2025 AAJS Conference
‘Sanctuary’
Melbourne Holocaust Museum
16-17 February 2025
Conference committee: Dr. Anna Hirsh, Dr. Simon Holloway, Dr. Donna-Lee Frieze
Conference Day 1
Welcome by AAJS Co-presidents and Conference Convenors
Session 1, chaired by Dr. Donna-Lee Frieze: Australia as Sanctuary
Dr. Myer Samra: Jews in Sydney in the 1960s
Emerita Professor Suzanne Rutland: Sanctuary for whom? Jewish victims and Nazi perpetrators in postwar Australian migrant camps
A/Professor Gabrielle Wolf: A Denial of Professional Sanctuary: Refugee Doctors in Australia 1937-45
Dovi Seldowitz: A Matter of Little Intolerances: Revisiting Australian Media Responses to the 1959-1960 Swastika Epidemic
Session 2, chaired by Dr. Anna Hirsh: a roundtable on Australia and the Holocaust: an intimate history
Panellists: Professor Avril Alba, Professor Ruth Balint, A/Professor Jan Lanicek, A/Professor Jane Persian
Session 3, chaired by Emerita Prof. Suzanne Rutland: Historical Sanctuaries
Professor Anna Michalowska-Mycielska: Sanctuary of the Community: The Social Function of Synagogues in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (16-18th c.)
Professor Mariusz Kalczewiak: Interwar Poland, Gender Anxiety, and the Search for a Male Sanctuary
Emeritus Professor Nachum Dershowitz: Computational Analysis of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts
Session 4, chaired by A/Prof. Jan Lanicek: Sanctuaries of Learning or Unsettled Sanctuaries? A Roundtable on the Complexities of Holocaust Education in Australian Museums
Panellists: Professor Avril Alba, Dr. Donna-Lee Frieze, Dr. Helena Robinson, Professor Andrew Singleton
Session 5, chaired by Dr. Jonathan Kaplan: Holocaust Sanctuaries
Dr. George Weisz: The Medical Professional Elimination Program and the Ideology and Motivation of Nazi Physicians
Lena Christoph: From the Philippine Sanctuary to New Homes
Rita Nash: A Most Unlikely Sanctuary: The Polish Jews in Stalin’s Soviet Union
Session 6, chaired by Dr. Anna Hirsh: keynote address
Professor Kathy Temin: Marking Memory: Looking at the influences on my artistic practice and proposing a different form of remembrance
Cocktail evening
Conference Day 2
Session 7, chaired by Dr. Simon Holloway: Biblical Sanctuaries
Dr. Raf Dascalu: Sanctuary and Symbolism: The Mishkan as a Window into Jewish Intellectual History
Dr. Idan Dershowitz: The Lost Sanctuary of Beer Sheba
Dr. Shani Tzoref: Sanctuary and Covenant: A Fugue of Sacred Time and Space in Leviticus
Session 8, chaired by Dr. Jonathan Kaplan: Literary Sanctuaries
Janine Schloss: Sanctuary in the Margins: Third-generation Marginal Holocaust Narratives
Professor David Slucki: Third Generation Writing in Australia
Kim Swivel: A Sanctuary from Stereotypes: New Third-generation Australian Holocaust Fiction That Challenges Dehumanizing Representations of Jews
Session 9, chaired by Professor Avril Alba: Religious Sanctuaries
Marcia Pinskier: Institutional Child Sexual Abuse: Abuse of Sanctuary
Dr. Simon Holloway: “I Will Be for Them a Small Sanctuary”: The Place of Torah Study During the Holocaust
Dr. Jason Schulman: Schism in the Sanctuary
Session 10, chaired by A/Prof. Jan Lanicek: Cultural Sanctuaries
Professor Rebecca Margolis: Yiddish Sanctuary in Melbourne: Australian Migration on the Small Screen
Dr. Anne Sarzin: Athol Fugard’s Exposition of Jew-hatred Corrupting the ‘Sanctuary’
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan: A Fashionable Body? Clothing and the Grotesque in Oskar Panizza’s Der operierte Jud’ [The Operated Jew]
Tour of Underground exhibition, hosted by Dr. Simon Holloway
Closing remarks