On the occasion of INTERNATIONAL ROMA DAY, the Jewish Museum of Belgium is pleased to invite you to an event dedicated to celebrating Roma culture and raising awareness of anti-Roma discrimination.
In partnership with ESMA, Carrefour des Cultures:

ESMA-CC is an association that promotes and supports artists, cultural creations and music from the Balkans and Roma, with the aim of encouraging encounters, debate and dialogue between groups, communities and cultural players in civil society.


Program

  • 3:30 pm: Conference: Carol Silverman (Eng – Fr)
  • 4:45 pm: Q&A
  • 5:00 pm: Break
  • 5:30 p.m.: Concerts
  • 6:30 pm: Drink of friendship
    Price
    Price: 7 euros on site
    Free for students

Free event

Conference

Historical and cultural contexts of klezmer and Balkan Romani music: comparisons and contrasts
Jews and Roma are often considered Europe’s two most emblematic minority groups. Both communities have greatly enriched the culture and arts of Eastern Europe, while facing historical discrimination, including the Nazi genocide. This illustrated lecture explores the cultural links and differences between Jews and Roma in Eastern Europe. Focusing on music, we will examine the professional role of klezmer and Roma musicians, as well as the context of their repertoire and performances in ritual and family life. Today, Balkan Romani music is not only a dynamic community asset, but also a global musical product; klezmer is also being creatively revitalized and recast. At the same time, anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism are on the rise. In these difficult times, music can serve as a tool in the fight against neo-nationalism and xenophobia.

  • Carol Silverman

Carol Silverman has been interested in Balkan music and culture for over forty years as a researcher, teacher, artist and activist. Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon, she has taught Jewish and Balkan folklore, focusing on music, festivals, cultural policy and human rights issue

Concerts

  • ESMA Next Generation Band
  • Vilmos Csikos, Anette Dukane Csikos, Duka Vilmos
  • The Klezmer Society

Exhibition

  • Ceija Stojka

Ceija Stojka was born in Austria in 1933, the fifth of six children in a family of Roma horse traders. Deported at the age of ten with her mother Sidonie and other family members, she survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. 

It was only forty-five years later, in 1988, at the age of fifty-five, that she felt the need and the necessity to talk about it; she embarked on a fantastic work of remembrance and, despite being considered illiterate, wrote several poignant books, in a poetic and highly personal style, which made her the first Roma woman survivor of the death camps to bear witness to her concentration camp experience, against oblivion and denial, against the prevailing racism.