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Uncommon Voices, Everyday Lives: Jewish Experiences in Salonika through the YIVO Archives
| RUTH GAY SEMINAR IN JEWISH STUDIES |
| SUNDAY 12 JULY 2009 Meet the Faculty at 3 pm; seminar at 3:30 pm |
| Chair: Isaac Benmayor Introductory Remarks: Steven Bowman Presenter: Devin Naar |
| The next Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies, sponsored by theYIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in partnership with the American Sephardi Federation, will take place on Sunday, July 12, in the Kovno Room, Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, New York City. Meet the Faculty at 3 pm. Seminar begins at 3:30 pm. RSVP required: email fmohrer@yivo.cjh.org or call 212-294-6143. The seminar, titled "Uncommon Voices, Everyday Lives: Jewish Experiences in Salonika through the YIVO Archives," will be presented by Devin Naar, Project Historian of the Salonika Project at YIVO, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Stanford University. Under the Salonika project, the Records of the Jewish Community of Salonika housed in the YIVO Archives were arranged, microfilmed, and digitized, and a finding aid was completed. The project received support from the Maurice Amado Foundation and from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Devin Naar notes that most histories of the Jewish community of Salonika during the 19th and 20th centuries utilize records produced by elite members of society: reports by European consulates, memoranda by government officials, or correspondence of the directors of Alliance Israelite Universelle schools. The archives of the Jewish community of Salonika, however, offer a markedly distinct perspective and provide glimpses into the experiences of a cross-section of the Jewish population whose voices are not usually heard and whose dynamic lifestyles either evade the record or are reconstructed from outside viewpoints. Rare records contained in YIVO's archive of the Jewish community of Salonika, especially the files of the Beit Din, which record testimony--often verbatim in Ladino--of members of all classes of Jewish society; the communal census conducted in the wake of the fire of 1917; and finally, petitions and correspondence from local peddlers, merchants, teachers, and families, offer uncommon voices of everyday lives and a new lens on this renowned Jewish community. Devin Naar is writing his dissertation on the Jewish community of Salonika during the 19th and 20th centuries. He was the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Greece, where he organized a segment of the Salonika archives housed at the Jewish Museum of Salonika and curated the exhibition "With Their Own Words: Glimpses of Jewish Life in Thessaloniki before the Holocaust," for which he prepared the accompanying catalog. An article Naar wrote on Jewish emigration from Salonika to the United States appeared in American Jewish History (Dec. 2007); a piece in Cahiers de Alberto Benveniste and an entry on Sephardic Jews for the Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups in Europe are both forthcoming. He has delivered conference papers or lectured at numerous locations in New York and New Jersey as well as St. Louis, Georgetown, New Haven, Jerusalem, Moscow, and Paris. Isaac Benmayor, who will chair the session, was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and holds a Ph.D. in Modern Greek Linguistics from Oxford University. A past president of the American Friends of the Jewish Museum of Greece, Benmayor has worked on a number of publications on the Holocaust in Greece, including The Holocaust in Salonica: Eyewitness Accounts, edited, with introductory essay by Steven Bowman and translated from Greek and Judeo-Spanish with introductions and notes by Isaac Benmayor. He is currently working on the Greek edition of Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece. The Salonika Project at YIVO was carried out from 2005 to 2008 with the academic guidance and support of an academic advisory committee that included Steven Bowman, Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Cincinnati; Aron Rodrigue, Professor of Sephardic History, Stanford University; Jane Gerber, Director, Jewish Studies, CUNY Graduate Center; Isaac Benmayor, scholar of Ladino and History of Salonika; Marcia Hadad Ikonomopoulos, historian of Greek Jewry and President, Association of Friends of Greek Jewry; David Bunis, Professor of Ladino, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Rena Molho, Panteion University, Athens. The Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies is given at YIVO several times a year by scholars who have done research in the YIVO Archives and who wish to share their research with the public. The seminar series is named in honor of the noted American Jewish scholar and historian Ruth Gay (1922-2006), and was made possible thanks to a generous gift from the family of Ruth Gay. |
| Admission: RSVP required | 212.294.6143 / fmohrer@yivo.cjh.org |
| Venue : YIVO Institute at the Center for Jewish History | 15 West 16th Street - NYC view map For directions and parking information, click HERE |