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Belsize Square Synagogue: Community, Belonging, and Religion among German-Jewish Refugees
Author(s): Lewkowicz, Bea
Date: 2008
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Holocaust Survivors, Oral History and Biography, Refugees, Synagogues
Abstract: This essay highlights the importance of Belsize Square Synagogue founded by German-Jewish refugees in 1939, known from 1940 as the New Liberal Jewish Congregation. Through the oral histories I have collected during my fieldwork, I will outline the history of the congregation focussing on certain themes which have emerged from the interviews, such as ‘belonging’, ‘connections’ and ‘family’. I suggest that belonging to Belsize Square Synagogue constitutes one of the most important forms of collective belonging in the UK for most of the interviewees. The institution of the synagogue helped its members integrate into the new society and also provided a framework in which memories of their continental past and the refugee experiences could be shared and remembered.
Jewish Community of Salonika: History, Memory, Identity
Author(s): Lewkowicz, Bea
Date: 2006
Topics: Sephardi Jews, Oral History and Biography, Memory, Holocaust Survivors, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial
Abstract: This book is a pioneering study of the often forgotten Sephardi voices of the Holocaust. It is an account of the Sephardi Jewish community of the Greek city of Salonika, which at one point numbered 80,000 members, but which was almost completely annihilated during the German occupation of Greece in the Second World War. Through her systematic series of interviews with the remnants of this once-flourishing community, the author reawakens the communal memory and is able to show how individual identities and memories can be seen to have been shaped by historical experience. She traces the radical demographic and political changes Salonika itself has undergone, in particular the ethnic and religious composition of the city's population, and she interprets the narratives of the Salonikan Jewish survivors in the context of this changing landscape of memory and as part of contemporary Greece.