Programme:

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Rabbi Eli Brackman, Oxford University Chabad Society
‘The Mystical Work of the Tanya by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi in Manuscript’

14:00 Professor Walter Zev Feldman
‘Gesture, Music and Personality in Ashkenazic Solo Dance’
Walter Zev Feldman is a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music. During the 1970s he spearheaded the revitalization of klezmer music. Today he is a performer on the klezmer dulcimer, the cimbal, and on the Ottoman lute, the tanbur. His book, Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition, and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Berlin, 1996) is taught as a basic text worldwide. His new book Klezmer: Music, History and Memory, was published by Oxford University Press (2016).

14:30 Professor Judit Frigyesi Niran
‘Gesture of the soul: davenen in Ashkenazic prayer’
Judit Frigyesi Niran is a teacher, writer, poet, musicologist and ethnomusicologist. She researched and published about the music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She developed a unique emotion-oriented method of teaching music which she used in teaching practicing musicians, scholars and writers. She had been documenting the traditional prayer chant of the Eastern European Jews since the late 1970s, being the only scholar doing fieldwork in Jewish music in post-WWII communist countries. Apart from numerous scholarly works, she recently completed a documentary novel treating the topic of Jewish prayer chant (Writing on Water –The Sounds of Jewish Prayer, CEU Press, 2018).

15:00 Coffee

15:15 Dr. Naftali Loewenthal, University College London
‘Bati LeGani’ by the last two Lubavitcher Rebbes: A Literary Edifice of the 20th Century’
Naftali Loewenthal lectures in Jewish Spirituality at University College London’s Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies. He is author of Communicating the Infinite: the Emergence of the Habad School (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1990) and his forthcoming book is Hasidism beyond Modernity, Studies in Habad Thought and History, recently published by the Littman Library.

15:45 Dr. Israel Sandman, University College London
Israel Sandman is a Fellow at the Hebrew & Jewish Studies Department at University College London and an expert on medieval Jewish philosophy and manuscripts.

16:15 Professor Edwin Seroussi
‘The musical poetry of Rabbi Israel Najara in Europe’
Edwin Seroussi is Director, Jewish Music Research Centre and Chairperson, Department of Musicology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

RSVP for lunch: info@oxfordchabad.org

Participants may attend all or any part of the programme.

All are welcome!