INVITATION

The Department of History, Archaeology and Museology of 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia and the Department of Jewish Studies, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature of the University of Bucharest – in partnership with the National Union Museum of Alba Iulia, the Commission for the History of Towns in Romania of the Romanian Academy and the Department of Jewish Art, Bar Ilan University – are organizing an international conference:

Urban Jewish Cemeteries in Central–Eastern Europe between Early Modern

and the Present Times: Research and Valuation

October 17 and 18, 2024

The conference is supported by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania – The Mosaic Cult, Alba Iulia Jewish Community and Alba County Council.

We intend to foster debate on the strategies applied by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in this field, as well as the research methods used by specialists and examples of the preservation of Jewish cemeteries from the perspective of their signification as cultural heritage of living communities. In this sense, we consider the suggestions offered during other conferences (European Jewish Cemeteries: An Interdisciplinary Conference, Vilnius, 2015; Urban Jewish Heritage: Presence and Absence, Kraków, 2018), published synthesis works (Rudolf Klein, Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries of the 19th and 20th Centuries in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Study, 2018) and preservation projects devoted to the theme (European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, initiated in 2015; Protecting the Jewish Cemeteries of Europe: A Full Mapping Process, a pilot project of the EC initiated in 2018).  The uneven coverage of this subject by researchers from Central and Eastern European countries presents a need and an opportunity to fill in knowledge gaps and tackle under-studied problems in the field.

Consequently, we propose some issues for discussion which outline a useful model for investigating of Jewish cemeteries:

1. Jewish cemeteries from community projects to government preservation strategies.
2. Jewish cemeteries and the topography of the urban space up to the late modern period.
3. The fate of Jewish cemeteries in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
4. Advanced technologies and methodologies in the archaeology of old urban cemeteries: ethical and practical issues.
5. Style, text and visual representation on Jewish gravestones; analyses of the status and identity of the people commemorated in Jewish funerary monuments.
6. The evolution of Jewish cemeteries, between the preservation of the ritual tradition and the influence of non-Jewish architecture, art and culture.
7. From conservation to restoration and landscape redevelopment: necessary steps in the recontextualization of Jewish cemeteries.

We invite you to participate in the conference with a paper which fits one of these proposed themes or a similar topic. The deadline for submitting paper titles and summaries (of about 300 words) is June 15, 2024. We will confirm which papers have been accepted by June 30, 2024.

The conference will take place in Alba Iulia in a hybrid format (physical and online, according to the choice of the participants, expressed by completing the attached registration form), in English, German and French.

Details of the costs of accommodation and meals for those attending in person will be sent in the next call, by the end of March 2024. The scientific committee of the conference intend to publish the final texts of the papers in a printed volume at an internationally prestigious publishing house in the field of arts and humanities. We will send details regarding this aspect in a letter related to the actual running of the conference by July 15, 2024.

Alba Iulia,

February 15, 2024

ACADEMIC COMMITTEE:

Professor Madeea Larisa Axinciuc, PhD

University of Bucharest, Romania

Department of Jewish Studies

Adrian Cioflâncă

Researcher,College of the National Council for the Study of Security Archives

President of Wilhelm Filderman Center for the Study of the History of Romanian Jews

Professor Daniel Dumitran, PhD

1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania

Department of History, Archaeology and Museology

Lucian-Zeev Herșcovici, PhD

Librarian, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem

Dan Dumitru Iacob, PhD

Researcher, Department of Urban History, Romanian Academy

Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities in Sibiu, Romania

Pál Lővei, PhD

Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

Professor Ilia Rodov, PhD

Bar Ilan University, Israel, Department of Jewish Art

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Professor Daniel Dumitran, PhD

1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania

Initiator of the research project of the Jewish cemetery in Alba Iulia

Sidonia Petronela Olea, PhD

Restorer, Coordinator of the AFCP project Conservation and Restoration

of Monumental Funerary Stones in the Jewish Cemetery in Alba Iulia, Romania

National Museum of the Union, Alba Iulia

Claudiu Stoian, PhD

Lecturer and Director of the Jewish Studies program

University of Bucharest, Romania

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Contact: daniel.dumitran@uab.ro