7th European Routes of Jewish Heritage Incubator
2025 Edition

The annual training meeting of the European Routes of Jewish Heritage (ERJH), explicitly designed and aimed at the network of Route managers, reaches its seventh edition (the sixth face-to-face) this November, from Wednesday 19th to Friday 21st, hosted by the University of Bologna and ATRIUM. Architecture of Totalitarian Regimes of the 20th Century in Europe’s Urban Memory.

The European Routes of Jewish Heritage (ERJH) Incubator is a space for meeting, training, and exchange, explicitly designed for professionals involved in the management of cultural routes of Jewish heritage. It operates under the certification of the Council of Europe and aims to enhance the specialization and skills of professionals while strengthening their network. Now in its seventh edition, the Incubator has consolidated itself as the annual reference event for members of the routes, offering the opportunity to explore a specific theme. This year’s edition focuses on the contribution of architectural heritage to dialogue for peace, with particular attention to addressing hate speech.

In this occasion, the Incubator will extend over several weeks, creating both virtual and face-to-face workspaces. Its main purpose is to explore how the interpretation of European Jewish architecture can help shape narratives that confront contemporary xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism. At the same time, it will address the ways in which cultural routes can build alliances to strengthen their capacity to respond to these challenges, and how professionals can engage other actors—such as guides, mediators, educators, and heritage managers—in raising awareness and disseminating these messages from a shared perspective across the routes.

This approach responds to a dynamic already present in Europe: many agents working on memory policies do so from a non-Jewish perspective, as they often lack a Jewish background and do not aim to bring Judaism closer to the wider public. Meanwhile, most Jewish agents active in these fields tend to focus on Jewish groups seeking to reconnect with their family roots or community heritage. The AEPJ believes that in order to complete this picture, it is essential to strategically bridge these two perspectives: providing an educational outlook for a non-specialized public while also preserving the cultural identity of those who suffered persecution under fascism, and adopting a transversal perspective that also opens the discussion to other groups and minorities.

To achieve this objective, the AEPJ relies on the support of ATRIUM (Architecture of the Totalitarian Regimes of the 20th Century in Europe’s Urban Memory). Together, they plan to develop a joint training process that addresses narratives of resistance against fascism through architectural interpretation, with architecture serving as the connecting thread across the different training activities.