Conference Celebrating 70 years of Leo Baeck Institutes – “Baeck Home”

Home – a word that encapsulates a world. A lifespan of legacies and memories, sights and sounds and smells. We chose the theme of »Home« to delve into the multiple contexts of this concept in the history of German-speaking Jewish communities. Leaving the bounds of our own research home in Jerusalem, we set forth to ask: What is home in the Jewish-German context? What are its locations, its contexts? What are its customs and practices? And how does it attest to the experiences of migration, war, return, and generational gaps over the years? And what’s left of home in our hearts?

The notion of home spans disciplines—sociology, psychology, geography, architecture, philosophy, history, and spatial and emotional theory. It is at once a material structure, a state of mind, and a social environment mediating between private life and the public sphere. It is deeply personal and fundamentally communal.

Our reflections on home are inseparable from current realities. In Israel, many lost their homes or were uprooted in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the war that followed. At the same time, we cannot overlook the devastation and displacement in Gaza, where countless Palestinians remain unable to return to their destroyed homes.

In Baeck Home, we seek to examine both the stable and the fragile, the rooted and the uprooted: the home that shelters, the home that is lost, and the home that lives on in memory and longing.