Chewra Tehilim building is located in the heart of the former Jewish district of Cracow (Kazimierz). It used to be a house of prayer and a beit midrash, a space for communal learning of religious texts as part of the spiritual, cultural, and social practice of everyday Jewish life. Today the building serves as a restaurant and a bar called “Hevre”, and is part of the unsettling phenomena of neglect, appropriation, and commodification of Jewish material heritage and memory.
We invite practitioners from different fields of architecture, design, and art to re-think and create a beit midrash of the future as a tribute to Jewish life practices conducted in the building, and – through its design – reflect the influence of the Jewish tradition on our everyday life.
The workshop centers on the design of a beit midrash. The exercise deals with aesthetic questions and the architectural-sensual aspects of a Jewish space. It focuses on the link between the urban space and sensual memory, which leads to thoughts on the cultural heritage we want to commemorate, the “Jewish learning experience,” and the tension between the desire to preserve an architecture that celebrated Jewish life and tradition of the community that is gone.
The event is co-organized with the Jewish Association "Czulent" and Zapomniane Foundation.
The 8th edition of FestivALT is made possible thanks to the support of the Matanel Foundation and the Dutch Jewish Humanitarian Fund and it is organized as part of the "MultiMemo: Multidirectional Memory: Remembering for Social Justice" project, thanks to the support of the European Union under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) program.
