Limmud AZ 2020

Place is fundamental in human experience and the human condition.  We enjoin and constitute place culturally and collectively, slipping and sliding into the future, generations unfolding, overlapping, and pushing forward as a fugue.  Even far away from the places where the murder of the European Jews was perpetrated, Beth Hebrew, a mid-century Phoenix synagogue founded among others by a family who rescued 1500 Jews and non-Jews from a Vichy camp, stands as testimony to the Holocaust. The structure also shows how American Jews, survivors and those who had come earlier, were able to rescue their individual and collective life after the Holocaust by deliberately asserting the continuity with their religious past, defying the intents of the Nazis to make the world "free of Jews."  The presentation will explore how scholars from diverse disciplines such as History, Religious Studies, Memory Studies, Jewish Studies and Geographers and Urban Planners can research the overlapping layers of memory of this place and communicate their importance to the wider public.