Leo Baeck Institute London

The latest feature in the Leo Baeck Institute’s Meet the Fellows series introduces Ágnes Kelemen, whose doctoral research examined the experience of Hungarian Jewish émigré students. Her first monograph Hungarian Students in Exile: Jews, Leftists, and Women, 1920–1938 is based on her doctoral thesis and is forthcoming with Indiana University Press.

Can you briefly describe your doctoral research project for a non-specialist audience? What inspired you to pursue this topic?

Congratulations to Amitai Glass, from LBI’s 2023/4 fellowship cohort, on his article in Jewish Studies Quarterly. In this piece, he looks at late antique debates on fasting in Sasanian Mesopotamia.

The article examines a comparative discussion in the Babylonian Talmud and Aphrahat’s Demonstration 3 on fasting. It adds to the study of Jewish and broader religious thought in late antiquity.

This is another welcome publication by an LBI fellow, and a further contribution to the field.

On 28 July 1929, Yehuda Bacon was born in Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, into an Orthodox Jewish family. He turns 97 this year. That he survived to this age is, by any measure, extraordinary.

In September 1942, aged just 13, he was deported to Theresienstadt. In December 1943 he and his father were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he pulled wagons laden with the bodies of the dead and drew secretly on scraps of paper, hiding his drawings before inspections. His father was murdered in the gas chambers in 1944. On 18 January 1945 he left Auschwitz on the Death March and was liberated at Gunskirchen, near Mauthausen, on 5 May 1945, aged fifteen.

On July 13, LBI London welcomed Dr Susanne Frane and Martine Brucker from the German Embassy in London to our new offices at Senate House, and to the LBI Library at its new home in Senate House Library. Dr Frane is Head of the Culture and Education Section at the Embassy, while Martine Brucker is the Desk Officer for Arts, Culture and Heritage. The visit offered a chance to see the Institute’s new premises and to learn more about the library collection now available to researchers in Bloomsbury.

From July 13 to 15, the campus of Birkbeck, University of London, was filled with illuminating conversations, discussions and debates about Space and Place in Jewish Studies. This year’s conference of the British and Irish Association of Jewish Studies (BIAJS), was proudly supported by the Leo Baeck Institute London, which calls Birkbeck its home. The diverse programme brought together papers on Jewish space, history, memory and identity. Sessions ranged from explorations of the borders of ancient Israel and conceptions of space in medieval Jewish philosophy to German debates on Jewish emancipation.

English Heritage has unveiled a new blue plaque at 49 Hallam Street in Marylebone, marking Stefan Zweig’s former London home. The plaque recognises the Austrian Jewish writer’s years in exile in London, where he lived from 1936 to 1939 after fleeing Nazi Austria.

The Leo Baeck Institute London will be well represented at the British Association for Jewish Studies (BIAJS) 2026 conference, which takes place 13 - 15 July at Birkbeck, University of London. The programme brings together papers on Jewish space, history, memory and identity.

On 7 July 1860, Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia, into a Jewish family. He went on to become one of the greatest composers and conductors in the history of Western music, a figure whose nine completed symphonies pushed the Romantic tradition to its outer limits.

Yet Mahler spent much of his life navigating the deep tensions of German-Jewish identity. In 1897, he converted to Catholicism, in large part to secure the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera. It was a compromise that haunted him. Even after his conversion, antisemitic critics dismissed his music as rootless and un-German. His own late works, above all Das Lied von der Erde and the unfinished Tenth Symphony, carry a profound sense of longing and of not quite belonging.