ANNUAL CONFERENCE CANCELED | ONLINE ROUND TABLE

MESSAGE FROM EMILE SCHRIJVER, CHAIR OF THE AEJM BOARD

Dear members of AEJM:

I sincerely hope this finds all of you well and dealing with the crisis as well as you can.

The last few days two major topics have occupied the board of AEJM; the planned annual conference in Moscow in November and an initiative to intensify the contact between Jewish museums in Europe.

ANNUAL CONFERENCE CANCELED
I regret to have to let you know that we have decided to cancel this year’s annual conference in Moscow. There are just too many uncertainties. We will certainly return to Moscow once the world returns to normal, but for now we can only thank our Russian colleagues, especially Liya Chechik, for their continued willingness to host us in a better future. We are now considering alternatives for this year’s conference, the most likely being that in the course of this year we will organise a number online meetings, dedicated to selected specialised topics.

ONLINE ROUNDTABLE ON 6 OR 7 MAY, 3 PM, TO BE ANNOUNCED
In order to experiment with such a new practice, we will start with an online roundtable discussion, for which we have invited a number of colleagues in leadership positions from different European museums, who will discuss the current crisis with the AEJM board. The definitive date is still to be established and depends on the availability of our invitees.

The overall length of the online event will not extend 75 minutes. AEJM members are cordially invited to watch the meeting online. We will record the meeting and decide to upload it to our website and/or Youtube after the meeting. The ca. ten participants will each start with a 300-word statement on the crisis and the way in which their institutions are affected by it and deal with it. After this we will start the discussion. The participants will be able to speak in Zoom, all spectators will be muted. Spectators can chat or mail with the moderator, who will then introduce comments into the meeting as appropriate.

More details regarding the online roundtable (date, zoom code, possibly registration), which will be hosted by our Moscow colleagues, will follow as soon as possible. For now we ask you to save both optional dates in your schedules.

Stay safe, and zay gesund!

Emile Schrijver

Photo header: Marco Caselli Nirmal