The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, will be marked by the representatives of the Romanian Cultural Institute from Berlin, Tel Aviv, New York and Venice through a series of lectures, exhibitions, literary moments, film screenings aimed at evoking the persecutions at which were subjected to the Jews during the Second World War, according to Agerpres.

* The Titu Maiorescu Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin organizes, on Wednesday, the event „Looking for a lost history, following the footsteps of Romanian Judaism”, at the Romanian Embassy in Berlin, dedicated to the history of Judaism in Romania, moderated by Robert Schwartz, editor with Deutsche Welle Germany.

Getta Neumann, editor and author, daughter of Chief Rabbi Ernest Neumann (1917-2004), rabbi of the Jewish community in Timisoara for 63 years and president of the community since the 1980s, and of Edit, née Fuchs, Holocaust survivor, will give a lecture about the Jewish community in Timisoara and Banat, and PhD Felicia Waldman with the University of Bucharest will have an intervention about the birth, existence and disappearance of Hasidism in Romania.

A literary moment will be dedicated to the avant-garde and existentialist writer of Jewish origin Benjamin (Fundoianu) Fondane, French-Romanian critic, essayist, poet and literary theorist, born in Iasi in 1898 and killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on October 2, 1944. Lyrics de Fondane will be read by Dan Schlanger – actor, director and director of the Bucharest Jewish Film Festival.

* ICR Tel Aviv, in collaboration with the Embassy of Romania in the State of Israel, organizes, on Wednesday, at its headquarters, an event to present the restoration project of the Elie Wiesel Memorial House in Sighetu Marmatiei, which also represents the Museum of Jewish Culture in Maramures.

The coordinator of the restoration project of the Elie Wiesel Memorial House in Sighetu Marmatiei, the museographer Alina Marincean, will be invited, along with the Romanian ambassador to the State of Israel, Radu Ioanid, and the historian Raphael Vago, professor with Tel Aviv University. The public will be able to watch a short documentary film about the stages of the Museum’s establishment.

* ICR New York, in collaboration with the Elie Wiesel Romanian National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Bucharest, marks, on Friday, the International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust, at the ICR New York headquarters, through a multimedia exhibition and a debate on the theme of the Jews of Bukovina, before, during and after the Second World War.

The photography exhibition will be organized in three different segments: the Jewish communities in Bukovina before the Holocaust, the situation of these communities during the war and the deportations from Transdniester and the period immediately following 1945, until the massive emigration to Israel of the children of the deported, in the years 1960.

Also during the exhibition, fragments of the documentary „October 6, 1941 – the day of deportation to Transdniester”, produced and owned by Lily Pauker, who also coordinated and produced the album „Once upon a time” will be played on a large device in Suceava – Bukovina”, which will be presented during the event, collective volume containing 56 contributions.

The exhibition at ICR New York is made with the support of the Elie Wiesel Institute, which provides materials and historical expertise, most of the photos coming from the private collections of the album’s signatories.

The debate, which will be moderated by the director of ICR New York, Dorian Branea, will be opened with a lecture by Prof. Diana Dumitru and will touch on all three stages of the life of the Jewish communities in Bukovina mentioned above. During the event, the recorded messages of Alexandru Muraru, special representative of the Government for the Promotion of Remembrance Policies, Combating Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia, and of the Romanian ambassador to Israel, Radu Ioanid, will be broadcast.

* The Romanian Institute of Culture and Humanistic Research from Venice, in collaboration with the Consulate General of Romania in Trieste, organizes, on Friday, at Palazzo Correr, the conference „The Sephardic Community in the Romanian Space”, supported by PhD Felicia Waldman, who heads the Goldstein Goren Jewish Studies Center within the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest.

This conference will be in Italian, highlighting the role of the Sephardic Jews who settled north of the Danube both in the process of economic development and institutional modernization, as well as in preserving and consolidating the Jewish identity of their own community.

Agerpres