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Philanthropy, Jewishness, and Cultural Heritage, 1850-1950: Introducing the Jewish Country Houses Project
6 December 2022, 5:00 pm CET
Jaclyn Granick (Cardiff University) and Tom Stammers (Durham University) Co-investigators of the Jewish Country Houses Project (funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council), Granick and Stammers will introduce...
„Chance Collectors of Refugees“: Local and International Humanitarian Interactions in the Bohemian Lands, 1938-1939
1 November 2022, 5:00 pm CET
Laura Brade (Albion College) For much of the 1920s and 1930s, American and British humanitarian organizations perceived their Czechoslovak counterparts as partners in distributing aid to the growing refugee population...
Half Profit, Half Loss – Negotiating Jewish Economic Law in Non-Jewish Courtrooms
11 October 2022, 5:00 CET
Verena Kasper-Marienberg (North Carolina State University) It was common practice that Jewish men and women brought their conflicts before non-Jewish courts throughout the early modern period. This talk explores how, due...
Jewish Initiative and Agency under Communism
An International Conference at the University of Wroclaw, 28 – 30 June 2022
Organizers: Kateřina Čapková, Semion Goldin, Kamil Kijek Throughout most of the twentieth century in the Soviet Union and from 1945 in east central European “people’s democracies,” citizens, including Jews, were...
Jewish Moneylending in Medieval Eger (Cheb)
31 May 2022, 5:00 pm CET
Kajetán Holeček (Charles University, Prague) Jews and Christians in Eger (Cheb) were deeply involved in moneylending in the city. A very important source for research of this topic in Eger are the books of obligations...
Asymmetrical Justice: Roma and Jews in the Courtroom
26 April 2022, 5:00 pm CET
Ari Joskowicz (Vanderbilt University, Nashville) After World War Two, Roma and Sinti increasingly looked toward Jewish successes to define their own expectations of post-genocidal justice. At the same time, the legal innovations,...
MemoGIS – the Spatial Exclusion of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Prague
15 March 2022, 5pm CET
Aneta Plzáková and Daniela Bartáková (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences) The web application "MemoGIS Prague" describes the fates of 30 thousand Holocaust victims from Prague and analyses...
Precarious Survival – Everyday Life of «Mixed Families» During the Nazi Regime in Vienna
22 February 2022, 5:00 pm CET
Michaela Raggam-Blesch (University of Vienna) This lecture will focus on the everyday life and persecution of «mixed families» during the Nazi regime in Vienna. In the context of National Socialist race ideology, marriages...
The DEGOB collection through a Digital Lens
14 December 2021 – 5 PM
Ildikó Barna (Eötvös Loránd University) Beginning from the early summer of 1945, employees of the National Committee for Attending Deportees (DEGOB) started to record the testimonies of deportees returning to Hungary.
Silenced voices. The untold stories of the “Last pogrom” in the Moravia (1918)
9 November 2021 - 5 PM
Jan Machala (Holešov Museum) The so called “Last Pogrom” in the Moravian town of Holešov in December 1918 is a relatively well known event, frequently mentioned in Czech historiography and occasionally reflected...
Languages of loyalty. Revocation of Jewish citizenship in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1938-1939
26 October 2021 - 5 PM
Michal Frankl (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences) By the end of the 1930s, tens of thousands of Polish and Czechoslovak Jews received notices informing them in a bureaucratic language about...
Jewish, Romani and Interethnic Families in the Era of Nationalism, Nazism and Communism
29 June, 2021 - 5 pm CET
Benjamin Frommer (Northwestern University, Evanston) Kateřina Čapková (ÚSD AV ČR) Book presentation of two volumes with entangled topics Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia. Mixed Families in the...
Slaughtering the Scapegoats: The Mass Murder of Jews and Roma in Hungary during the Last Months of World War II
27 April 2021, 6 pm CET
László Csősz (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences) In Hungarian historical awareness, wartime genocide is closely linked to the German occupation, which began in March 1944. ‘Germanizing’...
Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust
23 March 2021, 6 pm CET
Natalia Aleksiun (Touro College) This seminar explores the project of Jewish history writing in eastern Europe by examining the intellectual trajectories of Polish Jewish historians and their work. It argues that history...
Prague Forays: Egon Erwin Kisch and Walking-as-Belonging
9 February 2021, 6pm CET
Chad Bryant (University of North Carolina) Egon Erwin Kisch, a celebrated member of the Prague Circle, first earned local fame while writing a newspaper column entitled Prager Streifzüge, or Prague Forays, published weekly...
The Last Polish Shtetl? Jewish community of Lower Silesian Dzierżoniów, Jewish World, Cold War and Communism (1945-1950)
24 November 2020 - 6 PM
Kamil Kijek (Taube Department of Jewish Studies, Wroclaw) In my talk, using examples from archival, photographic and film material, I will show how remarkable and unexpected concentration of Polish Jews in former German...
The Days of Future Past. Thinking about the Jewish Life to Come from within the Warsaw Ghetto
3 November 2020 - 6 PM
Justyna Majewska (Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw) Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto pondered not only how to survive the present but also in the days to come. The day of liberation was calculated on the basis of...
Getting (Re-)Started. Jewish Livelihoods in West Germany after 1945
13 October 2020 - 6 PM
Anna Holian (Arizona State University, Tempe) At the end of the war, most Jews in Germany were in no condition to provide for themselves. Some, however, immediately sought to reenter the world of work. They were driven...
The Siberian Odyssey of Polish Jews
22 September 2020 - 6 PM
Lidia Zessin-Jurek, Katharina Friedla (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague; Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw) The great majority of Polish Jews who survived the Nazi genocide did...
Return Home: Holocaust Survivors Reestablishing Lives in Postwar Vienna
12 November 2019 - 5:30 PM
Elizabeth Anthony (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) Of the pre-Anschluss total of more than 200,000 Austrian Jews – both self-identified and those categorized as such by National Socialist “racial” policy – more than...
Refugee Camps in Bohemia and Moravia during WWI
22 October 2019 - 5:30 PM
Alena Jindrová (Muzeum Vysočiny Havlíčkův Brod) During WWI, refugees came mainly to the central parts of monarchy – Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian lands (Carinthia, Carniola, Lower Austria, Higher Austria). As the...
The Afterlife of Yizker bikher in Contemporary Jewish Writing
1 October 2019 - 5:30 PM
Marianne Windsperger (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies) In my PhD dissertation project on “Revisiting and Retelling the Shtetl: Narratives of Searching for Traces in American Jewish Writing” I devote...
How Yiddish Writers Became Yiddish Writers
14 May 2019 - 5:30 PM
Carmen Reichert (Augsburg University) Narrations on the Choice of Yiddish in Autobiographical Writings after Peretz It should come as no surprise that literary autobiographies essentially tell us how writers became...
Subversive Conformism? Youth Culture, Jews and Rock’n’roll in 1960s‘ Poland
30 April 2019 - 5:30 PM
Marcos Silber (University in Haifa) March 1968 was a short but important period in recent Polish history. That year, it seemed, almost the whole world was experiencing a cultural revolution provoked by the youth. Unlike...
Who Will Edit Our History, or Challenges of Editing Holocaust Sources. The Case of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Ghetto Notes
2 April 2019 - 5:30 PM
Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences) In September 1939 a Polish-Jewish historian, teacher and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944) began taking notes...
Becoming Refugees, Becoming Survivors? Reframing Jewish Children’s Experiences in Transnational, longue durée Perspective
5 March 2019 - 5:30 PM
Laura Hobson Faure (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) Since the 1990s, historians have sought to incorporate Jewish children’s experiences into the historiography on the Holocaust (Dwork, 1991, Stargardt, 2006),...
Microhistories from a Polish–Jewish town: 1918 – 1956
4 December 2018 - 5:30 PM
Agnieszka Wierzcholska (Osteuropainstitut, Freie Universität, Berlin) Tarnów in southern Poland has been a Polish-Jewish town for centuries. Prior to the Second World War almost 50% of the town’s inhabitants were Jewish...
Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture
Mirjam Zadoff (NS Dokumentationszentrum München)
The book presentation (of the Czech translation) will take place on 3rd December at 6 pm in the Jewish Museum of Prague, Maislova 15, Prague 1, 3rd floor. In Next Year in Marienbad, Mirjam Zadoff writes the social and...
Commemorating the Kindertransports 80 Years On
Maisl Synagogue, 19 November 2018
In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom, the British government, urged on by public opinion and the efforts of refugee aid groups, agreed to offer temporary refuge to unaccompanied children from Central Europe who were...
What is Hasidism?
6 November 2018 - 5:30 PM
Marcin Wodziński (University of Wrocław) What is Hasidism? Why do we know so little about one of the most intensively- researched phenomena in Jewish history? Which historiographical presumptions hinder the development...
Workshop: Stereotypical Representations of Roma and Jews in Photographs
French Institute, Štěpánská 35, Prague 1
For an invitation in pdf, please download here. For a poster in pdf, please download here. The workshop will take place at the French Institute, Štěpánská 35, Prague 1 Program of the workshop 16:30-18:00 HISTORICAL...
Minority Perspective and the Trouble with Liberal Discourses. Thinking History of Jewish/Yiddish Culture in Polish Context
9 October 2018 - 5:30 PM
Karolina Szymaniak (Wroclaw University) When in 1988 the poet Marcin Świetlicki formulated in a now-famous poem his sharp criticism of the rhetoric of cultural opposition and its possession by history, he wrote: “Instead...
Remembering Across the Iron Curtain in the Cold War Era. The Emergence of Holocaust Memory
A Joint Conference of the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past, University of York and the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, September 2-4, 2018.
The Cold War influenced how people, societies and states dealt with and understood the Holocaust and its aftereffects. Yet historiography tends to neglect the role the block confrontation played in shaping scholarship, trials,...
Workshop: The Inclusion of the Jewish Population into Postwar Czechoslovakia and Poland
20 June 2018, 2 pm
Final workshop of the research team of the project The Inclusion of the Jewish Population into Postwar Czechoslovakia and Poland Participants: Stephan Stach Kateřina Čapková Kamil Kijek Agnieszka Wierzcholska...
Holocaust Memory, Jewish Life, and Generational Dimensions. Czechoslovakia in the 1980s
19 June 2018 - 5 PM
Peter Hallama (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris) This lecture will reconsider the growing interest in Jewish culture, religion, and history in the last decade of State Socialism in Czechoslovakia. It...
The Jews, Social Mobility, and Antisemitism in Late-Stalinist Moldavia
22 May 2018 - 5 PM
Diana Dumitru (Creangă State University of Moldova) The history of Soviet Jews in the postwar era is traditionally viewed as a dark pe-riod, filled with repression, expulsion of Jews from the state machinery, and the...
Airing Dirty Laundry in Public? Postwar Retribution Trials and the Jewish Community in Bohemia and Moravia
10 April 2018 - 5 PM
Jan Láníček (University of New South Wales, Sydney) Shortly after the end of the war, European societies attempted to come to terms with the legacies of the genocides committed by Nazi Germany with the help of local...
Staging Plays from the Terezin Ghetto Today: Incorporating Historical Context into the Performance
27 March 2018 - 5 PM
Lisa Peschel (University of York) During the 40-month project Performing the Jewish Archive, we experimented with type of performance, which we called co-textual performance, to try to generate more intense audience engagement.
Friend, Writer, Zionist: the Quest for Kafka’s Judaism in Hugo Bergman’s Writings
13 March 2018 - 5 PM
Enrico Lucca (Simon Dubnow Institute, Leipzig) Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Hugo Bergman (1883-1975) have been classmates and very close friends until their first years of university. Yet, Bergman started to write on Kafka...
What Is A Witness? A Lecture by Annette Wieviorka
A joint event of CEFRES, Institute of Contemporary History CAS and the Prague Center for Jewish Studies at Charles University
17:30 at Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Jana Palacha 2, the room will be announced later Annette Wieviorka is probably one of the famous French historians on the Holocaust and a specialist of the history of Jews...
Publishing Books in Early Modern Jewish Prague
12 December 2017 - 5 PM
Olga Sixtová (Charles University, Prague) What factors and who determined the literature to be published in early modern Jewish Prague? Like their readers, the publishers of Jewish literature (often not the same people...
Third Workshop of the Authors’ Team Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands
6-7 December, 2017, CEU, Budapest
Participants: Michael Miller (Central European University, Budapest) Hillel Kieval (Washington University, St. Louis) Verena Kasper-Marienberg (North Carolina State University) Joshua Teplitsky (Stony Brook University)...
Solving the Housing Crisis: The Eviction and Resettlement of Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1939-1942
28 November 2017 - 5 PM
Benjamin Frommer (Northwestern University, Evanston) By the time the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia boarded transport trains for the Nazi ghettos in Theresienstadt and occupied Eastern Europe, many, if not most, of them had...
Concerning Retribution: The Holocaust on Trial in Slovakia, 1945–48
14 November 2017 - 5 PM
Michala Lônčíková (Comenius University, Bratislava) Similarly to other European countries that, immediately after the war, were facing the aftermath of German occupation and collaboration, a system of retributive justice...
Large Scale Use of Oral History Accounts in the Historiography of the Shoah
17 October 2017 - 5 PM
Éva Kovács (Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Vienna) The Case of the Hungarian-Jewish Slave Labourers in Vienna (1944-45) In the past two decades, thanks to the opening of the digital collections in the...
Germans or Jews? German-Speaking Jews in Post-War Europe
24 August 2017, Center for Jewish History, New York
The LBI London, in cooperation with LBI New York and with the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, is holding a workshop at the Center for Jewish History, New York, 24 August 2017. About the workshop:...
Second Workshop of the Authors’ Team Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands
12-13 July 2017, Prague, Villa Lanna
Participants: Michael Miller (Central European University, Budapest) Hillel Kieval (Washington University, St. Louis) Verena Kasper-Marienberg (North Carolina State University) Rachel Greenblatt (University of Connecticut)...
Eighth Session of the International Forum of Young Scholars on East European Jewry
3-6 July 2017, Prague, Villa Lanna
The Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in cooperation with the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, NYU Prague, the Skirball...
Concierges of Budapest as Ordinary Profiteers of the Holocaust in Hungary
6 June 2017 - 5 PM
Istvan Pal Adam (CEFRES, Prague) During the Second World War, Budapest concierges (in Hungarian, házmester, in Czech, domovník) were a link between the authorities and most Jewish citizens living in the city. This role...
New Approaches to the History of the Jews under Communism
23–25 May 2017, Prague
The experience of the Jews under the Communist régimes of east-central and eastern Europe has been a hotly debated topic of historiography since the 1950s. Until the 1980s, Cold War propaganda exerted a powerful influence...
Jewish Prague Revisited
Debate over the book series Jews - History - Memory
Discussion with Martina Niedhammer and Ines Koeltzsch, authors of two books about Jewish Prague in the 19th and the 20th centuries, and with Zuzana Schreiberová from the Multicultural Center in Prague who coordinates a project...
Imre Kertész, the „Medium of Auschwitz“
9 May 2017 - 5 PM
Clara Royer (CEFRES, Prague) To Imre Kertész, “Auschwitz” was the “Ecce homo” of two thousand years of European Christian culture. Such collapse of the so-called humanist culture led him to undertake a radical...
Jews and Popular Culture in 1960’s Czechoslovakia
11 April 2017 - 5 PM
Ilana Miller (University of Chicago) Was there such a thing as “Jewish popular culture” under communism? In this presentation, I use data collected from the publishing and film industries to examine moments of increased...
Austrian Refugee Movements to Czechoslovakia, 1934–39: From Political Exiles to Jewish Refugees
21 March 2017 - 5 PM
Wolfgang Schellenbacher (University of Vienna / EHRI) The political exile of Austrian Socialists in Czechoslovakia in 1934 is different from other refugee movements in central Europe at that time, most noticeably because...
The Holocaust and its Aftermath from the Family Perspective
15-16 March 2017, Prague
Applying gender analysis to the field of Holocaust Studies has yielded important results. Whereas before the 1990s, most Holocaust scholarship focused almost exclusively on the experiences of male victims, expanding to include...
Im Feuer vergangen (Lost in the Fire): East German Holocaust Memory, Cold War Propaganda, and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw
14 February 2017 - 5 PM
Stephan Stach (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences) During the 1950s and 1960s a number of books on the Holocaust appeared in the German Democratic Republic. They had their origins in the Jewish...
The Histories of Unknown Neighbours
13 December 2016 - 5 PM
Monika Vrzgulová (Institute of Ethnology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and Holocaust Documentation Centre, Bratislava) Monika Vrzgulová is a specialist on the collective memory of the Holocaust in Slovakia since the 1990s.
Beginnings of Israeli Right
8 November 2016 - 5 PM
Jan Zouplna (Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences) The genealogy of the Israeli right wing is very complex indeed. From the 1920s to the 1940s the right wing was a loosely defined alliance ranging from intellectuals...
Fighting Together: Jewish Soldiers in the Czechoslovak Army in Exile, 1939–45
18 October 2016 - 5 PM
Zdenko Maršálek (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences) The Czechoslovak armies in exile during the Second World War was made up not only of soldiers of Czech and Slovak nationality, but also of...
Professor Yaacov Ro’i: Developments in Post-Soviet Studies on Soviet Jewry
21 September 2016, library of CEFRES
Professor Yaacov Ro’i from the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies at the Tel Aviv University is a leading expert on history of Jews in the Soviet Union. Among his recent publications are however also...
Workshop of the authors’ team Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands
3-4 August 2016, Prague, Villa Lanna
Participants: Verena Kasper-Marienberg (North Carolina State University) Rachel Greenblatt (University of Connecticut) Michael Miller (Central European University, Budapest) Hillel Kieval (Washington University, St.
Assets and Liabilities: Synagogues and Cemeteries in the Communist Czech Lands
3 June 2015 - 5 PM
Jacob Labendz (Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Berlin) The postwar Jewish communities in the Czech lands came into the possession of hundreds of cemeteries and former synagogue buildings. Caring for them and determining...
Makeshift Economies: On Hunger, Shortage and Supply During World War II
6 May 2015 - 5 PM
Tatjana Tönsmeyer (Bergische Universität, Wuppertal) Wars – both past and present – go hand in hand with the interruption of economic life. This is especially true of the Second World War, since the German occupiers...
Myth, Politics and Empire: The Jews of Habsburg Bukovina
1 April 2015 - 5 PM
David Rechter (Oxford University) Bukovina was ‘created’ in the 1770s, along with Galicia, as part of the Habsburg Monarchy's eastward expansion. At the eastern edge of empire, geography, culture and politics combined...
“Why Go Be a Beggar in a Foreign Land?” Local Identity in Bohemian Jewish Literary Sources from the 1830-1840s
3 March 2015 - 5 PM
Jindřich Toman (University of Michigan) In 1828 the young poet L. A. Frankl (1810-1894) left his small Bohemian birthplace, Chrast, and moved to Vienna, where he published a collection entitled Das Habsburglied (1832),...
Host Desecration Legends in Czech Medieval Literature: Violence against Judaism, Polemic against Hussitism
4 February 2015 - 5 PM
Daniel Soukup (Palacký University, Olomouc and ÚČL, AV ČR) The paper focuses on the group of medieval texts related to the cases of the Host desecration accusation in the Czech lands and surrounding regions. In the...
‚Now or Never‘: Popular Opinion and the Jews of Slovakia, 1945-48
3 December 2014 - 5 PM
Hana Kubátová (Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries.
Jewish Communities of Moravia and Silesia in the Age of Emancipation
5 November 2014 - 5 PM
Daniel Baránek (Charles University, Prague) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries. Though primarily...
Czech–Jewish and Polish–Jewish Studies: (Dis)Similarities
29–30 October 2014, Prague
Polish-Jewish and Czech-Jewish history are often seen as following two different lines of narrative. While historians of Bohemian and Moravian Jews tend to focus on the impact of Austrian-Jewish and German-Jewish history...
The Jews of Postwar Poland and the Bohemian Lands: The View from the Periphery
1 October 2014 - 5 PM
Kateřina Čapková (Institute of Contemporary History, Prague) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries.
“We Live as Though Entombed”: Jews Hiding in Family Bunkers in Eastern Galicia
14 June 2014 - 5 PM
Natalia Aleksiun (Touro College, New York) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries. Though primarily focused...
History of Hasidism: New Trends
14 May 2014 - 5 PM
Marcin Wodziński (Uniwersytet Wrocławski) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries. Though primarily...
„Zigeuner“, Juden und andere „Fremde“. Zur Kriminalisierung von Minderheiten im langen 19. Jahrhundert
2 April 2014 - 5 PM
Volker Zimmermann (Collegium Carolinum, Munich) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries. Though primarily...
Transfer of Good – Transfer of Culture: The Tobacco Monopoly and the Rise of Modern Jewish Intellectuals in the Habsburg Monarchy
5 March 2014 - 5 PM
Louise Hecht (Palackého univerzita, Olomouc) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries. Though primarily focused...
Jewish Community in Postwar Greece: Between Assimilation and Exclusion
5 February 2014 - 5 PM
Kateřina Králová (FSV UK) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries. Though primarily focused on the Jews...
Eine Geschichte des Niedergangs? Landjuden und die Migration in die Städte in Zentraleuropa um 1900
4 December 2013 - 5 PM
Ines Koeltzsch (Masaryk Institute and Archives, Prague) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries. Though primarily...
Czech Antisemitism between the Monarchy and the Republic
6 November 2013 - 5 PM
Michal Frankl (Jewish Museum, Prague) The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries. Though primarily focused on...
