Date & Time

Venue or Medium

Contact

Event

Thursday 25 November

7.30pm

Conversation with Dalia Fleming, Executive Director of KeshetUK

Edinburgh Jewish Cultural Centre

KeshetUK is the only education and training charity working in the UK to ensure a world where no one is forced to choose between their LGBT+ and Jewish identity. Dalia will talk about how KeshetUK works with Orthodox, Reform, Liberal, Masorti and Cross Communal organisations, and will take questions from our chair and the audience. 

Click here to book

28 November

to

5 December

Chanukah around Scotland

Click here for full details of candle-lighting and other events around Scotland

Sunday 5 December

12.15–1.15pm

Jewish Tales from Scotland

Hannah Holtschneider

Phil Alexander

Ellen Galford

Elisa Koch

Winter Tales Book Festival

Stories and music bringing aspects of Scottish Jewish history to life. The event will take you of a tour of the ‘Jewish quarter’ of Edinburgh and of the Gorbals in Glasgow, where we will listen to the sounds of the streets, the tenements and synagogue music of the early twentieth century.

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Sunday 5 December

8pm

Anthony Warrens

Scottish Jewish Archives Centre

Anthony was born in Glasgow and brought up in the Garnethill community. He went to Hutchie, taught in the Glasgow Hebrew College and was involved in various youth and education groups in the Glasgow Jewish Community. He did his first degree at Glasgow University and completed his medical degree in Oxford and his clinical and scientific training in London where he undertook a PhD. He spent a post-doctoral fellowship in Harvard in the US, developing his growing interest in how to solve the shortage of donated organs for the now very successful practice of transplantation.

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Thursday 9 December

7.30pm

Jewish Women's Aid

Lee Wax
Training Co-ordinator,
Jewish Women's Aid

Edinburgh Jewish Cultural Centre

Domestic abuse thrives on closed doors, secrecy and isolation, and the pandemic has created conditions that can put women at much greater risk. This session will show a snapshot of domestic abuse in the Jewish community, how COVID is making what might be happening behind closed doors under normal circumstances so much worse, how to spot clues, and what Jewish Women’s Aid does to help.

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Sunday 23 January

8pm

Jewish Honour Courts:
Jews Look Inward after the Holocaust

Gabriel Finder

Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society

Jewish honour courts were post-war Jewish tribunals in which Jews suspected of co-operation with the Nazis were tried in quasi-legal proceedings before a panel of their judicial peers. Gabriel Finder will examine the reasons for the establishment of post-war Jewish honour courts, discuss exemplary trials, and draw conclusions from their short-lived existence and eventual demise.

Contact the Lit to register

Sunday 6 February

8pm

The vital Jewish element
in a patchwork quilt

Hella Pick

Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society

In her memoir, Invisible Walls, Hella Pick has described a multifaceted life that began in Vienna and brought her as a Kindertransport child to Britain at the age of 10. Brought up without contact with Jewish communities, it took a long time for Hella to acknowledge her Jewish identity, and involve herself in the fight against Antisemitism. With her refugee’s origin the question of what it is to be a Jew in Brexit Britain occupies her deeply. 

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Sunday 20 February

8pm

Scientist Spies: My parents
Engelbert Broda & Alan Nunn May

Paul Broda

Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society

The distinct voices of those who passed atom secrets to the Russians in the War have rarely been heard.  Paul Broda's father and stepfather were two of these. They gave secrets out of conviction and for no reward. Broda's book Scientist Spies: a memoir of my three parents and the Atom Bomb places in their historical context the dilemmas of political belief versus obedience and of action versus passivity.

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Sunday 6 March

8pm

Angels in our own traditions

Valery Rees

Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society

Valery Rees will take this opportunity to look at some of the angels that appear in our own liturgies against a wider background of their origins and their later representations across the Religions of the Book. How did people know what the cheruvim on the cover of the mercy seat were supposed to look like? Was Satan the equivalent of the fallen angel Lucifer of the Christian tradition? Who were the angels who ‘fell’? and who are the angels we invoke in the song Shalom Aleichem? 

Contact the Lit to register

Sunday 20 March

8pm

Galleries, Guilds, and Graves:
British Orthodox Women

Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz

Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society

Drawing on interviews as well as on her own experience, Dr Taylor-Guthartz shares her findings of how new norms of lived religion have emerged, influenced by both the rise of feminism and the backlash against it, and also by an evolving understanding of women’s religious roles.

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Sunday 24 April

8pm

"Remembering Second World War Internment in Great Britain"
and
The economics of internment: as seen through the banknotes created by the “Dunera Boys” deported to Australia and interned in Hay NSW, September 1940 to May 1941

Rachel Pistol
and
Alan Morgenroth

Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society

Some 80,000+ refugees from Europe sought refuge in Great Britain during the 1930s. Upon the declaration of war in 1939, Germans and Austrians automatically became ‘enemy aliens’. From May 1940, all men over the age of 16 were interned, as were many women and children. 

Rachel Pistol's talk will talk will compare and contrast attempts to bring Second World War internment to greater public awareness across the UK, Canada and Australia.

Alan Morgenroth's talk explores the experiences of 2,000 predominately Jewish refugees who were deported to Australia aboard HMT Dunera and interned in two equal groups in Hay Camps 7 and 8 which, despite being just two hundred yards apart were kept isolated from each other. 

Contact the Lit to register

Sunday 1 May

8pm

Book talk: Daughters of the Labyrinth

Ruth Padel
Professor of Poetry, King’s College

Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society

Ri is a Cretan-born painter, internationally successful, who has worked and lived in London all her life. When her English Jewish husband dies, she paints her family and home landscape in Crete, where her elderly parents run a B&B, but a colleague sees something with-held or unsaid about these paintings. When Ri’s mother Sophia is hospitalised, possibly dying, she discovers why – she learns of a lost world, a past that has been hidden from her – Jewish Crete, the Holocaust on Crete – and her mother’s real name. She discovers that she herself, and now her own daughter, have an identity she knew nothing about.

Contact the Lit to register