5th European Routes of Jewish Heritage Incubator 2023 Edition

The European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage (AEPJ), an NGO created in 2004, is a network of European institutions, including public bodies, private foundations, federations of Jewish communities and NGO’s, that serves as a platform to develop cultural initiatives and educational programs to European Jewish sites. The AEPJ network acts as a channel for intercultural dialogue and promoting better knowledge and understanding of European history, creating awareness of cultural diversity and strengthening European citizens’ cultural identity.

The Routes Incubator is an annual program, developed by the AEPJ together with its Scientific Committee, which offers in a dynamic and transversal way, training and ongoing assistance to the teams that develop Jewish Heritage Routes in Europe, through workshops, conferences and individual mentoring sessions. A meeting point for learning, reflection and exploration of transnational collaborations. Year after year we do our best to provide a successful Incubator programme, tailored precisely to the needs of our members. 

The annual training programme reaches its fifth edition with a programme that aims to highlight the advances that our community has developed over the last year, to share them, learn from them and give continuity to the process of construction, consolidation and dissemination of our Routes. On this occasion we will focus on the unfolding of the narratives of the routes, on how the discursive link between one place and another is constructed, on the perspective and values behind the message conveyed by interpretative elements such as exhibitions and mediators as tour guides and heritage educators, and on the conception of the memory policies behind them. On the other hand, we will be introduced to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their link with Cultural Routes, an issue that is not only of growing interest within our community but is also focusing some of the debates within the Cultural Routes and the Institute of Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe recently.

We will also be privileged to be hosted by the ‘Brama Grodzka – NN Theatre’ Centre in Lublin and the Taube Center for Jewish Life & Learning in Warsaw, which will provide us with an excellent opportunity to explore the challenges of transmitting heritage in spaces of absence and presence, creating nuanced narratives that integrate the past and the present, and examine the importance of collaboration among all of the stakeholders to achieve our goals, based on the study case in Poland and in the frame of the Shtetl Routes, learn more about the Center’s heritage education methodologies and practices, explore the richness of Warsaw’s Jewish heritage, examine issues of memory and memorialization in place which there is a presence of absence, identify the nexus between the past and the present, and combine the Holocaust and the post war trauma into a cohesive narrative.

In this fifth edition, we would like to highlight the European Routes of Jewish Heritage leadership in the frame of the Routes certified by the Council of Europe, in fields such as heritage narratives, the link between cultural experience and its impact on the critical capacity of citizens in the understanding of our history and society, as a tool for awareness-raising, and the role of the European Jewish Heritage Routes as a tool to raise awareness of our history and society.

Despite the meeting is intended for the AEPJ members, it is also open to other stakeholders in the field of the Jewish Heritage routes development. The participation in the training for professionals from outside the AEPJ has a fee of 300€.