The Jewish religious heritage continuum: Jewish religious communities’ interactions with synagogues and ceremonial objects in Amsterdam
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Abstract
This article explores how rabbis, directors and members of Amsterdam’s Jewish religious communities view the heritagisation of Jewish religious life by analysing how they interact with Amsterdam’s main synagogues and their collections of ceremonial objects. It focuses on the synagogues of the Jewish Cultural Quarter – the Portuguese Synagogue with its accompanying Sephardi community, and the former Ashkenazi synagogue complex, now the Jewish Museum. From a dynamic heritage perspective, this heterogeneous constellation raises questions about how and why heritage making occurs here. Following a Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology, concurrent data collection and analysis let emerge interrelated conceptual categories that explain how communities interact with these functioning and musealised synagogues and objects: Embodying the transmission of tradition; Instrumentalising the heritage of Jewish religious life; Transforming the beauty of holiness; and Assembling in heritagised synagogues. These categories intersect in the core category of the Jewish religious heritage continuum, which this article presents as a dynamic embodiment of remembering, reconnection, and revival of Jewish tradition. For the interviewees, these performances, and the deployment of functioning and musealised synagogues and collections, form a cultural apparatus that marks their present, diverse and living material culture and grafts a Jewish future onto a Jewish past.
Topics
Synagogues Rabbis Jewish Leadership Jewish Heritage Jewish Continuity Religious Observance and Practice Religious Denominations Sephardi Jews Main Topic: Culture and Heritage Jewish Museums Artefacts and Material Culture
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Copyright Info
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on whichthis article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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Volume/Issue
30(7)
Page Number / Article Number
799-820
DOI
Bibliographic Information
The Jewish religious heritage continuum: Jewish religious communities’ interactions with synagogues and ceremonial objects in Amsterdam. 2024: 799-820. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/13527258.2024.2334234
