The project aims to study contemporary Jewish commemorative practices and oral stories related to the Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust. The analysis of these texts and practices will, first, allow an understanding of how different commemoration traditions and local versions of Victory Day celebrations are arranged, and second, discern the external conditions (the cultural and political context) and internal mechanisms (the laws of transmission of oral texts) that formed these traditions. To perform these tasks, the research team plans to conduct a series of expeditions to several regions of Russia, Latvia and Israel. These field studies will make it possible to compare how former Jewish Soviet citizens of the "post-memory" context selectively remember the war, as they reside in countries with very different "memory policies", different degrees of familiarity both with Jewish commemorative traditions and with late Soviet and contemporary discourses about victory, and finally with varying degrees of family involvement in the Holocaust.
The result of the project will be a collective academic monograph in Russian, three papers in Russian and one paper in English in peer-reviewed academic journals. Materials received during the expeditions will be accessible for consultation by the Museum of Jewish History and the Center for Tolerance in Moscow.
Dr. Maria Gavrilova, Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics, Russian Presidential Academy of Public Administration (RANEPA, Moscow).
Project participants:
Dr. Anna Kirziuk, Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics, Russian Presidential Academy of Public Administration (RANEPA, Moscow).
Dr. Irina Kozlova, Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics, Russian Presidential Academy of Public Administration (RANEPA, Moscow).
Sergey Belyanin, Doctoral Student at the Centre for Typological and Semiotic Folklore Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow), Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics, Russian Presidential Academy of Public Administration (RANEPA, Moscow).
Ekaterina Zakrevskaya, Doctoral Student at the Centre for Typological and Semiotic Folklore Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow).
In the picture: preparation for the "Immortal Regiment" march, Kirillov, Vologda Oblast, 2018.