Abstract: In the wake of the Holocaust and the post-war reconstruction of Greece’s historic city centers, many Greek synagogues were demolished, abandoned, or appropriated, erasing centuries of Jewish architectural and communal presence. This study presents a thirty year-long research and documentation initiative aimed at preserving, recovering, and eventually digitally reconstructing these “lost” synagogues, both as individual buildings and within their urban context. Drawing on architectural surveys, archival research, oral histories, and previously unpublished materials, including the recently rediscovered Shemtov Samuel archive, the project grew through the use of technology. Beginning with in situ surveys in the early 1990s, it evolved into full-scale digitally enhanced architectural drawings that formed the basis for further digital exploration, 3D models, and virtual reality outputs. With the addition of these new tools to existing documentation, the project can restore architectural detail and cultural context with a high degree of fidelity, even in cases where only fragmentary evidence survives. These digital reconstructions have informed physical restoration efforts as well as public exhibitions, heritage education, and urban memory initiatives across Greece. By reintroducing “invisible” Jewish landmarks into contemporary consciousness, the study addresses the broader implications of post-war urban homogenization, the marginalization of minority heritage, and the ethical dimensions of digital preservation. This interdisciplinary approach, which bridges architectural history, digital humanities, urban studies, and cultural heritage, demonstrates the value of digital tools in reconstructing “lost” pasts and highlights the potential for similar projects in other regions facing comparable erasures.
Abstract: The synagogues that suffered the ravages of World War II in Central and Eastern Europe faced an uncertain future. A limited number managed to retain their original religious functions, while the majority were either neglected or repurposed for entirely different uses. In the last thirty years, numerous towns and cities have started to “rediscover” these buildings as vital components of local history and culture. With their original roles as pivotal religious, cultural, and social centres for Jewish communities inevitably diminished, issues of ownership, control, and authenticity have emerged. The ongoing debate about whether these structures represent “Jewish heritage” or a more expansive cultural heritage that encompasses local, national, and international dimensions remains unresolved. This study examines the situation in Bucharest, which once boasted a significant Jewish population that has since dwindled. Although many synagogues have been lost over time, four have recently been restored, showcasing their fascinating eclectic architectural styles. These buildings now serve a combination of religious, social, cultural, and museum functions, gradually reintegrating them into the city’s identity and practices. Nonetheless, challenges and disagreements emerge, within the Jewish community itself, regarding the management and representation of these sites, as well as their inclusion into the tourism dynamics.
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: The Pluralism Seminar Papers is a collection of twenty insightful papers born from a series of four seminars dedicated to exploring the theme of Pluralism. These seminars, held in the vibrant cities of Prague, Sarajevo, Cordoba, and Florence, were part of the European Routes of Jewish Heritage initiative. This initiative, certified by the Council of Europe since 2004, spans across 17 countries, each actively engaged in research, heritage preservation, contemporary culture, art, and sustainable cultural tourism.
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: Since the 1989 political transition, a multifaceted process of knowledge production and memory formation regarding rural Jews has been ongoing in Hungary’s civil and academic spheres, often starting from or leading to local history research. These initiatives typically have multiple aims and functions: mourning the losses of the Holocaust, confronting and facing the difficult past, and uncovering the historical values of specific localities. Through the
presentation of examples and analysis of a bibliography on the subject, this article evaluates the achievements, directions, and shortcomings in this field, using historian Diana Pinto’s conceptual framework of “Jewish Space.” Building on the theoretical and practical analyses by Diana Pinto, Erica Lehrer, and Ruth Ellen Gruber, the author emphasizes that the social memory of European Jews can be most effectively created in spaces where Jewish and non-Jewish organizations and individuals can collaborate, engage in dialogue, and make joint contributions. The analysis also highlights the need for more professional and financial support for individuals and organizations active in this area and stresses the importance of coordinating their work and developing strategies based on professional criteria to ensure the efficient use of resources.
Abstract: This paper uses archival and ethnological research to analyze the fates of former synagogues during two totalitarian regimes in present-day Slovakia. The processes described here were catalyzed by the Holocaust. Between 1938 and 1945, over 100,000 Jews from Slovakia were murdered. Out of the 228 Jewish religious communities (JRCs) active before the war, only 79 were reconstituted after liberation. Most were later disbanded because of aliyah to Palestine/Israel. Their abandoned synagogues passed into the administration of the newly founded Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities (CUJRC). During the Communist era (1948-1989), the majority of these synagogues were sold because the CUJRC did not have sufficient resources for their maintenance.
The second section of this paper discusses synagogues in different parts of Slovakia to show how representatives of the CUJRC tried to ensure the temples’ new owners did not violate their religious dignity. Purchase and sale agreements generally prohibited using the synagogues for entertainment purposes, instead preferring their conversion into warehouses, silos, workshops, etc. Although, as soon as the 1940s, part of the community requested that the synagogues be used as cultural centers, this did not happen on a large scale until after the revolution of 1989. A synagogue is not defined by its four walls but rather by the activities that take place inside it. The repurposed buildings are frequently located in regions with no active Jewish organizations. They are mere relics of the past and, bar a few exceptions, do not contribute to the renewal of traditional Jewish life. Believers nevertheless tend to have a negative view of the events that are held in the former synagogues, with some going as far as to consider them disrespectful. Even many secular Jews feel that the former synagogues do not fulfil their original purpose and have definitively transformed into non-synagogues.
Abstract: The aim of the article is to demonstrate the specifics of the gastronomic code as a phenomenon of cultural model and as a particular element of the formation of Jewish identity during the Soviet period using the example of the situation of Jews in Latgale. The study is part of a research project focusing on the Jewish text in Latgale, a region in south-eastern Latvia, during the 1970s–1990s. Within the project, a field study – semi-structured interviews – was carried out. The informants interviewed were representatives of Jewish ethnicity, born in the 1960s–1970s, who currently reside in Latvia and Israel.
During the research, the key components of the gastronomic code were identified: remarkable dishes, awareness of the ethnic tradition, understanding of religion, model of knowledge transmission from generation to generation.
Considering the specifics of the field study material, the following conclusion has been drawn. The gastronomic code of the Jewish community in Latgale during the Soviet period reflects a blend of Ashkenazi Jewish traditions and the norms of Soviet household practices.
Abstract: This book explores and reveals the intricacies of Jewish heritage in contemporary Germany, the role it plays as a "moral heritage" in the symbolic representation of Jews and Judaism in the national landscape, and its relevance for the cultural sustainability of local Jewish communities. The practice of synagogue music in the past and present is a central case study in the discussions. This ethnographic study examines how Jewish liturgical music as the cultural heritage of minorities has been constructed, treated, discussed, appropriated, and passed on to different actors in different forms and for different purposes over time. It also examines the resulting moral and ethical questions and power imbalances. The author discusses how both Jewish and non-Jewish stakeholders utilize the music of 19th- and early 20th-century Reform Judaism and the Minhag Ashkenaz for a symbolic reconstruction of German Jewry. Furthermore, they repatriate it in local Jewish communities today. This is usually done for individual, sometimes commercial, rather than religious reasons. The Jewish-musical cultural heritage process is characterized by moral imperatives and complex negotiations about power and representation. It reveals problematic aspects of German-Jewish relations, cross-generational rifts, and denominational differences between the Jewish communities in post-war Germany.
Abstract: In recent decades, comedy studies have displayed a concern with understanding the power dynamics and cultural norms shaping the ‘marginal’ and ‘mainstream’ in comedy. Rarely, however, have intersecting norms concerning religion, gender and race been taken as a point of departure in this field. Through a qualitative analysis of Creeger’s 2022 set Pray It Forward! and of a semi-structured interview conducted with the comedian in August 2022, this chapter explores precisely these issues. Stand-up comedian Rachel Creeger, whose work is the central focus of this chapter, experiences particular intersecting forms of marginalization as an Orthodox Jewish woman on the normatively secular British comedy circuit. She experiences both covert misogyny and anti-Semitism, and more subtle forms of exclusion. At the same time, the frame of marginality is not always experienced by Creeger as a straightforwardly ‘negative’ thing. Instead, Creeger’s comedy complicates the frame of ‘marginality’ through an emphasis on the advantages of having a ‘unique voice’ and on the relatability of her material. Specifically, a repertoire of popular culture references in Creeger’s material blurs the imagined binary between the categories of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ and implicitly disrupts norms concerning religion and gender entangled with this binary frame.
Topics: Attitudes to Israel, Attitudes to Jews, Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Israeli-Arab Conflict, Israel Criticism, Main Topic: Culture and Heritage, Memory, Literature, Film, Television
Abstract: Examines an important relational shift in British and German cultural depictions of Palestine and Israel since 1987
Develops relationality as a critical tool to challenge mainstream ideas about Israeli and Palestinian narratives as separate and not connected to European histories of the Holocaust and colonialism
Argues that Israel and Palestine are used as geopolitical and imaginary spaces to discuss social and political concerns in the United Kingdom and in Germany
Examines works by authors and directors from outside of Israel and Palestine, including those with no direct link to the conflict, thus extending our understanding of Palestine and Israel as signifiers in the contemporary period
Offers a comparative analysis of British and German literature, TV drama, and film which focuses on country-specific case studies to identify common trends in imagining and reimaging Israel and Palestine since the first Palestinian Intifada
Discusses works published since 1987 which depict encounters between (Israeli) Jews and Palestinians since 1947 which depict encounters between (Israeli) Jews and Palestinians and their narratives since 1947
Isabelle Hesse identifies an important relational turn in British and German literature, TV drama, and film published and produced since the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). This turn manifests itself on two levels: one, in representing Israeli and Palestinian histories and narratives as connected rather than separate, and two, by emphasising the links between the current situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the roles that the United Kingdom and Germany have played historically, and continue to play, in the region. This relational turn constitutes a significant shift in representations of Israel and Palestine in British and German culture as these depictions move beyond an engagement with the Holocaust and Jewish suffering at the expense of Palestinian suffering and indicate a willingness to represent and acknowledge British and German involvement in Israeli and Palestinian politics.
Abstract: As elsewhere in eastern and southern Europe, many Jewish communities in Greece were almost completely destroyed during the Holocaust, which resulted in the near erasure of many distinctive religious and cultural practices. Among these erased communities were the Romaniote Jews, an Indigenous Judeo-Greek population distinct from the Sephardic Jews who arrived in Greece following the Spanish Inquisition. The cultural losses included their musical practices, which were largely orally transmitted. A few Romaniote leaders and practitioners continue the musical-liturgical traditions today in Greece, as well as in the United States and Israel. The living practice of this musical liturgy that is ever-changing in the typical manner of orally transmitted repertoires arguably embodies a process of remembering destruction. This process is shown by the imprint of gaps in memory caused by rupture embedded in the repertoire. While remembering destruction is an intrinsically Jewish practice, it is of specific importance to the Jews of Ioannina (a city that once was, and arguably still is, the spiritual center of Romaniote Jews) and their descendants. In the past decade, an annual pilgrimage to Ioannina to attend a Romaniote Yom Kippur service has become a pivotal experience for both Romaniote Jews and others, enabling them to remember and mourn the pre-Holocaust community. This annual pilgrimage, at the epicenter of Romaniote religious and social significance, generates a new Jewish collective based on Romaniote identity and history that includes the restoration of distinct musical practices.
Abstract: Over half a century after the Holocaust, in Eastern European countries where the Jewish community remained only a small part of the population, products of Jewish culture (or what is perceived as Jewish culture), including music, have become vital components of the popular public domain. In Poland, there are festivals and concerts of Jewish music, more and more records with this music, Jewish museums, and renovated Jewish districts, with Jewish cuisine, and music that are offered to tourists visiting Poland as the main attractions. They attract enthusiastic – and often non-Jewish – crowds. I consider how non-Jews involved in this movement in Poland perceive and implement Jewish culture, why they do it, how much it involves the recovery of Jewish heritage, and how this represents the musical culture of Jews in museums and at events organized for tourists. I also consider the relation of non-Jews as a majority group to Jews as a minority group, as well as the impact of the musical actions of the former on the musical culture of the latter. The article is based on field research and observations I have made during more than twenty years, both among the remaining Jews in Poland and in mixed or non-Jewish communities where music perceived as Jewish is promoted.
Abstract: The filigree ground mosaic is placed at the heart of the Grindel neighbourhood in Hamburg, Germany. Tracing the footprint of the former synagogue that once stood there, proudly, it demarcates an absence. It is a reminder of what the Nazis destroyed and sought to extinguish. The fact that the synagogue will finally be rebuilt, in the same place, with the support of the Federal government and the city, is anything but a matter of course. This will be the first reconstruction project of a synagogue of this size in Germany since the Second World War. Yet the project has been controversial in some respects. The two main concerns expressed in the public debate about the form of reconstruction and whether and how to integrate the Synagogue Monument at first sight appeared to be in irreconcilable competition: the importance of maintaining a culture of remembrance, and the legitimate claim of the Jewish Community to recover and rebuild its former place of worship. This would not merely be, as is often said, a sign of Jewish belonging, of identity and representation, in the urban society. Rather, it is about modes of existence that the architecture itself, in the materiality of its form and its presence, embodies and makes possible. To the people, architecture is what makes the difference. It thus shapes the political landscape.
Abstract: In 1905, Yiddish poet and Glasgow union activist Avrom Radutsky described the Jewish population of Scotland as ‘a mere drop in the ocean’. Nevertheless, by 1920 this drop had swelled to 20,000 people, centred primarily (though by no means exclusively) around the Gorbals in Glasgow. The area was characterised by vibrant community life, but also cramped low-quality housing, poor sanitation and harsh economic inequality. Many of Glasgow’s Jews began to climb a social ladder that would lead them out of the Gorbals and towards more spacious residences in the south-west of the city, but maintained regular contact with its streets, shops and places of worship. Large-scale demolition of the neighbourhood in the 1960s mean that the Gorbals looks very different today, and the Jews are gone. The Jewishness of this space, however, still remains: a remembered or imagined presence in the minds of second and third generations, celebrated through community outreach, or romantically evoked in popular narratives. Equally, an absence of Jewish life in today’s Gorbals has been paralleled by the emergence of wide-ranging and socially minded virtual networks of shared memory. Through analysis of contemporary accounts and archival sources, oral histories, fieldwork interviews, and lively online discussion groups, this article examines how this former densely populated Jewish neighbourhood now functions as an important lieu de memoire, but in a significantly different way to Eastern Europe’s pre-war Jewish spaces. At the geographical edges of more traumatic histories, the Gorbals instead provides an affective link for contemporary, assimilated Scottish Jews, while at the same time the area’s Jewish history becomes part of a wider virtual online community – signifying an emotional connection to immigrant narratives and grounding personal and social histories.
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: The racial formation of nationalism from the perspective of migration produces multiple forms of “whiteness”. “Not quite/not white” (Bhabha) translated racial difference into a culturally-hybrid formulation of the postcolonial subject in postcolonial theory. The consequence of translating racial difference into culturally hybridity also diluted a focus on the nation by focusing on the diasporic subject. In Eastern Europe however, “whiteness” is firstly marked by the ambiguous history of the racial other within the nation rather than the historical colonization of racial others beyond. Further, the often traumatic displacement of racial others in/from Eastern Europe has more to do with forms of nationalism than colonialism. Thus, the displacement of racial others in relation to Eastern European nationalism take on an importance largely missing in deracinated postcolonial condemnations of the nation. Europe-based Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s And Europe will be stunned: the Polish trilogy, provides a provocative invitation to think the disturbing place of race in the formation of nationalism in Eastern Europe precisely from these two dimensions: the history of racial difference (Jews) within the nation (Poland), and the centering of racial “returns” for the past and future of nations both in Eastern Europe and beyond it. Through film, public performance and spoken/written word, And Europe… firstly stages the nation from the historical perspective of displaced/exterminated racial others. Through a provocative call to return of the Jews into the Polish nation from which they fled or were exterminated, Bartana proposes a ghostly and literal racially hybridity within the nation to counter the ongoing construction of “whiteness” in Eastern Europe. Secondly, And Europe.. also performs a powerful critique of the problematic politics of return in Israel which deploys Europe’s treatment of its Jewish others to now consecrate the Israeli nation as an exclusively Jewish state. The currency of “whiteness” from the doubled perspective of a future Poland and the present in Israel delivers contradictory returns for the nation by producing hybridity here in Europe and homogeneity there outside it.
By thinking “whiteness” for/against the nation, the essay shows how the returns of race and of racial others can help think a hybrid nation both within Eastern Europe and outside it. Seen from a global perspective, “Whiteness” in Eastern Europe thus offers the racially hybrid nation rather than the culturally hybrid postcolonial subject as a counter to the racism of contemporary nationalisms.
Abstract: The starting point for the present study is the thematization of the concept of “Jewish cultural heritage” and, in this context, the outlining of the role and position of cemeteries in Jewish tradition. The case study focuses on the Hungarian village of Apc, which was home to a Jewish community of just over a hundred people before World War II. After the Holocaust, only a few survivors returned to the settlement; some of them emigrated, while others remained in Apc for the rest of their lives. In recent decades, what has become of the cemetery, one of the most important sites for the former Jewish community of Apc? This paper explores the process of the heritagization of the local Jewish cemetery, one of the activities carried out by the Together for Apc Association, a civil society initiative launched two decades ago. In 2003, the dilapidated and abandoned “Israelite cemetery” was the first of the settlement's deteriorating assets to be declared as local cultural heritage. With the involvement of various actors from the local community (volunteers and local entrepreneurs), and in contact with Jewish organizations (the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, the Foundation for Hungarian Jewish Cemeteries), the cemetery was restored over a period of two years and was “inaugurated” in 2006 in the presence of a rabbi, a cantor, a Jewish secular leader, Holocaust survivors and members of the local society. In the fifteen years since then, care has been taken to ensure that the achievements are sustainable and maintained, and the cemetery has been kept open not only for the descendants of the Jewish community but for all interested parties. But the salvaging of the Apc Jewish cemetery is not only an example of the preservation of the built heritage of a single community: while for the village residents it forms part of their local identity, for the Jewish organizations it represents part of their Jewish identity. What happens when two communities stake a claim to the heritagization of the same site? As a shared goal, or “cause,” the “bipolar” process of the heritagization of the Jewish cemetery in Apc has provided an opportunity for dialogue, collective thinking, and problem solving between Jewish and non-Jewish society, even if the various heritagization goals, coming from different directions, have in many cases generated tensions.
Abstract: Jewish-Roman cuisine, the traditional food of one of Europe’s longest-standing Jewish communities, is among Italy’s most distinctive hyper-local repertoires. Gastronomes increasingly acknowledge the importance of Jewish foodways for Italian cuisine, but a few famous “signature dishes” often dominate popular ideas of Jewish food in Italy. In Rome, carciofi alla giudìa – deep-fried “Jewish-style” artichokes – have long been used to symbolize the diverse and complex Jewish-Roman tradition. Blending ethnographic methods with discourse analysis, I ask how and why carciofi alla giudìa occupy this role, and what this means for contemporary Jewish-Roman identity. I then examine a selection of “origin stories” behind other dishes in the Jewish-Roman tradition, arguing that going beyond the near-ubiquitous artichoke can complicate and enrich our understanding of Jewish-Roman history, culture, and identity. Rather than attempting to prove or disprove these stories, I analyze them as tools for self-fashioning. I identify a variety of characteristics that these narratives are used to communicate: including ancient roots; resilience and resourcefulness; and an openness to new arrivals and external influences. Finally, I interrogate the relationship between the Jewish-Roman tradition and the city’s cuisine at large, arguing that this too has important repercussions for Roman and Jewish-Roman self-perception and identity.
Abstract: In the twenty-first century, Rome’s former Jewish Ghetto has experienced rapid “foodification,” in which food businesses come to dominate a previously residential or mixed-use neighborhood. Why and how has foodification taken place in Rome’s former Ghetto, and how unique is this case? What can this example teach us about foodification as a phenomenon? Foodification is influenced by broader forces, including gentrification, but is also affected by factors particular to this neighborhood. These include Jewish heritage tourism; religious dietary laws; and a growing curiosity about hyper-local food, such as cucina ebraico-romanesca (Jewish-Roman cuisine), and about dishes outside the Italian canon. Jewish-style and kosher restaurants have developed to stimulate and satisfy multiple demands, serving “traditional” Jewish-Roman dishes; Middle-Eastern and North African dishes; new interpretations of popular Italian dishes; and kosher versions of international foods popular in Italy, like hamburgers and sushi rolls. Contrary to the idea that this diversity threatens the Jewish-Roman tradition, I argue that the neighborhood’s foodscape reflects the variety of communities and tastes in contemporary Rome, where local specialties persist alongside a wide range of other options. This article argues that although foodification is often connected to gentrification and tourism, it should be distinguished from these phenomena. By asking how the former Ghetto’s new restaurants communicate heritage and identity, I demonstrate that foodification can take place in ways that are specific to a particular neighborhood, and that the food has become one of the major means by which the former Ghetto’s past and present character is articulated in Rome.
Abstract: This article explores how Jews in Finland relate to the musical traditions of their synagogues and the changes that have occurred in the customs over time and as the result of various cultural and spiritual influences. Based on ethnographic data, it focuses on rituals, liturgy, and music as contexts for negotiating relationships between the institution and the individual, memory practices, and contemporary innovation – being and doing Jewish, to use concepts from the vernacular religion framework. The article outlines the historical development of Minhag Finland, the vernacular liturgical customs. It concludes that the “turn to traditions” should be stated in the plural, as several Jewish customs, cultures, and context are engaged in the negotiations around liturgy. This is not just a way to freeze time and preserve the status quo. Instead, seeking for meaningful models in the past paves the way for change – especially when turning toward a broad range of traditions.
