the collection deposited at the Slovak National Museum, from where it returned only in 2002. In 2012, the Jewish Community Museum was established in Bratislava´s only synagogue, which remains in use as an Orthodox house of worship. Since 2016, the Eugen Bárkány Prize has been awarded annually for achievements in Jewish heritage preservation by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Slovakia.
The Jewish Community Museum in Bratislava dedicated in 2018 and 2019 two exhibition projects to Eugen Bárkány and Slovakia´s first Jewish museum in Prešov. The precious collection has remained in the research and exhibition focus of the Museum.
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A native of Bratislava, Dr. Maroš Borský studied art history and Jewish studies in Bratislava, Regensburg, London, Jerusalem, and Heidelberg. From 2001 to 2006, Dr. Borský was the curator at the Slovak National Museum-Museum of Jewish Culture, where he founded and oversaw Synagoga Slovaca, the documentation project of synagogue architecture in Slovakia. Dr. Borský is the director of the Jewish Community Museum and Jewish Cultural Institute in Bratislava.
Lecture by Dr. Vladimir Levin, Director of the Center for Jewish Art at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Levin will discuss the research and collections of the Center, including on-site missions and the Historic Synagogues of Europe web site.
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