Last Thursday 24 November, in the context of the course The Jews in Spain: History, Heritage and Memory of the Barcelona Program for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Pompeu Fabra University, Federico Szarfer, project manager at AEPJ, gave a lecture in which he presented the projects of AEPJ, the European Routes of Jewish Heritage and the European Days of Jewish Culture, as well as the approach of the association in the work on Jewish heritage and culture from a holistic, creative and pluralistic point of view.
The course, directed by Dr. Lucía Conte and led by Dr. Clara Jáuregui, is a course of History with a trans-disciplinary approach. The course focuses on the history of the Hispanic Jews approaching it from Jewish identities and culture and an analysis of Jewish sources and sources about the Jews. In this sense, this is not a course of religious studies or about Judaism per se, but an approximation to Jewish identity from the experiences of the Jews in Spain through centuries.
The talk given by AEPJ, as a closing event of the course, offered the students an opportunity to see the work carried out in the association and to experience in first person, through a role-playing exercise, the challenges, strategies and situations that we face in the process of building a Jewish heritage project in Europe. The group of students showed great interest in the class and were deeply involved in the exercise, proposing solutions and projects that, even in a fictional environment, could be perfectly extrapolated to the European Jewish cultural environment.