From 7 to 17 November 2024 in London and Manchester
Eleven days dedicated to sharing the diversity of Jewish-themed cinema. Local and international works to share the historical and family moments of yesteryear, to understand contemporary issues, future concerns and the emotions that run through all these times and places in this essential vehicle for the emotional palette that is cinema. As the great works of Jewish cinema are not in the habit of dodging these subjects, there is no doubt that the films presented at this new edition will surprise audiences once again.
UK Jewish Film Festival 2024 – UK Jewish Film
From 27 October to 17 November 2024
Manchester’s Jewish community recently celebrated 150 years of the Iberian Synagogue. It is continuing these celebrations by organising a series of cultural events this autumn. These include the sharing of Sephardic tales through Hasidic music and drama. Starting with a musical evening on 27 October in the company of Nani Vazane, a Ladino songwriter whose songs meet the emotional theatricality of flamenco. Other events at the festival include a concert by eclectic artist Dekel on 31 October, the singers of Vache Baroque on 3 November, a musical walk with Rabbi Danny Bergson on 10 November and the one-act play ‘Mathiarch’ by Jessica Litwak on 17 November.
Manchester Jewish Museum — Synagogue Nights 2024
From 20 to 25 December 2024
Since the turn of the 21st century, the Limoud festival has established itself as a key event in Jewish cultural sharing. In England, where it was born, and today throughout the world. All kinds of Jewish cultural enthusiasts take their turn as lecturers, artists or spectators in these exchanges on a wide variety of themes. Without taboos, but always with the desire to share. The December event in England is the biggest of its kind, providing a week-long opportunity to appreciate this wide range of cultures.
From 4 to 6 April 2025 in Youlgrave, Derbyshire
Klezmer never ceases to enchant musical evenings around the world. With its ancient inspiration, its travels and sharing of styles and fashions, but also with the joy it brings, especially in worrying times. This magnificent festival gives participants the chance to get together for a few days and learn more about klezmer, but also, and above all, to take part in artistic creation and join enthusiasts from the four corners of England and beyond.
KlezNorth | A festival of Klezmer music, dance and song
7 November 2024, 8pm in London
DJ Mizz, accompanied by Ronen Kozokaro on the darbouka and a belly dancer will share oriental music and dance with the audience in a spirit of brotherhood. An inclusive event where cultural differences add spice to this musical encounter. The event takes place in a bar close to Russell Square. Don’t hesitate to contact the organisers for more information.
MIZZ RAQI – 7.11 – Jewish Music Institute (jmi.org.uk)
Until 2 March 2025 at the Frankfurt Jewish Museum
In the space dedicated to the museum’s permanent exhibition, you will find a room housing portraits drawn by the artist Else Meidner (1901-1987). These portraits, which also include self-portraits, form an important part of her work, with a hint of melancholy running through it – hence the title of the exhibition, chosen to reflect the emotion felt by the artist and by visitors to her work. In the first part of the 20th century, few women artists were accepted as such. Else Meidner, née Meyer, lived for a long time in the shadow of her painter husband, Ludwig Meidner.
Else Meidner. Melancholia – Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt (juedischesmuseum.de)
From 13 December 2024 to 4 May 2025 at the Jewish Museum Berlin
The 100th anniversary of the great writer’s death has prompted the organisation of numerous cultural events paying tribute to him across Europe, starting of course with Prague. The exhibition dedicated to him in Berlin questions the place of his intellectual legacy, particularly in the context of a dialogue with contemporary works of art. The exhibition also aims to explore new perspectives on his texts.
Access Kafka | Jewish Museum Berlin (jmberlin.de)
Until 31 October 2024 at the Centre culturel Anna et Simon Drahi in Levallois
The artist Eva Pelles explores many of the symbols present in art and in our everyday lives, especially for this exhibition the fish that caresses the blue of her canvases and the Hebrew letters that dance on them. This is achieved through a magical encounter between ancient stories and references and contemporary artistic techniques that allow Eva Pelles to share her work by day, pushed a little further each time the curtain rises on her nocturnal dreams.
CCL – Les activités du centre communautaire juif de Levallois (ccl-levallois.com)
17 November 2024, 5.30pm at the Théâtre Antoine Watteau, Nogent-sur-Marne
As part of the 2024 edition of the Jazz’N’Klezmer Festival, in partnership with the Maison de la culture juive, the evening will feature two exceptional concerts. First up is the duo of Denis Cuniot (piano) and Yannick Thepault (clarinet). They will share with the audience works by Maurice Ravel, Dmitri Shostakovich, Joseph Kosma and Joachim Stutschewski, linked to Jewish culture and traditional Klezmer music. Next up on stage are the Yes! Trio perform their third album: Spring Sings. A trio made up of three artists from very different family, geographical and historical backgrounds, united by their love of swing and jazz, from Motown to Yemen Blues. With Omer Avital on double bass, Aaron Goldberg on piano and Ali Jackson on drums.
FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER – Yes Trio – FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER (jazznklezmer.fr)
6 November 2024, 8.30pm at the Alhambra
As part of the 2024 edition of the Jazz’N’Klezmer Festival, this musical presentation takes on the moving and difficult task of telling the story of Les Enfants d’Izieu in music, recounting their short lives. Starting with the text, the music is added to amplify the emotions and share them with the audience. All original compositions by Lionel Belmondo, who also aims to pay tribute to the great French composers who inspired him throughout his life: Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honneger, Francis Poulenc, and above all, Jehan Alain, who died for France in 1940.
FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER – Les Enfants d’Izieu – FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER (jazznklezmer.fr)
17 November 2024 at 6.30pm at Espace Paul Benhaïm
As part of the 2024 edition of the Jazz’N’Klezmer Festival, virtuoso clarinettist Marine Goldwaser will once again be enchanting the Klezmer scene. Her Petit Mish-Mash, the ensemble she founded, draws on the repertoire of traditional Romanian music, adding its own energy and style. After working with master equestrian Bartabas, Marine Goldwaser delved into the sound archives of the early 20th century to set to music the charms and tensions of a traditional Yiddish wedding. With five soloists in a spirit that is above all a celebration of life and its passions.
FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER – Noces Yiddish à Marseille – FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER (jazznklezmer.fr)
23 November, 8.30pm at the FSJU Rhône-Alpes
As part of the 2024 edition of the Jazz’N’Klezmer Festival, Mahaleb draws on the sounds and pains of the past to propose a musical rapprochement and a spirit of brotherhood between Turkish and Armenian music. In this astonishing musical rollercoaster, festive and melancholy melodies mingle and follow one another, influenced as they are by contemporary emotions linked to the realities of love and personal journeys.
FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER – Mahaleb à Lyon – FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER (jazznklezmer.fr)
13 November, 7.30pm at the Salle Pétrarque
As part of the 2024 edition of the Jazz’N’Klezmer Festival, an ensemble of Swiss, Polish, Bulgarian and French artists unite around Marc Crofts in a quest to revive a forgotten klezmer repertoire. A tradition dating back to the beginning of the last century, the folk elements enter into dialogue with the modern tools available to the instrumentalists. Classical music, jazz, music from the Balkans, Ukraine, Turkey and Greece are blended with individual contributions in the service of the musical collective and the enjoyment of the audience.
9 November 2024, 10pm at Espace Rachi – Guy de Rothschild
As part of the 2024 edition of the Jazz’N’Klezmer Festival, the festival is welcoming the Canadian ensemble Oktopus, one of Quebec’s leading world music groups, to France for the first time. Klezmer isn’t just about travelling from East to West, and jazz isn’t just about travelling from America to Europe. This astonishing world music combines interpretations of the klezmer repertoire, jazz and Balkan music, tinged with an accent of classical music, a long way off in time. With Gabriel Paquin-Buki on clarinet, composition and arrangements, Matthieu Bourget on bass trombone, Noémie Caron-Marcotte on flute, Madeleine Doyon on tenor trombone, Maxime Philippe on drums and percussion, Francis Pigeon on trumpet, Laetitia Francoz Lévesque on violin and Guillaume Martineau on piano,
FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER – Oktopus – FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER (jazznklezmer.fr)
11 November 2024, 5pm at the Angers synagogue
As part of the 2024 edition of the Jazz’N’Klezmer Festival, the Pletzl Bandit is once again taking audiences on a journey through its klezmer universe, with a surprising new approach after so many years of sharing its enthusiasm on stages across France and Europe. The band is made up of Gheorghe Ciumasu on accordion, Charles Rappoport on violin, Samuel Maquin on clarinet and Henry Kisiel on double bass.
FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER – Pletzl Bandit à Angers – FESTIVAL JAZZ ‘N’ KLEZMER (jazznklezmer.fr)
16 October 2024, at 2pm, at the Shoah Memorial
This workshop offers an opportunity to discover the lives of several Righteous in Europe, whose heroism was often discreet and whose recognition was sometimes too discreet by local authorities. More often than not, the men and women who risked their lives in defiance of the Nazi regime and their local auxiliaries felt they had a duty of human fraternity. At a time when the last survivors of the Shoah and the last Righteous are leaving us, this workshop and the many events organised on this theme by the Memorial are helping to do justice to their courage among new generations, which is particularly important in these threatening times.
Mémorial de la Shoah | Boutique en ligne (memorialdelashoah.org)
From 7 to 10 November 2024 at the Maison de la culture yiddish
A wide-ranging programme is planned for the ‘Lithuania in France 2024’ season. Films, lectures, workshops, tastings of traditional dishes, shabes-tish and a seminar will all combine Yiddish and Lithuania in a variety of ways. Among the many events: a screening of the film The Secrets of Vilna’s Great Synagogue, a comic strip workshop by Miglė Anušauskaitė, a lecture on Yiddish writers from Kaunas, a lecture on Yiddish singer Nehama Lifshitz, a lecture and tasting of culinary specialities…
Le yiddish et la Lituanie : week-end de découverte – programme.yiddish.paris
From 26 September 2024 to 26 January 2025 at the mahJ
Sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, sometimes a mixture of both, the dybbuk is haunted by Jewish literary and cinematographic inspirations. This wandering soul who takes possession of a living being originated in the old Yiddish theatre, appearing in Shlomo An-ski’s play ‘Between Two Worlds’, and has been travelling ever since, without a passport or any notion of time or the challenges of history, as shown for example in Romain Gary’s The Dance of Genghis Cohn. Curated by Samuel Blumenfeld and Pascale Samuel, with the collaboration of Dorota Sniezek, the mahJ presents around a hundred works from painting, music, film and literature, each in its own way provoking this teasing soul.
Le Dibbouk. Fantôme du monde disparu | Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (mahj.org)
From 29 September 2024 at JEM Beaugrenelle
In 2007 Marc-Alain Ouaknin co-founded the Targoum Project, a project for a new translation of the Hebrew Bible (translation and commentary), which in 2017 became the Institut Targoum-IRETS (Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur la Traduction des Textes Sacrés), in partnership with the JEM Cultural Centre and the Moses Mendelssohn Foundation. JEM offers a series of ten meetings from September to June to share this passion for translating biblical texts.
Atelier Targoum – Judaïsme En Mouvement (judaismeenmouvement.org)
21 October 2024, 8pm at the JEM Copernic Synagogue
The Copernic synagogue’s liturgical choir, directed by Didier Seutin, performs the main pieces from the liturgy of the major feasts of the year in an Ashkenazi version. A journey back in time, to the present and the past rediscovered by these communities forced to flee to the West throughout the 20th century, with a few words and music recalling the towns and shtetls of yesteryear by way of reunion for the exiles.
La synagogue de Copernic – Judaïsme En Mouvement (judaismeenmouvement.org)
Until 6 October 2024 at Galerie Saphir
An invitation to travel, to voyages, from land to sea, through a body of work nourished by Venezuelan references, Amerindian symbols and other almost unsuspected Sephardic and European influences. Born into a Sephardic family that fled to the Dutch West Indies during the Inquisition, Exposition Olle Curiel travels back in time and across borders, in search of a dialogue between influences and identities that have been wounded and are healing with his brushstrokes.
Elisabeth OLLE CURIEL | 19 September – 6 October 2024 – Overview | GALERIE SAPHIR
15 October 2024, 8pm at the Medem Centre
This lecture by Sylvie Drumlewicz-Lidgi looks at the little-studied subject of the impact of the Shoah in the part of Poland occupied by Soviet troops following their pact with the Nazi regime to divide the country between the two dictatorships. The difficult conditions of survival during the war for these Polish Jews, who were spared the fate of other Jews under German domination, will be addressed.
Réfugiés et déportés en URSS-Avec Sylvie Lidgi – Centre Medem (centre-medem.org)
15 October 2024, 7pm
In a long hunt that takes him to South America before returning to the United States, an FBI agent finds a former leading figure of the Nazi regime, hiding in an American village under a new name and a new respectability. This 1946 film was directed by the great Orson Welles, who also played the Nazi. The FBI agent is played by the great Edward G. Robinson, a famous pre-war film noir actor who was one of the few to dare, with Warner’s help, to denounce the Nazi regime before the United States entered the war, in the face of ongoing censorship by the US State Department.
Projection du film : “Le Criminel” – Mémorial de Caen (memorial-caen.fr)
20 October from 2pm
In the presence of journalist Didier Epelbaum and historian Renée Poznanski, journalist Edouardo Castillo will lead a discussion on the period 1944-1947, which saw the closure of the Drancy camp following the Liberation of France. He recalled the zealous massacres carried out by the camp’s administrators before the arrival of the Allies, and the flight of its commandant, who took 51 Jewish hostages with him on 17 August 1944. A second meeting with historian Olivier Lalieu and historian Annette Wieviorka will look at the construction of the memory of the Drancy camp, driven by associations and institutions.
10 October 2024, 5pm to 10pm
The splendour of botanical diversity, the colours of the flowers and how they welcome visitors at night in this astonishing experience of this Boulogne landmark. Crossing emotions and continents, represented from garden to garden.
Nocturne – Musée Albert Kahn (hauts-de-seine.fr)
3 November 2024 at the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de l’Isère
This tour, offered every first Sunday of the month, allows participants to discover how the Second World War affected the département of Isère. The tour takes a chronological look at how history developed and the impact it had on the people who lived there. It then looks at how the Resistance was organised in the département and its impact on the war. The exhibition then looks at the repression of the population and the words of the Shoah, before concluding with the Liberation of Isère.
Visite classique grand public (isere.fr)
26 September 2024 at 7pm at the Institut Universitaire Rachi
This lecture, in the form of a dialogue between Gérard Rabinovitch, vice-president of the Institut Universitaire Rachi, and Samuel Blumenfeld, film critic at Le Monde newspaper, will address this contemporary and difficult subject, the misuse of the term ‘Resistance’. The Army of Shadows is a reference to Joseph Kessel’s book adapted for the cinema by Jean-Pierre Melville, two Resistance fighters who wished to pay tribute to their fellow soldiers who had the courage to risk their lives for France and its values, aware of the weight of this word and those who embodied it.
Conférences – Institut Universitaire Européen Rachi (institut-rachi-troyes.fr)
At the Musée Judéo-Alsacien Bouxwiller
Art Deco and its daring artistic adventures inspired the brothers Norbert and Moritz Max Neiger to create costume jewellery for this brand new market, in response to the post-First World War desire for more sobriety than the expensive jewellery that had previously been paraded. The exhibition tells the story of these designers from the Czech town of Gablonz, whose work helped to put the town on the map of the European jewellery industry. This was before they were forced to flee during the annexation of the Sudetenland, their family being murdered in Poland in 1941.
Evénements 2024 | construction (museejudeoalsacien.fr)
1 September 2024 in Anderlecht
The year is starting again, but the notes and the enthusiasm that accompany them are still present. A music of distant and uncertain times, klezmer is reappearing in the four corners of the world to re-enchant us. The Jewish Culture House offers you an introduction to klezmer music, with sessions of nigunim, work on scores, a study of style, personal work and the accompaniment of traditional dances.
KlezJam – La Maison de la Culture Juive
15 September 2024 from 10am at the Beth Yaacov Great Synagogue and the Geneva Liberal Jewish Community (GIL)
A wide range of activities will be on offer throughout the day. Starting with a guided tour of Beth Yaacov by historian Jean Plançon, followed by a tasting of traditional Shabbat dishes. The day continues at the GIL with a visit by Rabbi Emeritus François Garaï. There will also be a talk by Nathan Alfred on ‘The Jewish family: myths and stereotypes’. And to round things off with some music, at 5pm Noga, in a trio with Patrick Bebey and Arnaud Laprêt, will be singing Shabbat melodies.