Abstract: Durant quarante ans, l’extrême droite a été l’ennemie officielle des Juifs de France. Or, certains leaders extrémistes ont pu voir dans l’irruption de l’islamisme radical l’opportunité de séduire un électorat jusque-là hostile: l’islamisme n’était-il pas un ennemi commun?
Marine Le Pen a ainsi voulu surfer sur l'inquiétude des Juifs de France face à la montée d’un antisémitisme dont elle prétendait, de surcroît, pouvoir les protéger. D’où ses tentatives, nombreuses et variées, pour les rallier à sa cause.
Le FN, devenu Rassemblement National, serait-il devenu un partenaire respectable? Ou, tout au moins un opposant fréquentable ?
Les auteurs de cette enquête ont sillonné la France à l’écoute des communautés juives présentes dans les villes d'extrême droite, de Fréjus à Hayange, de Béziers aux quartiers-nord de Marseille. Ils ont remonté le fil de l’histoire du Front National et de ses tentatives de séduction, ainsi que celle des réactions des juifs face à cette main tendue. Pour mieux comprendre, ils ont recueilli des confidences d’élus frontistes, de témoins et d'intellectuels.
Et ils racontent les coulisses de cette tentative de hold-up idéologique.
Abstract: Projekt Overview
This study explores the experiences, perceptions, and coping strategies of Jewish individuals in Germany in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Our research aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding of how Jews in Germany, with or without Israeli migration background, navigated the complex emotional landscape of collective trauma and rising antisemitism.
Key Objectives
Examine the immediate and ongoing impacts of the October 7 events on Jewish individuals in Germany
Investigate changes in experiences of antisemitism and perceptions of societal responses
Identify coping strategies and resilience mechanisms employed by Jewish individuals
Explore the influence of these events on Jewish identity and community engagement
Assess concerns and hopes for the future of Jewish life in Germany
Methodology
We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 Jewish individuals living in Germany, including both Israeli and non-Israeli backgrounds. Participants ranged in age from 23 to 68 years old and represented diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and levels of religious observance.
Key Findings
Profound emotional disruption and trauma following the October 7 attacks
Significant changes in social relationships, often leading to social withdrawal
Increased community engagement and activism among Jewish individuals
Heightened sense of insecurity and vigilance in expressing Jewish identity
Complex coping strategies, including humor, community involvement, and selective avoidance
Abstract: Auch 70 Jahre nach dem Holocaust hat sich in Deutschland noch immer kein flächendeckender Konsens über die Unteilbarkeit der Menschenrechte durchgesetzt. Antisemitismus, Islamophobie und Fremdenfeindlichkeit sind besorgniserregend weit verbreitet. Ein Viertel der Deutschen sind antisemitische Israelkritiker, bei denen juden- und islamfeindliche Einstellungen miteinander Hand in Hand gehen, und deren (scheinbare) Parteinahme für die Palästinenser ihnen letztlich nur als Mittel dient, „das wahre Gesicht der Juden“ zu entlarven. Gut ein Zehntel vermeidet es, Kritik an der israelischen Politik zu üben, „weil man ja nicht sagen darf, was man über die Juden wirklich denkt“, und selbst jenes Viertel der Deutschen, das der Politik Israels wohlwollend gegenübersteht, tut dies oft nur, um selbst vor der Welt gut dazustehen.
Jedoch kritisieren immerhin vier von zehn Deutschen die israelische Politik deshalb, weil sie für die Menschenrechte eintreten, Antisemitismus und Islamophobie gleichermaßen ablehnen und eine Politik verurteilen, die nicht nur den Palästinensern Unrecht antut, sondern auch Israel von innen heraus zu zerstören droht. Auch sie des Antisemitismus zu bezichtigen, kann weder im Interesse Israels noch im Interesse der in Deutschland lebenden Juden sein.
Abstract: This thesis looks into representations of Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish non-elite civilians in the liberal press
in Britain, namely the Guardian and the Independent newspapers. The period examined in the research
follows the al-Aqsa Intifadah (since September 2000) and the Arab-Israeli conflict during the 2000s (2000-
2010). The research findings look specifically into the coverage of the peace months of July and December
2000. The primary proposition of the thesis follows the burgeoning literature regarding the parallel,
centuries-old histories of the Arab, Jew and the Idea-of-Europe in tandem, in one breath as it may (e.g.,
Anidjar, 2003, 2007; Kalmar and Penslar, 2005; Boyarin, 2009). This theorisation finds the Arab and Jew
as two formational Others to the Idea-of-Europe, with the Jew imagined as the religious and internal enemy
to Europe and the Arab as the political and external enemy (Anidjar, 2003). This research enquires how
liberal-left forms of racialisations (not only extreme right racialisations) towards the Arab and Jew are
contingent upon these centuries-old images and imaginaires, even during moments of peacemaking (not
only times of heightened violence). The main hypothesis of the research is that in the mediated, Manichean
packaging of the Arab-Israeli conflict in both newspapers the Palestinian and Israeli-Jew are reduced to
two sediment polarized identities where no Palestinian exists outside the articulation of being oppositional
to the Israeli-Jew through difference marked by violence, and vice versa. Critical Solidarity is proposed as
a mode of Peace Journalism (e.g., Galtung, 2000; Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005; Kempf, 2007) which hopes
to address concerns at the intersection of news reporting about the conflict and race.
Abstract: Die Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Israel sind einzigartig. Geprägt von der Erinnerung an die Shoah und getragen von dem Anspruch, daraus praktische Konsequenzen für heute zu ziehen, gelten sie als „besonders“. Doch was bedeutet diese Besonderheit im Jahr 2025? Haben der Terrorangriff der Hamas auf Israel am 7. Oktober 2023 und der nachfolgende Krieg Israels gegen die Hamas im Gazastreifen Spuren im bilateralen Verhältnis hinterlassen? Wie blicken Deutsche und Israelis heute aufeinander, welche Erwartungen und Bilder prägen das gegenseitige Verhältnis, und welche Verantwortung resultiert daraus in einer Zeit wachsender geopolitischer Spannungen und gesellschaftlicher Polarisierung? Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Fragen gibt die vorliegende Kompaktauswertung einen ersten Einblick in die Ergebnisse unserer aktuellen Studie zur gegenseitigen Wahrnehmung von Israelis und Deutschen. Auf Basis einer repräsentativen Doppelbefragung in beiden Ländern gibt sie Aufschluss über das politische Selbstverständnis in beiden Gesellschaften, die Rolle der Geschichte für die Gegenwart, die Erwartungen an die deutsche Nahostpolitik sowie die Wahrnehmung von Antisemitismus und internationaler Verantwortung. Die Ergebnisse zeichnen ein ambivalentes Bild, geprägt von Nähe und Distanz, Zustimmung und Kritik, Hoffnung und Skepsis. In dieser Auswertung legen wir einen besonderen Fokus auf die Erhebung in Deutschland und ziehen die israelischen Befunde vergleichend heran. Eine umfangreiche Darstellung aller Ergebnisse ist in Vorbereitung. Mit dieser Studie setzt die Bertelsmann Stiftung ihre langjährige Reihe empirischer Analysen zur Entwicklung der deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen fort. Die Studie erscheint in einem Jahr, in dem sich die Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen zwischen beiden Staaten zum sechzigsten Mal jährt. Ein Anlass, nicht nur auf das Erreichte zurückzublicken, sondern auch für eine kritische Selbstbefragung: Wie können wir, Deutsche und Israelis, unsere Beziehung in Zukunft verantwortungsvoll gestalten?
Abstract: Vast research has been carried out on the way Jewish women feel about their infertility and their use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). This has been particularly researched in Israel, a distinctly pro-natalist country. Building on this scholarship, this thesis explores the infertility experiences of Orthodox Jewish Women living in London. Based on twenty-six interviews, conducted between 2017 and 2018, with Orthodox Jewish women living in North West London, this thesis presents some of the challenges these women faced when experiencing infertility, and the ways in which they found strength and support to navigate their journeys through ART. This thesis is comprised of two parts. Part I provides the background context for the thesis in three chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to Judaism and British Jewry along with the development of its denominations and the meaning behind ‘community’. Chapter 2 broadly discusses Jewish meanings attributed to fertility and infertility alongside studies on the way individuals experience infertility, reproduction and pregnancy with a particular focus on Jewish scholarship. Chapter 3 outlines the methodology used, explaining how this thesis was developed from thought into fruition. Part II of the thesis concentrates on original data, with four data chapters each concentrating on a key theme emerging from the data – My destiny (Chapter 4), My Rabbi (Chapter 5), My Relationships (Chapter 6), My Identity (Chapter 7), a discussion chapter (Chapter 8), and a final chapter for conclusions, reflections and future work (Chapter 9). The key findings of this thesis illustrate that while all women believed their infertility was God given, their acceptance of these perceived ‘tests of faith’ was not smooth. The relationships that appeared to suffer the most were those the women held with their mothers. Inversely, the relationships that flourished most, as a result of infertility, were those which the women held with their Rabbis. This research gives useful insight into an under researched population. Its findings could offer guidance to medical professionals, counsellors, policy makers, and religious leaders. Additionally, this work could be encouraging for other Orthodox Jewish women when facing infertility.
Abstract: Depuis les années 1970, s’observe une « orthodoxisation » de la judaïcité mondiale, notamment en France, au Royaume-Uni, aux États-Unis ou en Israël. Ce mouvement est d’abord porté par des jeunes. Or, jusqu’ici, les études n’ont pas suffisamment abordé la conjonction de la globalisation, de la jeunesse et de la religion dans cette évolution. Cet article étudie la globalisation d’un courant juif orthodoxe, le mouvement loubavitch. Comment insère-t-il les jeunes dans une stratégie de globalisation ? Quels en sont les effets sur leur pratique religieuse ? Cette ONG confessionnelle est un important vecteur d’une « orthodoxisation » chez les jeunes. Elle investit de manière prioritaire dans la jeunesse, notamment par un système éducatif spécifique : il vise à favoriser l’intégration à la communauté loubavitch, par le biais d’une formation orthodoxe standardisée. Mais au sein du mouvement, les jeunes sont aussi des agents : ils sont promoteurs d’une orthodoxie juive globalisée.
Abstract: This paper presents two digital public history resources—online maps—that are concerned with the everyday lives and reminiscences of Jewish people in two cities in the United Kingdom: London and Manchester. Using techniques derived from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and the spatial humanities more broadly, these resources take the form of interactive maps which compile recordings of oral history interviews with background research, documentary photographs, and historical maps. Drawing on the work of Raphael Samuel and Pierre Nora, and the insights derived from space syntax urban research and what we have termed ‘memory mapping,’ we discuss the tensions between memory, which in Nora’s sense refers to the past as it is recalled informally and colloquially, and history, the academic study of the past. Digital mapping technologies, we argue, shape new opportunities for exploring the relationship between these two modes of historical thinking. Through a consideration of specific examples taken from the two maps, we discuss how bringing these materials into dialogue with cartographic maps opens new avenues for spatially and historically situated research into memory.
Abstract: Background Ethnic and religious minorities in the UK had a higher risk of severe illness and mortality from COVID-19 in 2020–2021, yet were less likely to receive vaccinations. Two Faith Health Networks (FHNs) were established in London in 2022–2024 as a partnership approach to mitigate health inequalities among Muslim and Jewish Londoners through a health system–community collaboration. By evaluating the FHNs, this study aimed to examine: the organisational processes required for FHNs to serve as a model of interface between health systems and minority communities; the role these networks play in addressing public health inequalities; and implications for their future development and sustainability.
Methods A qualitative evaluation of the two FHNs was conducted using semi-structured interviews (n=19) with members of the ‘London Jewish Health Partnership’ and the ‘London Muslim Health Network’. Participant clusters included public health professionals, healthcare workers, community representatives and local government workers.
Results The FHNs shared similar structures of leadership, but differed in core membership, which influenced their access to expertise and the activities developed. They were found to perform a key conduit role by integrating expertise from within the health system and faith communities to address the needs and expectations of underserved communities, with the ultimate goal of addressing health inequalities through the design of tailored campaigns and services. Emerging themes for developing an FHN model included enhancing their sustainability by determining funding allocation, strategic integration into health systems and identifying the appropriate geographical scope to sustain their impact. Further implications included recognition of intersectionality, addressing diverse needs within faith communities and trust-building approaches.
Conclusion This evaluation offers insights into developing partnership models between faith-based organisations and health sectors to foster relationships with underserved communities. These findings provide valuable considerations for teams navigating the priority of health equity and community engagement as part of our learning from the pandemic to support the development of FHNs across different faith communities, not just for vaccine uptake, but to support the broader health and well-being of communities more widely.
Abstract: Why do non-Jewish football fans chant "Yid Army" or wave "Super Jews" banners—especially in support of clubs that are not Jewish? The Making of "Jew Clubs" explores how four major European football clubs—FC Bayern Munich, FK Austria Vienna, Ajax Amsterdam, and Tottenham Hotspur—came to be seen as "Jew Clubs," even though they have never officially identified as Jewish.
In this transnational study, Pavel Brunssen traces how both Jewish and non-Jewish actors perform Jewishness, antisemitism, and philosemitism within European football cultures over the 20th and 21st centuries. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources—from fan chants and matchday rituals to media portrayals and club histories—the book reveals how football stadiums have become unexpected stages for negotiating memory, identity, and historical trauma.
Offering a new approach to Holocaust memory, sports history, and Jewish studies, The Making of "Jew Clubs" shows how football cultures reflect and reshape Europe's conflicted relationship with its Jewish past.
Abstract: Ashkenazic Hebrew is a unique language variety with a centuries-long history of written use among Central and Eastern European Jews. It has distinct phonological and grammatical features attested in texts composed by Ashkenazic Jews (e.g. adherents of the Hasidic and Maskilic movements) in Europe prior to the twentieth century. While Ashkenazic Hebrew is commonly believed to have been replaced by Israeli Hebrew in the twentieth century, this traditional written variety of the language actually continues to thrive in contemporary Diaspora Haredi (strictly Orthodox) communities, chiefly the Hasidic centres of New York, London, Montreal and Antwerp. This fascinating and understudied form of Hebrew is used widely and productively in the composition of a rich variety of original documents for a Hasidic audience (about e.g. Covid transmission, United States educational stipulations, Zoom schooling, lockdown rules, etc.). In this article we demonstrate that contemporary Ashkenazic Hebrew has many shared orthographic, phonological, grammatical and lexical features with its Eastern European antecedent. These include: orthography of loanwords based on Yiddish conventions (e.g. חולי הקאראנא xóylay ha-koróna ‘those ill with coronavirus’); morphology of plural loan nouns (בקאלידזשעס be-kóleǧes‘in colleges’, הפראגראמע״ן haprográmen ‘the programmes’); retention of the definite article with inseparable prepositions (בהשכונה be-ha-šxíne‘in the neighbourhood’);
Abstract: Cette contribution tente d’approcher les sentiments nourris par le souvenir du Yiddishland à la fin du XXe siècle et au début du XXIe siècle. Elle cherche, afin d’aborder cette sphère habitée par l’ancrage familial, traversée par des antagonismes idéologiques, hantée par le souvenir de l’émigration et de l’intégration ainsi que celui de souffrances inouïes et longtemps indicibles, à suivre les représentations idéales d’un monde perdu, dans le domaine de la culture et dans celui des utopies politiques, en s’intéressant d’une part à des aspects du renouveau de l’expression culturelle yiddish en France au cours des trois dernières décennies, en particulier dans la chanson (Jacques Grober, Violette Szmajer, Batia Baum, Michèle Tauber et le groupe du Paon doré) ; d’autre part aux survivances des motifs d’utopie politique trouvant leur source dans l’épopée idéologique et historique du Yiddishland (Charles Melman, Mojsze Zalcman) ; enfin à la réappropriation de la mémoire véhiculée par le yiddish telle qu’elle peut être perçue dans les interviews réalisées par Max Kohn entre 2006 et 2016. Cette recherche, tentative d’exploration d’un cheminement affectif vers le yiddish de la part d’un enfant né à cette époque en Israël et ayant grandi en France dans une famille non yiddishophone, se limitera à certaines expressions de cette mémoire et de ces motifs d’espérance en France, sans s’interdire de les mettre en rapport avec des expressions analogues dans d’autres pays de la diaspora juive ou en Israël.
Abstract: Aujourd’hui, le djudyó (judéo-espagnol) n’est plus transmis en France. Des associations, comme Aki Estamos, offrent aux personnes qui le parlent ou le comprennent la possibilité de suivre des cours de langue. Les participants, sans être des locuteurs à part entière, ne sont pas non plus des apprenants stricto sensu, puisqu’ils possèdent des compétences linguistiques acquises dans leur enfance. Dans leur cas, la dichotomie entre acquisition et apprentissage est inopérante. Il convient d’identifier les objectifs de ces locuteurs-apprenants, qui suivent les cours sans développer de nouvelles compétences langagières. Ce sont les mots et leurs sonorités qui montent alors sur le devant de la scène, délaissant la grammaire. Le cadre des cours constitue un prétexte pour retrouver une langue et un monde disparus. M’appuyant sur l’observation participante, j’esquisserai les profils linguistiques de ces participants pour tenter d’en comprendre la démarche.
Abstract: Religious spaces in the London borough of Barnet provide a lens through which to understand Muslim–Jewish encounters. This case study, pre-dating the 2023 escalation in the Israel–Gaza conflict, examines community relations in the context of the hegemonic discourses that play into racialisations, power dynamics and cultural connectedness through minority religious and ethnic identities in superdiverse urban centres. It focuses on a mosque’s application for planning permission in an area with a sizable Jewish population. Contestations and cooperation developed between the mosque and local Jewish communities, with some offering support while others mobilised, eventually successfully, to prevent planning permission being granted. Power differentials around race, class, religious affiliation and access to political power structures emerge in these instances, in which the impacts of racialisations, societal anxiety and communal hierarchy are sometimes overt and sometimes subtle. These complex and multifaceted events can be productively viewed through the narratives that circulate through local relations, social hierarchies, national discourses and culturally charged communal entanglements. This article draws on mixed methods of interviewing, press and social media analysis, and ethnographic observations to explore religious spaces as a lens to local encounters, in a manner that seeks to avoid direct involvement in an already complex incident.
Abstract: From an intercultural perspective, this article explores majority/minority and between minorities interactions, and revisits Allport’s contact theory, in a socially and ethnically diverse urban area hosting a large proportion of Jews and Muslims. The data comes from a telephone survey of a sample of inhabitants of the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Open and closed questions explore the symbolic social and political boundaries respondents construct between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and their patterns of sociability. Survey experiments with vignettes deal with more sensitive issues (reactions to circulating cartoons at school and police reactions to verbal assault, according to the ethnicity of the victim). The immediate social and ethnic surrounding of each respondent is reconstructed on the basis of census and ethnographic data. The results go against several common beliefs. Religion is not the only dimension of respondents’ identity; it intersects with social class, gender and generation. The relations between Jews and Muslims are not so much conflictual as ambivalent. Being minorities and feeling discriminated against as such brings them together. They both are more religious than the majority population, more traditional on sexual issues and more family-oriented, and most of them consider that Jews and Muslims have a common cultural heritage and should be united against discrimination. Nevertheless, there are friction points (Israeli-Palestinian conflict/the colonial past of France). Politically and socially Muslims are closer to the non-European immigrants, while Jews are closer to the French and the European-born ‘white’ population. Antisemitism is a clear taboo; anti-Jewish cartoons are seen as far more reprehensible than any other. But a majority of the sample, and Muslims a little more than average, see Jews as a ‘group apart’, and believe in the old stereotype about Jews having more influence, being more likely, for instance, to be helped by the police if needed.
Abstract: Commensality – eating together – is often understood by anthropologists and others as fundamental to human sociality, binding groups together and also creating bridges between groups. Consequently, sharing food or making food together has been emphasised in many policies to promote intercultural and interreligious contact. However, a more critical literature has emphasised how consuming the cultural produce of the other may also create opportunities for exploitative rather than meaningfully positive relations (at worst, in bell hooks’ evocative phrase, a way of ‘eating the other’). Eating the culture of the other has become a significant element in forms of gentrification that capitalise on exoticised difference, sometimes leading ultimately to the displacement of minoritised communities. More recently, an alternative approach to the role of food in intercultural encounters has emerged within the ‘conviviality’ and ‘super-diversity’ literatures, focusing on the convivial tools and somatic work of food entrepreneurs. This article, drawing on the author’s fieldwork in London and on fieldwork by colleagues in other European cities, builds on this literature to explore how forms of commensality, and the commercial transactions around them, play a unique role in generating Jewish-Muslim encounters in urban Europe, which are ambivalent, marked by power asymmetries, shadowed by securitisation and geopolitical conflict, but nonetheless fragile resources for hope.
Abstract: This article argues that the Parisian spheres of Middle Eastern dance and Mediterranean music shape distinct Muslim-Jewish encounters for individuals involved in these practices, fostering a coexistence among artists from Muslim and Jewish backgrounds which involves carefully navigating tensions over geopolitical issues. Three key findings emerge from this study. First, respondents of Muslim and Jewish backgrounds shared a common Maghrebi heritage that was reappropriated by engaging in the practices of Middle Eastern dance and Mediterranean music. Second, these artistic encounters were not immune to instances of stigmatization and tensions, particularly relating to geopolitical issues, which reactivated symbolic boundaries between artists of Muslim and Jewish backgrounds. Third, participants employed strategies to avoid conflict, explicitly separating art from politics, and fostered mutual respect for differing perspectives. Nevertheless, some respondents politicized Muslim-Jewish commonalities, notably by reaffirming their shared Maghrebi heritage.
Abstract: This special issue, based around the European Encounters project research carried out before October 2023, explores ambivalence and boundary work in Jewish and Muslim encounters across urban European contexts. Drawing on case studies in Frankfurt, London and Paris, it examines intercultural negotiations and identity constructions among minoritised groups. Contributors analyse diverse sites of encounter, from musical collaborations to more formal interfaith initiatives and everyday commercial spaces. Across these settings, the articles highlight complex layers of commonality and difference shaping boundary dynamics between Muslims and Jews. Analytically, this issue deploys central cultural studies concepts like symbolic boundaries, conviviality and superdiversity to elucidate lived realities. Empirically, grounded examination of understudied intercultural encounters advances cultural studies scholarship. The juxtaposition of the cities enables a relational understanding of how national repertoires of discourse shape boundary negotiations differently across contexts. Furthermore, analysis complicates assumptions of conflict, foregrounding marginalised perspectives on identity and power. Key findings demonstrate the ambivalence underpinning most Muslim-Jewish interactions. Structural inequalities, avoidance and indifference more frequently characterise encounters than outright hostility. Yet significations of difference still dominate, as groups navigate uneasy proximities. This special issue challenges essentialist portrayals of immutable intergroup divisions. Its nuanced analysis underscores the need to understand quotidian encounters relationally, as a multi-level interdependency, grounded in their socio-historical contexts across and within groups. This yields multifaceted insights into minority experiences of othering and belonging in Europe’s superdiverse cities.
Abstract: In this article, I focus on Antwerp’s Hasidic male immigrants, who must not only apprentice themselves to a new language (Flemish) and career, but also accustom themselves to an unfamiliar country and governmental bureaucracy. They must learn the local habits and social mores of Antwerp’s Hasidic community. Moreover, they must contend with the afterlife of a classed association – wherein Jewish male workers actively tethered their classed identities and subjectivities to the diamond and to its status as a “luxury” commodity. In the wake of the diamond industry’s decline for the vast majority of Antwerp’s Jewish male workforce, I attend to this space of displacement, in which the diamond industry continues to exert itself, despite its diminished capacity, over these men. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted between 2015-2019 in Antwerp, in cooperation with a Hasidic non-profit focused on the economic revitalization of Antwerp’s Hasidic male workforce, I examine the intersection between class, masculinity, and piety, through an initiative within Antwerp to recreate a new Hasidic man and worker-citizen. In this space of reinvention, Hasidic men must contend with the spectral presence of the diamond industry and its association with Jews, as they seek integration into the local Flemish labor force and legitimacy in the eyes of Antwerp’s Hasidic community.
Abstract: In this paper, I focus on online and offline practices of community-building within two specific religious communities that remain active despite mass emigration. These communities are based in Derbent, Dagestan, and Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, with members located in Moscow and the North Caucasus. Both communities have formally accepted rabbis from Chabad-Lubavitch, who are likely to promote Chabad-Lubavitch values among community members. I investigate the strategies and methods used by Chabad emissaries in the region to facilitate the process of chabadization. In addition to outreach activities, the visual manifestations of chabadization are significant in this study, as they are presented across multiple online platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and other social forums, chats, and websites. My research combines online analysis with fieldwork conducted in Dagestan, Azerbaijan, and Moscow between 2018 and 2020.
Abstract: Jüdische Flüchtlinge aus der Gemeinschaft Unabhängiger Staaten (GUS) stellen eine stetig wachsende Minorität dar, über deren pflegerische Bedürfnisse in der Fachliteratur wenig bekannt ist. Weitaus besser untersucht sind die pflegerischen Bedürfnisse von Angehörigen des jüdischen Glaubens außerhalb der GUS, insbesondere von Personen aus den USA, Israel und Kanada. Im Rahmen eines von der Robert Bosch Stiftung geförderten Pilotprojekts zu den Versorgungsbedürfnissen jüdischer Flüchtlinge aus der GUS entstand die nachstehende internationale Literaturstudie. Ziel war es, bereits vorliegende Erfahrungen mit der Zielgruppe zu erheben. Dazu wurden unter den Stichworten «Juden», «jüdisch», «Migranten», «jew», «jewish» «migrants» und «nursing» insgesamt 67 Artikel verschiedener Datenbanken analysiert. Die Literaturstudie generierte folgende international bedeutsame Themen: – die psychosoziale Situation von und daraus resultierende Versorgungsaspekte bei zwei Generationen von Holocaust-Überlebenden, ihren Kindern sowie jüdischen MigrantInnen aus der GUS – die unterschiedlichen religiösen Orientierungen, die in die groben Kategorien orthodox, konservativ und Reformjudentum unterteilt werden, von denen jede spezifische Einstellungen beinhaltet, welche die Pflege beeinflussen – pflegerisch relevante ethisch-moralische Aspekte im Judentum – Besonderheiten bei der Pflege gerontologischer PatientInnen und – soziokulturelle Aspekte palliativer Pflege. Als eines der wichtigsten Ergebnisse zeigte sich, dass jüdische Flüchtlinge aus der GUS insbesondere das Merkmal der Verfolgungserfahrung mit Holocaust-Opfern und ihren Nachkommen teilen, woraus sich spezifische Implikationen für die pflegerische Betreuung ergeben.
Abstract: The fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the communist regimes in Europe represented a radical change for Judaism on the continent. The most striking change occurred, naturally, in Central and Eastern Europe, that is, in those countries that were behind the Iron Curtain, such as Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia or the German Democratic Republic. There, while the political decomposition of the Soviet bloc was gaining traction, thousands of people rediscovered their Jewish origins – forbidden, concealed, or silenced under communism, giving rise to a process of Jewish revivalism. In this context, numerous Jewish philanthropic organizations came to the region to support these developments with the mission of renewing local Jewish communities. The process involved a multitude of actors – Jewish agencies, organizations and foundations based in the United States, Europe and Israel – and entailed the mobilization of professionals, specialists and financial resources. This thesis explores the concrete dynamics of this cross-border mobilization of Jewish philanthropic bodies in favor of the Jewish communities of East Central Europe after the fall of communism in 1989. It studies in-depth the historical origins and evolution of transnational Jewish solidarity in modern times, enquires about the Jewish agencies and organizations that started to operate in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially, but not only, their sources of financing and the circulation of economic resources. Finally, it gives an account of the narrative corpus that emerged about European Jews before and during this process, identifying those actors who created and mobilized these narratives.
Abstract: There is a rich body of research concerning Jews who lived in Germany before 1933. Publications on the Holocaust are equally numerous, a significant proportion of this output tackling historical (and contemporary) antisemitism in Germany from a non-Jewish perspective. Much less is known about the post-1945 Jewish population of the former East and West (now reunited) Germany: in terms of Jewish socio-demography, life-worlds, cultural heritage, praxes and about Jewish perspectives on antisemitism. The aim of this article is threefold. Content-wise, it sets out to summarise the existing social scientific research on the post-1945ers, and to identify gaps therein in terms of empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative. Structurally, it seeks to determine the scope and frame of research concerning the post-1945 Jewish population of Germany, demonstrating thus that the study of contemporary Jews is replete with lacunae. Practically, the article outlines the consequences of patchy knowledge, and the hampered knowledge transfer within academia and to the public – consequences which have become painfully clear in the wake of October 7, 2023.
