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World Jewish News
International Conference on the Jewish and Slavic Traditions
02.01.2009
The international conference "Myth-Folklore-History in the Jewish and Slavic Cultural Traditions" has taken place on the premises of the RAS Presidium. It was organized by the Center of Judaica Researchers and Teachers in Universities "Sepher", the RAS Institute of Slavic Studies, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Comittee.
As the director of the Sepher Center, Victoria Mochalova, told our correspondent, these conferences dedicated to Jewish and Slavic folklore have been taking place since 1995. The current conference is the twelfth. "We choose a topic, and begin comparative studies," Mochalova noted.
She also underscored that she likes these December conferences more than the "yearly" large conference at the end of January — beginning of February, "It is smaller, more homey here, 30 or 40 people instead of 300. Everything is united by one topic, there is no need to run from section to section."
Mochalova noted that a certain backbone of constant participants has formed through these years. This conference, though small, has full right to be called "International": researchers from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, USA and Israel are among the participants.
The conference began with a session dedicated to the memory of the first chairman of the Academic Council, Rashid Kaplanov, who died a year ago. His successor, Dean of the Language and Literature Faculty of the Maimonid Academy Mikhail Chlenov, shared his memories of working together with Kaplanov within the framework of the half-legal Jewish Historico-Etnographical Comission, which worked throughout the 1980's.
Other speakers also turned to the memory of Rashid Kaplanov. The Head of the Judaica Department of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Moscow Humanitarian University Arkady Covelman, when speaking in his report "Judaism After Davod" on the image of the wise-man crying before his death, counted the prince Kaplanov among them.
The reports of the participants were dedicated to such diverse topics as folk myth creation, the appearance of stories from the Torah and the Tanach in Slavic works of art and literature, the image of Moses, the memory of the heresy of the Judaizers and its depictions, the views of the revisionist Zionist Zeus Zhabotinsky, and even to such an exotic subject as the creation of the myth of the secret wife of Stalin Roza Kaganovich.
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