Abstract: Introduction. This study addresses the representation of ethnic minority cultures in online museum collections, which often reflect diverse viewpoints. We propose a data-driven methodology to construct a large-scale multi-viewpoint knowledge graph, using Jewish cultural heritage as a case study.
Method. We developed an LLM-based pipeline that combines object typing, named entity recognition, relation extraction, enrichment, and clustering.
Results. An analysis of 647,951 records and 178,444 extracted subjects from the collections of Jewish museums across the globe revealed diverse thematic emphases: Israel and the Netherlands prioritised religious themes, while others highlighted everyday life. Surprisingly, only Australia emphasised the Holocaust.
Conclusion(s). The central contribution of this study is the development of a knowledge organisation system capable of tracing major trends and identifying patterns in the polyvocality of perspectives. The methodology provides quantifiable, scalable analysis of multi-viewpoint cultural heritage, extendable to other minorities.
Abstract: After the Holocaust, in which 87 per cent of Greek Jewry was annihilated, communities confronted the challenge
of survival with limited resources. In many cases, synagogues and communal properties were sold and demolished
to support the surviving Jewish populations or to establish new institutions, such as the Jewish Museum of Greece.
This process illustrates a critical social dilemma: whether the continuity of community should be ensured through
the maintenance of living institutions or through the preservation of monuments as bearers of collective memory.
But what occurs when members of the community object to leadership decisions or challenge institutional
authority? This article examines the interplay between antisemitism and internal mechanisms of exclusion within
the Jewish communities in Greece, and how these dynamics shape both communal identity and the urban
landscape. Drawing on archival research and documentation of synagogues initiated by the author in 1993, it
highlights the tension between assimilation and self-preservation expressed both socially and spatially. Traditional
Jewish neighbourhoods, with their defensive layouts and gates, embodied a morphology of protection that
reinforced boundaries while becoming landmarks within historic city centres in cities such as Veroia, Komotini,
Kos, and Serres. The discussion situates the destruction and preservation of synagogues within broader patterns of
urban renewal, reconstruction, and transformation, where redevelopment often erases valuable cultural heritage,
and considers how such processes engage the voices that object to this erasure. Framed through the thought of
Ricœur, Arendt, and Levinas, the argument also emphasizes the moral responsibility of the researcher, alongside
that of community members, to act as a guardian of memory, recognising that the loss of monuments constitutes
both an urban and existential rupture, with implications for present and future generations.
Abstract: Eine Vielzahl von Institutionen und Initiativen in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz sammelt, erforscht und vermittelt jüdische Geschichte und Kultur. Dazu gehören Museen, Bibliotheken und Archive, Gedenkstätten, Vereine, Kommissionen, Universitätsinstitute und private Initiativen; es gibt Projekte zur Erforschung jüdischer Friedhöfe ebenso wie genealogische Gesellschaften. Sie sind lokal, regional sowie überregional tätig und werden durch staatliche Förderung oder privates Engagement getragen.
Das Buch bietet erstmals eine aktuelle Bestandsaufnahme dieser Institutionen und Initiativen, die mitunter auf eine lange Tradition zurückblicken können, insbesondere in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten aber an Zahl zugenommen und Bedeutung gewonnen haben. In diesem übersichtlichen Nachschlagewerk beschreiben die einzelnen Institutionen ihre Entstehung, Entwicklung und Aufgaben. Genaue Angaben zu den Archiv- und Sammlungsbeständen ermöglichen Interessierten einen Zugang zu schriftlichen, bildlichen und materiellen Überlieferungen zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur im deutschsprachigen Raum.
Abstract: Facing and coming to terms with the past in post-Holocaust Europe has not only been a moral imperative but also a challenge in scientific, political and social senses. This process was delayed significantly in socialist countries. A part of the development of a post-socialist commemorative structure was the establishment of Holocaust museums which not only serve as a memento of the past but also provide an institutional framework for memorialization, research and education about the Holocaust. However, nationalist political forces jeopardize this process by attempting to whitewash the past in order to preserve a positive picture of the nation. In this paper, I compare the permanent exhibitions of three museums from Slovakia and Hungary in order to illuminate how this struggle influences their exhibition narratives and activities. After examining the narrative strategies of the exhibitions and conducting interviews with museum personnel of the Holocaust Memorial Center (Budapest), the House of Jewish Excellencies (Balatonfüred) and the Sereď Holocaust Museum, it can be inferred that especially the way collaboration, perpetration, and in general, the role of the local non-Jewish population is depicted (or obscured), is inextricably intertwined with political agendas.
Topics: Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust Education, Holocaust Memorials, Holocaust Survivors, Holocaust Survivors: Children of, Holocaust Survivors: Grandchildren of, Memory, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Jewish Museums, Jewish Heritage, Museums
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
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.
Abstract: András Koerner is the author of a number of critically acclaimed, award-winning CEU Press titles on the cultural history of Hungarian Jews and Jewish cuisine. This volume continues that tradition by discussing the phenomenon of exhibits on Jewish culinary culture in museums and galleries around the world.
The first part of the book provides an overview of the cultural history of "foodism" and the proliferation of Jewish museums. In addition, it examines the role of cuisine in Jewish identity. It offers an analysis of the history and recent examples of exhibitions on Jewish culinary culture, a subject that has not received scholarly attention until now.
The second part complements this by offering a detailed case study of the book’s subject. It showcases a 2022 exhibition in Budapest on the History of Hungarian Jewish Culinary Culture. András Koerner was the co-curator of the show, thus he is able to offer an insider’s account of its implementation – concept, scope, goals, audience, and design. He also openly discusses the compromises made and mistakes committed in the exhibition’s preparatory work.
This subjective account, quite different from the dry objectivity of catalogues, offers an unusual, behind-the-scenes look at how a complex exhibition like this is prepared. At the same time, the book’s appendix includes images of the display boards and some of the exhibited objects – thus it can also stand for a valuable ex-post catalogue.
Abstract: As one of the most visited museums in Germany’s capital city, the Jewish Museum Berlin is a key site for understanding not only German-Jewish history, but also German identity in an era of unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity. Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. How do modern students relate to the museum’s evocative architecture, its cultural-political context, and its narrative of Jewish history? By accompanying a range of high school history students before, during, and after their visits to the museum, this book offers an illuminating exploration of political education, affect, remembrance, and belonging.
Abstract: Italy holds most of the world's cultural heritage, and its Jewish cultural heritage is also of the greatest importance. Only after Emancipation did Italian Jews begin to pay attention to their material heritage – synagogues, cemeteries, libraries, archives, silver furnishings, textiles and artifacts. Their preservation came to be understood as a means of preserving the identity and history of the Jews. After the war, and especially since the early 1980s, the importance of preserving the Jewish cultural heritage as a memory not only for Jews, but for the whole country, began to be acknowledged not only by Jews, but also by the general population, including the Italian authorities.
Abstract: Der Beitrag vergleicht das Rigaer KGB-Museum, im Volksmund Eckhaus genannt, mit dem Rigaer Ghetto-Museum. Beide Museen sind zirka im gleichen Zeitraum (zwischen 2010 und 2016) entstanden bzw. erweitert worden und befinden sich an Originalschauplätzen. Beide Museen legen ein besonderes Augenmerk darauf darzustellen, welche Folgen die nationalsozialistische bzw. kommunistische Besatzung und Diktatur auf Lettland hatte. So beinhaltet das Rigaer Ghetto-Museum eine Ausstellung zum jüdischen Leben in Lettland vor 1941. Beide Ausstellungen legen großen Wert darauf, Zeugnisse von Überlebenden einzubeziehen. Da die Opfer des Rigaer Ghetto-Museums auch aus Deutschland und Österreich kamen, ist die Einbeziehung einer europäischen Perspektive hier vom Untersuchungsgegenstand vorgegeben. Die Europäisierung des Holocaustgedenkens wird auch anhand mehrerer Ausstellungsstücke, so zum Beispiel eines nachkonstruierten Zugwaggons, deutlich. Hingegen stellt das KGB-Eckhaus primär die lettische Geschichte aus: Der Fokus liegt auf den zivilen lettischen Opfern der kommunistischen Diktatur, die im Kellergefängnis des NKWD bzw. des KGB gefoltert wurden. Eine »Europäisierung« wird nur in Querverweisen zu anderen Museen deutlich, die ebenfalls die Geschichte der kommunistischen Diktatur ausstellen, wie z.B. das Haus des Terrors in Budapest.
Abstract: Der 1. Juni 2018 bedeutete eine Zäsur für die staatlichen Einrichtungen des Freistaats Bayern. Mit diesem Stichtag mussten Kreuze als Symbol »bayerischer Kultur«, so Ministerpräsident Söder, in den Foyers staatlicher Institutionen angebracht werden: Staatliche Symbolpolitik wurde für den öffentlichen Raum verordnet, für Museen wurde sie immerhin noch empfohlen. Spätestens seit der Flüchtlingskrise von 2015 wird die Angst vor einem »importierten Antisemitismus« durch populistische Parteien in Deutschland wie in Österreich politisch verwertet. Gemeinsam mit dem Feindbild des »politischen Islam«, das sich mittlerweile auf alle Muslim_innen erstreckt, trug dies zu einem markanten Anstieg offenen Antisemitismus innerhalb der deutschen Gesellschaft bei. Populisten, die die Bevölkerung immer mehr in ein »wir« und »die anderen« spalten, die den Hass gegen Minderheiten politisch verwerten und Antisemitismus entweder klein reden oder ausschließlich jenen zuschreiben, die sie bekämpfen, haben Einzug in den politischen Mainstream gefunden. Jüdische Museen müssen heute auf diese Entwicklung antworten: Als Museum zur Geschichte einer Minderheit und als Ort, der sich zwangsläufig mit den Folgen von Antisemitismus und politisch motivierter Ausgrenzung auseinandersetzt, haben sie eine gesellschaftspolitische Verantwortung. Dies bedeutet, dass sich jüdische Museen öffnen müssen, und zwar in mehrerer Hinsicht: 1. thematisch, wenn es darum geht, historischen und aktuellen Antisemitismus und dessen Folgen für die jüdische Bevölkerung zu thematisieren, 2. politisch, um gegen Populismus, rassistische Hetze und Instrumentalisierung von Religionen aufzutreten, und 3. räumlich, wenn es darum geht, nicht nur ein kulturell interessiertes Publikum, sondern die Stadtbevölkerung anzusprechen.
Abstract: Wenn Peter Sloterdijk Museen allgemein als »Schule der Befremdung« erkennt, wie ergeht es dann erst Besucherinnen und Besuchern von jüdischen Museen? Gehört jüdische Geschichte »zu uns« oder nicht? Ist jüdische Kultur Teil des »Eigenen« oder des »Anderen«? Jüdische Museen sind, um eine Formulierung von Zygmunt Baumann zu verwenden, konstitutiv »auf dem Zaun«, in einer prekären Lage der Ambivalenz, der Zweideutigkeit situiert. In Zeiten, in denen Identitätsdebatten in Europa mehr und mehr im Zeichen des Ausschluss des »Anderen« – und heute vor allem im Zeichen des Ausschlusses von Muslimen – stehen, werden Juden und jüdische Geschichte – aber auch der Staat Israel – auf andere Weise relevant als noch vor zwanzig Jahren. Der politische Mainstream, aber auch wachsende Teile der populistischen Rechten, sehen im »Jüdischen« nun offenbar das »gute Andere« Europas, das sich im neuen rassistischen Diskurs trefflich instrumentalisieren lässt. Der Druck auf jüdische Museen wächst, sich einer scheinbaren Eindeutigkeit zu verschreiben, die die neuen europäischen Identitätsdiskurse nicht länger stört.
Abstract: There is a rich body of literature examining the contribution of Holocaust museums to the Holocaust memorial culture by focusing on their educative, awareness-raising, and memorializing functions. In this context, ample attention has been devoted to these museums’ exhibitions, educatory activities, reenactment practices, digital strategies, as well as their historical and architectural narratives. This article brings a novel perspective to the literature by giving an account of how Holocaust museums act as a medium through which individuals contribute to the Holocaust memorial culture from a Constructivist perspective. It argues that Holocaust museums do not treat individuals as passive recipients of the Holocaust memorial culture, but actors who could exercise agential capacities in relation to the Holocaust memorial culture. This argument is illustrated by case studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Berlin Jewish Museum, and the Anne Frank House. It is shown that these museums offer platforms through which individuals actively contribute to the Holocaust memorial culture by encouraging them to conduct and share their Holocaust-related research, donating Holocaust-related objects, and engaging in social activities to diffuse related norms and messages.
Abstract: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish socialist movement played a vital role in protecting workers’ rights throughout Europe and the Americas. Yet few traces of this movement or its accomplishments have been preserved or memorialized in Jewish heritage sites.
The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. In an account that is part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish museums and heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade, from Krakow to Kiev, and from Warsaw to New York, to discover which stories of the Jewish experience are told and which are silenced. As he travels to thirteen different locations, participates in tours, displays, and public programs, and gleans insight from local historians, he juxtaposes the historical record with the stories presented in heritage tourism. What he finds raises provocative questions about the heritage tourism industry and its role in determining how we perceive Jewish history and identity. This book offers a unique perspective on the importance of collective memory and the dangers of collective forgetting.
Abstract: The paper argues that the recent history of Holocaust Studies in Lithuania is characterized by major provision (for research, teaching and publishing) coming from state-sponsored agencies, particularly a state commission on both Nazi and Soviet crimes. Problematically, the commission is itself simultaneously active in revising the narrative per se of the Holocaust, principally according to the ‘Double Genocide’ theories of the 2008 Prague Declaration that insists on ‘equalization’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes. Lithuanian agencies have played a disproportionate role in that declaration, in attempts at legislating some of its components in the European Parliament and other EU bodies, and ‘export’ of the revisionist model to the West. Much international support for solid independent Lithuanian Holocaust researchers and NGOs was cut off as the state commission set out determinedly to dominate the field, which is perceived to have increasing political implications in East-West politics. But this history must not obscure an
impressive list of local accomplishments. A tenaciously devoted group of Holocaust survivors themselves, trained as academics or professionals in other fields, educated themselves to publish books, build a mini-museum (that has defied the revisionists) within the larger state-sponsored Jewish museum, and worked to educate both pupils and the wider public. Second, a continuing stream of non-Jewish Lithuanian scholars, educators, documentary
film makers and others have at various points valiantly defied state pressures and contributed significantly and selflessly. The wider picture is that Holocaust Studies has been built most successfully by older Holocaust survivors and younger non-Jews, in both groups often by those coming to work in it from other specialties out of a passion for justice and truth in history, while lavishly financed state initiatives have been anchored in the inertia of nationalist regional politics.
Abstract: Was bleibt, wenn die Zeuginnen und Zeugen der nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen gestorben sein werden? Seit Jahren ist diese Frage in allen gesellschaftlichen, wissenschaftlichen und pädagogischen Debatten über den Umgang mit der NS-Geschichte präsent. Was bleibt, sind die Zeugnisse, die Überlebende in ganz unterschiedlicher Form abgelegt haben: ihre Berichte, ihre literarischen, musikalischen und bildnerischen Verarbeitungen, ihre lebensgeschichtlichen Erzählungen, ihre Zeugenaussagen vor Gericht. Sie vermitteln eindrücklich die Auswirkungen und Schrecken der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung. Aber sind sie Garanten dafür, dass die spezifische Erfahrungsgeschichte der NS-Opfer auch künftig in der öffentlichen Erinnerungskultur und in der Bildung bewahrt werden wird? Welchen Stellenwert haben sie in der Geschichtsforschung zu Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust? Und wie lassen sie sich in der Bildungspraxis am besten einsetzen? Die Veranstaltungsreihe „Entdecken und Verstehen. Bildungsarbeit mit Zeugnissen von Opfern des Nationalsozialismus“ der Stiftung „Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft“ (EVZ) ist diesen Fragen nachgegangen. In fünf Seminaren wurden neueste Forschungsergebnisse sowie konkrete Bildungsmodule zu den wichtigsten Zeugnisformen vorgestellt und diskutiert. Die Resultate der Reihe sind in diesem Band dokumentiert
