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I’m taking part in this panel discussion at the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival
Jewish places in Poland, almost moribund after the war, have become increasingly popular among tourists over the last two decades, and their past is becoming meaningful to their present residents. Their visage is highly differentiated, from fields of rubble built over with new structures as at the site of the former Jewish district in Warsaw, through extant streets with hardly any Jews in them, as in the case of Kazimierz in Krakow. In the first case there is a danger that the new identity of a place will replace the old, and in the second that the old will be transformed into a Disneyland fantasy. How to speak about these identities, and how to present them to residents and visitors?
The issue will be discussed by:
I’ll be taking part in a wide-ranging discussion with the anthropologist Annamaria Orla Bukowska, during the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival.
I’ll be speaking on
I am scheduled to speak at the conference
The web site http:www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu is a growing online resource that aggregates links, runs a regular newsfeed, publishes long articles and features many other Jewish heritage resources for 48 European countries. A project of the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe, JHE aims to facilitate communication and information exchange regarding projects, initiatives and other developments concerning Jewish heritage and Jewish heritage sites: restoration, funding, ongoing projects, best-practices, advisory services, tourism, genealogy, & more. It also aims to foster contacts among Jewish communities, private individuals or bodies, foundations, state and civic organizations, monuments protection authorities and other stakeholders and interested parties. As JHE
As the author of National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe, and the coordinator of the web site www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu, I conduct an illustrated virtual tour of far-flung synagogues, shtetls, Jewish cemeteries, and other Jewish heritage sites in a variety of countries in East-Central Europe. I describe personal experiences and discuss the many changes I have witnessed in a quarter century of exploration of Jewish heritage. These include efforts at reconstructing Jewish life, with new forms of Jewishness, Jewish practice, and religious and cultural expression. I describe how I coined the term
presentation on a panel at the conference:
A one-day international conference organized by the Ovas! NGO that promotes preservation of buildings in downtown Budapest
Ruth takes part in a conference she co-organized as director of Jewish Heritage Europe.
The challenges and opportunities posed by Jewish heritage tourism and travel in Europe are the focus of this three-day conference and raise many important issues both in places where there is an active local Jewish population and in places where there are sites of Jewish heritage but no organized Jewish community.
The conference will focus on issues that reflect the growing diversity and energy of Jewish and Jewish-themed tourism in Europe, both for Jews and for others. But it would also address both the specifics of Jewish heritage tourism and how it fits within heritage tourism/travel in general. Special emphasis will be given to the ways in which technology influences and possibly changes Jewish heritage tourism.
This conference is the latest in a series of international conferences on Jewish heritage and follows on from a number of major international conferences on Jewish built heritage issues that have taken place since 1990.
Ruth is conversation with Shaul Bassi, marking 25 years since Jewish Heritage Travel and 15 years since Virtually Jewish were published.
The even takes place during the conference on Jewish Heritage Tourism in the Digital Age.
