Date & Time

Venue or Medium

Contact

Event

Tuesday 18 January

5.30pm

The First Minister
in Conversation with Jewish Students

SCoJeC meeting to give Jewish students in Scotland an opportunity to raise issues that matter to them with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon MSP.

Click here to register

Tuesday 18 January

6–8pm

Glasgow University Holocaust Memorial Lecture

Dame Stephanie Shirley CH

Dame Stephanie's life story begins with her 1939 arrival in Britain as an unaccompanied Kindertransport refugee. In 1962, she started a software house, Freelance Programmers, that pioneered new work practices and changed the position of professional women, especially in hi-tech.

Click here to register

Wednesday 19 January

6.30pm

Antisemitism: Then and Now

Prof Yehuda Bauer
Holocaust Studies Dept, Hebrew University, Jerusalem,
& academic advisor to Yad Vashem

Rt Hon Nadhim Zahawi MP
Secretary of State for Education

Holocaust Educational Trust event for Holocaust Memorial Day.

Click here to register

Sunday 23 January

12–3pm

Tu b'Shvat Celebration

SCoJeC, UJIA, Operation Play Outdoors and Scottish Forestry are partnering to bring you a Tu b'Shvat Celebration in Dunnikier Park in Kirkcaldy. Join us for activities for all ages including a treasure hunt, woodland crafts, discussions around the fire and tree planting! Lunch and hot drinks will be provided.

Click here to register

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

Wednesday 26 January

6pm

One Day:
National Holocaust Memorial Day, Scotland

Edinburgh Interfaith Association

Official National Holocaust Memorial Day Event for Scotland to pay respects to those who lost their lives in the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, and attempt to learn the lessons from humanity's dark past.

The program will include contributions from Holocaust survivor Henry Wuga, Rwandan genocide survivor against the Tutsi Eric Eugene Murangwa, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government Shona Robison.

Click here to register

Thursday 27 January

6.30–8.30pm

Holocaust Memorial Day 2022

Households across the UK will be lighting candles and safely putting them in their windows to remember those who were murdered for who they were, and stand against prejudice and hatred today. Join Interfaith Scotland either in person or online for a film screening of the UK-wide commemorative event, candle lighting ceremony, and, for those participating in person, light refreshments.

Click here
to register for the Glasgow event

and

Click here
to register for the online event

Sunday 30 January

7.30pm

Inside Out – a Life in Stages

Vanessa Rosenthal

Edinburgh Jewish Cultural Centre

Playwright and actress Vanessa Rosenthal will be reading from and talking about her recently published autobiography, and her radio and theatre plays depicting events relating to the Holocaust. In conversation with producer/director David Ian Neville, she will talk about her work as a writer, and her personal exploration of her Jewish identity.

Click here 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. 

Contact the Lit to register

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.

Contact the Lit to register

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.

Contact the Lit to register

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