July 12th, 13th and 14th 2008:

Symposium "The Other Europeans"

[Deutsche Übersetzung]

A three-day symposium on Yiddish and Roma music and cultures takes place on July 12-14, featuring talks by renowned anthropologists, historians, musicologists, and musicians. For anyone interested in Yiddish or Roma cultures, or in issues of national and transnational identities in Europe, the symposium will be a rich experience.

Lecturers:

Kalman Balogh (Hungary)

Diana Bunea (Moldova)

Claude Cahn (Switzerland)

Bob Cohen (Hungary)

Zev Feldman (USA/Israel)

Ruth Ellen Gruber (Italy)

Ivan Ivanov (Belgium)

Slawomir Kapralski (Poland)

Zola Kondur (Ukraine)

Harry Stein (Germany)

Yale Strom (USA)

Janina Wurbs (Germany)

 

participation fee 60 € or 40 € (reduced),

[discounts possible, see: 'conditions']

 

opening conference

symposia

interviews

concerts

films

PDF-Downloads

application form symposium

conditions symposium

Project Partners

In cooperation with Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Thüringen and  Gedenkstätte Buchenwald.

Schedule 

Schedule with abstracts by the speakers here [PDF].

 

Diana Bunea (Ethnomusicologist, Moldova)

is an ethnomusicologist, doctor, folklore professor at Music Academy from Chisinau, Moldova. She is especially interested by problems of folklore in modern society, by folklore phenomenoes of 20th century, traditional popular legacy, and other nations' musical culture. Her works are connected with Romanian traditional ceremony, structural folklore problems and fiddlers (Roma) music from Moldova.

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Claude Cahn (Human Rights Activist, Switzerland)

is Head of Advocacy Unit for the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), a global housing rights initiative based in Geneva. Between 1996 and 2007, he was Programmes Director of the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), an international public interest law organisation working to end the systemic human rights abuse of Roma (“Gypsies”) in Europe. Mr. Cahn’s areas of expertise include cause and mission management, international institutions, human rights law and policy, monitoring methodologies, policy and law analysis, public outreach and matters relating to the Romani communities. Major achievements with the ERRC include authoring European Union policy on Roma issues, shaping European human rights law in the field of housing rights, securing just remedy for victims of coercive sterilisation, and moving a number of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to implement school desegregation policy. He has been active since 2004 in the campaign for an Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Since joining COHRE, he has been active in Human Rights Council work, including matters concerning the first rounds of the Universal Periodic Review.

 

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Zev Feldman (historian, musician / USA/Israel)

is a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music, and a performer on the klezmer dulcimer, tsimbl. During the mid-1970s he and Andy Statman studied with Dave Tarras and were two of the creators of the klezmer revival; at that time Feldman reintroduced the dulcimer tsimbl into klezmer music with his classic LP “Jewish Klezmer Music”. Today he performs with the group Khevrisa and elsewhere. Having grown up with traditional Ashkenazic, Greek and Armenian dance, during the 1970s he researched and taught Turkish folkdance. Today Feldman is a teacher and performer of Ashkenazic dance, leading workshops in the U.S., Canada, England, Germany and Israel. Zev is a part-time associate professor at Bar-Ilan University (Tel-Aviv) and a fellow of the Center for Jewish Music Research at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He was a co-editor of the Medimuses Project for Modal Musics of the Mediterranean for the EnChordais School in Thessalonica, Greece. In 2004 he co-directed the successful application of the Mevlevi Dervishes of Turkey for the UNESCO proclamation of the masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity. In 2003 he curated the concert series “The Revival of Klezmer and Yiddish Music in New York” at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was the artistic director for Jewish music at the 92nd Street in New York, and was the artistic director of the series “Music and Dance of the Jewish Wedding” (2004-2007) and "Music of the Mystics"(2005). Today he is teaching klezmer music at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. [Photo © by David Kaufman]

 

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Ruth Ellen Gruber

(publicist, cultural scientist / Italy)

is an American writer living in Europe. Her books include “Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere)”, “National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe” and “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe”. Her work has appeared in the “New York Times”, the “International Herald Tribune”, JTA and many other publications. She has won Rockower awards for Jewish journalism and  received a Guggenheim Fellowship and NEH Summer Stipend to explore the role of the American west in the European imagination. [photo: Amalie R. Rothschild]

 

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Ivan Ivanov

(expert for human rights, attorney / Belgium)

is the Executive Director of the European Roma Information Office (ERIO). Previously as an Attorney for the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Center, he was involved for five years in the research and building the legal strategy of ground-braking civil rights cases filed with the European Court of Human Rights and the domestic courts of several countries in Central and Eastern Europe. From 1996 to 1998 he has served as a legal adviser for the Human Rights Project a national human rights and legal defence organization based in Sofia, Bulgaria. In this period he has spearheaded the development of a number of strategic litigation cases and key advocacy initiatives.
Ivan Ivanov holds degrees in medicine and law. In 1999-2000 he was a visiting scholar at the Law School of Columbia University in New York, where he has specialized international human rights and anti-discrimination law. He has a number of publications focusing on issues related to discrimination and access to education and health care.

 

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Slawomir Kapralski

(sociologist and philosopher / Poland)

studied sociology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, where he received his MA and Ph.D. He taught at the Jagiellonian University and then joined the Central European University where he has been lecturing for thirteen years in all three campuses: Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Bielefeld, the University of Chicago, IWM Vienna, WZB Berlin, and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle. At present he is a Lecturer at the Warsaw School of Social Psychology and an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Centre for Social Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Since the end of 1980s he has been involved in various research activities and educational initiatives in the field of Polish-Jewish relations and Roma communities of East/Central Europe. His research interests focus on nationalism, ethnicity and identity, collective memory, anti-Semitism, and the Roma and Sinti. He is a member of the Gypsy Lore Society.

 

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Zemfira “Zola” Kondur (lifelong human rights

advocate and Roma activist)

was born in 1976 in the Odessa region of Ukraine and was raised in a traditional Roma family. But unlike most Roma, Kondur’s father attended university and obtained two advance degrees. Education was important to the Kondur family, and Zola’s mother had to fight against discrimination so that her three children could attend an English school in Odessa. To this date, the Kondur children are the only Roma students to have graduated from the school. Zola went on to enroll in the State Pedagogical University and earned a teaching degree in Russian language, literature and world culture.
In 1993, Zola and her family helped form the Izmail Roma Association, which works to protect the rights of Roma people in southern Ukraine. In 1997, she became the head of the association’s Sunday school. In response to a serious lack of services for Roma girls, she helped launch the Chiricli International Roma Women’s Fund in 2000 to advocate on behalf of Roma women across Eastern Europe. As the vice president of Chiricli, her priorities are ensuring that Roma girls have access to adequate education and proper health care for themselves and their families.

 

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Yale Strom (Director, Composer, Musician,

Writer and Photographer / USA)

was a pioneer among klezmer bale-kulturniks (returners of the culture) in conducting extensive field research in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans among the Jewish and Rom communities since 1981. Initially, his work focused primarily on the use and performance of klezmer music between these two groups. Gradually, his focus increased to examining all aspects of their culture, from post-World War II to the present. In the more than two decades since his initial ethnographic trip, Yale has become the world’s leading ethnographer-artist of klezmer. His work has resulted in 10 books (i.e. The Book of Klezmer, Uncertain Roads: Searching for the Gypsies), 12 recordings (i.e. Cafe Jew Zoo, Borsht with Bread Brothers, Absolutely Klezmer Vol. 2), 7 documentary films (i.e. The Last Klezmer, L'Chayim Comrade Stalin!) and many photo exhibitions.
www.yalestrom.com

 

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Janina Wurbs (Jewish studies / Germany)

has been exploring the Yiddish scene for several years. She began by attending workshops on Yiddish instrumental and vocal music, and recently spent over a year with the Yiddish poet and songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman in New York City. Last summer her interests led her to Chernovitz (now in the Ukraine), where she conducted ethnological interviews in Yiddish. She has delved into various facets of Yiddish culture – from listening to nigunim in Boro Park's Hasidic shiln and shtiblekh to studying Yiddish language and literature with Miriam Hoffman at Columbia University and Dovid Roskies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Having majored in Jewish Studies, Religious Studies and History at Potsdam University, she is connecting what she has learned with her interests in Yiddish and Jewish music in a variety of ways, whether t's collaborating in a project on the collections of Sofia Maggid and Moshe Beregovski at Potsdam University, digitalizing the Stonehill collection (field recordings of mostly Yiddish songs) at YIVO, doing research and translation of Yiddish songs for CD release, operating the supertitles at New York's Yiddish theater Folksbiene, helping to write subtitles for Boris Sandler's interview film with the Yiddish writer Shira Gorshman (Yiddish to English), or publishing her own photographs in the Yiddish periodicals "Forverts", "Afn Shvel" and "Di Tsukunft".

 

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