European Day of Jewish Culture article

My latest article on JTA is a preview of the European Day of Jewish Culture -- this year Sept. 5 -- highlighting the way it has become a major event on the end-of-summer cultural calendar in Italy. There are 25,000 affiliated Jews in Italy, but Culture Day activities take place this year in 62 towns and cities around the country. And last year's events in Italy drew 62,000 visitors, the overwhelming majority non-Jewish. Culture Day gets lots of media attention and has the support of civic bodies and is under the patronage of Italy's president.

Tourists shop in a store in the former Jewish district that sells kosher wine, matzah, Jewish pastries and souvenirs. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

Introducing non-Jewish Europeans to Jewish life

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · August 31, 2010

PITIGLIANO, Italy (JTA) -- In Italy, where there are only about 25,000 affiliated Jews in a population of 60 million, most Italians have never knowingly met a Jew. "It's unfortunate," said the Italian Jewish activist Sira Fatucci, "but in Italy Jews and the Jewish experience are often mostly known through the Holocaust."

Fatucci is the national coordinator in Italy for the annual European Day of Jewish Culture, an annual transborder celebration of Jewish traditions and creativity that takes place in more than 20 countries on the continent on the first Sunday of September -- this year, Sept. 5.

Synagogues, Jewish museums and even ritual baths and cemeteries are open to the public, and hundreds of seminars, exhibits, lectures, book fairs, art installations, concerts, performances and guided tours are offered.

The main goal is to educate the non-Jewish public about Jews and Judaism in order to demystify the Jewish world and combat anti-Jewish prejudice.

“What we are trying to do is to show the living part of Judaism -- to show life," Fatucci said. "What we want to do is to use culture as an antidote to ignorance and anti-Semitism.”

Some 700 people flock to Culture Day events each year in Pitigliano, a rust-colored hilltown in southern Tuscany that once had such a flourishing Jewish community that it was known as Little Jerusalem.

Click to read full story at jta

European Day of Jewish Culture -- Sept. 5

 Synagogue, Radauti, Romania. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The annual European Day of Jewish Culture is coming up -- this year, it's Sept. 5. This is the 11th edition of the "Day" -- I was present at the meeting in Paris in 1999 when it was decided to sponsor an international, cross-border Culture Day, broadening the effort that had already been under way in the Alsace region of France since 1996.

Organization is at the local level, but each year a different general theme is chosen to more or less link events, which this year are said to be taking place in nearly 30 countries -- though programs for only 16 countries are listed on the web site.

Italy remains perhaps the most enthusiastic participant, with events in some 62 locales, including many places where no Jews live.

The theme chosen this year is "Art and Judaism." Events focus on:

  - Different kinds of art: paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, literature, music, films, theatre
  - Different artists: painters, sculptors, writers, actors, composers and performers, directors
  - Different periods: ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary
  - Others: patrons of art, collections
  - Art applied in religious ceremony or in everyday life

You can see the program by clicking THIS LINK

Italy -- Synagogue in Sabbioneta to Reopen after Restoration

The charming little synagogue in Sabbioneta, near Mantova in northern Italy, will reopen next month after a year-long restoration process. The re-opening is timed to coincide with this year's European Day of Jewish Culture, which takes place Sept. 5.

Sabbioneta was built in the 16th century by Vespasiano Gonzaga and laid out as an ideal Renaissance city. The synagogue that stands was built much later -- in 1824 -- to a design by Carlo Visioli on the site of a much older Synagogue

European Day of Jewish Culture Coming up -- Sept. 6

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the European Day of Jewish Culture, an event that takes place in nearly 30 countries and represents the biggest and most extensive Jewish culture festival in Europe. Begun as a local initiative in the Alsace region of France, Culture Day went international in 1999 and is one of the only such manifestations that has a cross-border character.

This year its theme is Jewish Festivals and Traditions. Its roster is likely to include as many as 800 separate, simultaneous events in 28 countries.

With so much going on at the same time in so many places, Culture Day is targeted more at local people than at tourists. It's aim is to enable the public at large to discover the cultural and historical heritage of Judaism and in doing so to combat anti-Jewish prejudice.

As I wrote last year in an article for Hadassah Magazine, Culture Day is loosely coordinated by the ECJC, B'nai B'rith Europe and the Red de Juderias, a Jewish tourism route linking 15 Spanish cities. On the ground, however, the operation is staffed by local volunteers in each participating country -- thousands of them, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The level of participation in each country is determined by local interest, resources and capabilities: some countries have only a few token events.

The Italian participation has, from the beginning, been among the most enthusiastic, thanks to good organization, hundreds of volunteers, and important support from state, regional and local authorities. This year, there will be a record participation in Italy -- nearly 60 towns, cities and villages will be scheduling some sort of event.

Each year in Italy, one city is chosen as the flagship, where official kick-off ceremonies and major events are held.

This year the choice is unusual -- it's Trani, a seaport town in the deep south of Italy, in Puglia, on the heel of Italy's boot. Jews were expelled from here half a millennium ago; it's only in the past few years that local people have begun to recover Jewish history. A tiny Jewish community was reconstituted five years ago.

Events there will center around what is being called the first Festival of Jewish Culture ever to be held in Puglia. Called "Negba", it takes place Sept. 6-9. The program includes performances, concerts, lectures, discussions, exhibits.

Many events will be sited at Trani's Scolanova synagogue, which was used for a centuries as a church but has been the center of Jewish life in the town since 2005.

You can see the full Italian schedule by clicking HERE.

Workshop to be Held on European Itinerary of Jewish Heritage

What is being billed as the First international workshop on the European itinerary of Jewish heritage is to be held in Oviedo, Spain on Nov. 4-5. The sponsor for the meeting is the European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Heritage (AEJP), which coordinates the annual European Day of Jewish Culture.

Participants are to include the presidents of B'nai B'rith Europe and the European Council of Jewish Communities, the director of the European Institute of Culture Itineraries, and experts from France, Italy and Spain. Participants listed in the program include Max Polonovski from Paris, Annie Sacerdoti from Milan, Assumpcio Hosta, from Spain. It is not clear who else will be in attendance.

Topics on the agenda include "Approaches to management of cultural routes, with examples of Italy, Slovakia Czech Republic, England, France, Holland, Poland and Spain," and talks relating to the history and future of the annual European Day of Jewish Culture -- I recently wrote about some of the challenges in my article on European Culture Day in Hadassah Magazine.

One of the sessions is on "the website as a tool for promotion and working in a group" -- I hope that attention will be drawn to the regularly updated International Survey of Jewish Monuments site and the (slowly) growing Jewish Heritage Europe site -- not to mention Sam Gruber's Jewish art and monuments blog (and my own blog). Sam's blog, mailing list and ISJM site, along with my blog, are among the few web resources that attempt to keep up some sort of regular, updated track of international developments in the Jewish heritage field.

It will be interesting to see what comes of the Oviedo workshop. (And I wish that information had been released on it a bit earlier, as it might have been interesting to attend.)

Francesco Spagnolo on European Day of Jewish Culture

I know I already have placed my friend Francesco Spagnolo's blog on my blog list, but I do recommend readers take a look at what he is writing this week. As I noted earlier, in my post from Siena, Francesco is an Italian musicologist who is now the director of research at the Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California.

He took part in a whole batch of events during the recent European Day of Jewish Culture in Italy and has begun posting reportage and reflections on his experiences. I met Francesco when I was beginning my research for Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe; I can't quite remember how I connected with him, but I do remember arriving at his apartment in Milan from Budapest, sitting down, and starting to talk, talk, talk. We don't, alas, see each other all that frequently any more because of geography, but we haven't stop talking. Skype is great!

Jewish Culture Day in Turkey

The European Day of Jewish Culture took place Sept. 7, and reports are coming in about how events were celebrated around the continent. Turnout appears to have been high in many places.

The Turkish Daily News reports from Istanbul:

Tünel's music store-lined streets are rarely quiet. But walking through the area Sunday, one could hear some very unfamiliar sounds, from a klezmer, to a maftirim choir, to Hebrew love poetry for the land of Israel.This was less an invasion than a return. For this year's European Day of Jewish Culture, a celebration of Jewish traditions held in cities across Europe, became for Istanbul's Jews a re-creation of a time when they were a vital, even dominant, part of the area, and when it would not have been unusual in the Galata area to be guided from synagogue to synagogue by Hebrew chants.

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