Cooperation between Leipzig and Jerusalem

The International Research Training Group »Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond« was officially opened on November 12, 2024 at Leipzig University's Paulinum with a keynote speech by Ofer Ashkenazi. The cooperation project between the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Leipzig University and the Dubnow Institute offers a diverse qualification program for outstanding international doctoral candidates.

Bringing together German, Israeli, and other international researchers from all academic career stages, the IRTG »Belongings« proceeds from the idea that Jewish history can be reconstructed, narrated, and commemorated in a substantial and innovative way through the analysis of its world of objects. This includes objects that were lost, imagined, longed for, or that left a recognizable void due to the cataclysms of the twentieth century. With this object-centered approach the IRTG seeks to implement new tools to analyze European Jewish life and its entanglements with the non-Jewish surroundings. Five research clusters (Practice, Ownership, Text, Memory, Stage) are implemented within the training group to explore Jewish material cultures in Europe and the areas of Jewish (forced) emigration from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries from a multidisciplinary angle. Its two cohorts of 22 international students plus post-doc scholars will not only disseminate their findings to an international academic audience and the interested public, but will also foster the academic cooperation between Israel and Europe.

The IRTG is funded by the German Research Foundation and the Landecker Foundation