A Jewish Europe in Crisis

During the last 30 years, scholars have discussed the development both of a widening “Jewish Space” (Pinto 1996) and of new forms of “virtual Jewishness” (Gruber 2002). Both notions refer to different arenas of Jewish/non-Jewish co-construction and co-operation in the fields of cultural expression, heritage, and identity. These concepts were born in a European landscape that assumed the best to come. As Diana Pinto laid out in her by-now famous article in JPR Policy Paper, post-1989 Europe seemed to promise “an open, democratic, pan-European space” (Pinto 1996, 2), with peace between Israel and the Arab worlds, the Catholic Church’s amends toward Jewish Holocaust survivors, and the integration of the Holocaust into general European history.

Europe of the early 2020s is radically different, as Pinto herself pointed out during her keynote at our conference, “A Jewish Europe? Virtual and Real-Life Spaces in 21st Century Europe” in 2022, co-organized by the University of Gothenburg and the University of Southampton.Footnote 1 Today, the continent has already been a long-time home for right-wing parties, with their increasing influence on national and international politics, a scene of racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism, epitomized through terror attacks and a lack of empathy for the many non-European migrants who perish as they try to cross the Mediterranean Sea, as well as a setting for Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine that is a threat toward democracy as a whole. In addition, many Jews in Europe regard with apprehension the attempts of the Israeli government to reform the judicial system and its support for settler violence, while at the same time Jewish institutions and individuals question their future existence on the continent in view of rising antisemitism.

For Jews, the terror assault by Hamas on Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, Israel’s ensuing war on Gazan territory, and the rapid unleashing of antisemitic attacks on European Jews have further changed the face of Europe. Just as the early Israeli–Hamas conflict, Operation Protective Edge in 2014, created an outburst of violent antisemitism across Europe (Ben-Moshe 2015), the far-reaching consequences of today’s conflict demonstrate that European Jewish life is conditional. Studies show that antisemitism had already grown in various European countries since the 2010s (Jensen 2022, 2; Zoufalá 2014, 216–222). On top of this, by December 2023 antisemitic attacks had increased by several hundred percent following October 7.Footnote 2 The Israeli flag was burnt in front of Malmö’s synagogue in Sweden, and the Magen David was painted on private houses in Paris, just to mention two of thousands of incidents in the months following the terror attack. Across Europe, people are still self-censoring, not speaking Hebrew or wearing jewellery and clothes that might reveal their Jewish identity. In light of this, many Jews ask themselves whether Europe can offer them a secure home in the twenty-first century.

In the spirit of Pinto’s work, we argue that these challenges need to be addressed by non-Jews as well. All concerned societies, institutions, and individuals need to make an effort to create and develop Europe as a home for Jews and as an arena for fruitful Jewish/non-Jewish relations. Given the fact that “Europe’s Jewish population has dropped 60% in last 50 years” (Sherwood 2020), are we left with just a “European Route of Jewish heritage”? Or are there new and promising spatial options for “Being Jewish in 21st Century Central Europe”?

This special issue—originally planned in the wake of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic—offers insights into how contemporary European Jews (and non-Jews) use digital platforms as strategies to survive various types of crises. We are interested in how digital forms of communication shape, change, invigorate, and inhibit European Jewishness. It seems to us that the role of digital tools in facilitating social interaction during the isolating lockdown periods imposed during the pandemic underlines their imperative position in today’s societies, including Jewish communities. Hence, we see these digital spaces as a unique gateway into understanding the Jewish and non-Jewish sense and practice of (non-)belonging to today’s Europe. During the conference mentioned above, presenters from Europe, Asia, and North America explored case studies of recent or ongoing digital spaces, such as digital memorials and exhibitions, community events on YouTube, interreligious podcast productions, and cultural construction on Instagram. These examples showed the possibilities of digital modes in facilitating meetings across ethnic and religious groups. At the same time, the papers proved digital spaces to be as conflicted and contested as real-life spaces, with various wills, ideals, and desires in collision, demanding negotiations on questions of authority, belonging, and identity. For this special issue, we have gathered some of the papers delivered at the conference in May 2022 and asked contributors to explore European Jewish life through the relationship between digital and real-life encounters. Ultimately, and especially in light of today’s increasing antisemitism, we wonder whether these digital spaces can serve as a reminder that, despite the current crises, Jewish life in Europe will continue.

Jewish Spaces in Today’s Europe

It is clear that the Europe of today does not harbor the hopeful atmosphere of democratic freedom and border-crossing unity that prevailed in the 1990s. In terms of Pinto’s trajectories mentioned above that, to her, promoted such optimism 30 years ago, the role of Holocaust awareness seems to be the main aspect that has continued to expand. The dark heritage industry dedicated to commemorating the Holocaust is indeed steadily burgeoning, with the Swedish Holocaust Museum in Stockholm as but one of its latest additions. Former concentration camps and extermination camps continue to draw visitors, with Auschwitz-Birkenau reaching beyond 2 million annual visitors before the COVID-19 pandemic. Representations of an (often idealized) “authentic” Jewish culture can be found across Europe. For example, the former Jewish district of Kazimierz in Kraków has developed into a tourist destination, complete with cultural conferences and events set up (partly) by non-Jewish actors (Lehrer 2005). Magdalena Waligórska (2013), relatedly, emphasizes the role of Klezmer music in reviving, replicating, and reinventing today’s image of historical Jewish communities. At the same time, we have seen efforts to dissolve the memory of the Holocaust in a seemingly universalist and post-colonial relativism that finds common ground in the denial of Israel’s right to exist. As the educational role of sites related to the Holocaust becomes universalized, scholars worry that they do not even teach about the prevalence and danger of today’s antisemitism (Pearce et al. 2020). Clearly, while non-Jews play an active role in creating and solidifying the number of Jewish spaces across Europe, the latter do not ensure a successful integration of contemporary Jewish culture and everyday life, leaving majority populations without knowledge of how to detect antisemitism and Jewish minorities vulnerable to and unprotected from such attacks.

Furthermore, recent demographic studies portray a complex picture of today’s “Jewish Europe.” Statistically, the population dwindles due to antisemitism, migration, and intermarriage. Culturally, the sense of Jewishness grows stronger among younger generations (DellaPergola and Staetsky 2020). At the same time, apart from their integral role in the construction of Jewish spaces linked to the Holocaust across Europe, non-Jewish actors are even running and defining Jewish contemporary religious institutions in Germany (Tzuberi 2020). How do we interpret these findings? Was Bernard Wasserstein (1997) correct in raising an alarm about the future of Jewish life in Europe? Is non-Jewish involvement in cultural and religious institutions a threat to “Jewish Europe” or a means for its continued existence?

As mentioned above, the contributions to this special issue originally entered this scholarly debate from the perspective of a world changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. All of us recognized the role of digital spaces in upholding, continuing, and replacing collective practices—Shabbat meals, synagogue services, and seder celebrations—that took place before March 2020. While the digital world has enabled these kinds of platforms in the last two decades, pandemic regulations imposed them on the majority of the world’s Jewry from 2020 to 2022. As Europe now experiences another crisis, with the increasing antisemitism yet again threatening the existence of Jewish life, the question about the state of “Jewish Europe” that was prompted by the pandemic rings even truer. Analysis of the digital component of European Jewish spaces in the late 2010s and the early 2020s holds potential to lay bare the way spatial practices of Jewish/non-Jewish interactions might (not) dispute antisemitism and safeguard Jewish presence in Europe.

Situating “Europe” and “the Digital” in the Field of Jewish Spatiality

The development from traditional, text-based “Judaic Studies” to more open, modern, and interdisciplinary “Jewish Studies” at academic institutions across the continent can be regarded as an important part of the creation of the “Jewish space in Europe” discussed by Pinto (1996, 7). Influenced and sometimes enriched by the different—cultural, linguistic, performative, and indeed spatial—“turns” in the Humanities, Jewish Studies has embraced new methodological approaches, identified new sources, and tried to keep pace with the flow of theoretical innovations. This has been particularly fruitful in the area of Jewish spatial culture and history, as evidenced by the works of Charlotte Fonrobert and Vered Shemtov (2005) at Stanford University, by the collective and individual projects based within the “Makom” project at Potsdam University (Brauch et al 2008; Kümper et al. 2007), by Barbara Mann’s analysis of space and place in Jewish Studies (Mann 2012), and by the contributors to Simone Lässig and Mirjam Rürup’s (2017) edited volume on space and spatiality.

Work in this field has offered new insights into the construction and meaning of Jewish settlements (Ewence 2010), the specific conditions of life in rural areas and larger cities (Gromova et al 2015; Lässig and Rürup 2017), and the particular associations connected to notions such as “shtetl” or “ghetto” (Cheyette 2020; Schwartz 2019). Important studies have been dedicated to the cultural history of mobility, migration, and transnational aspects of Jewish life (Korbel 2021; Schlör 2024). Particular attention has been paid to the notion of border-crossing and to the relationships that Jewish individuals and communities developed with the city (Schlör 1999/1996; Schlör 2005; Mann 2012), the sea (Schlör 2009; Nocke 2012), the desert (Zerubavel 2019), the landscape (Lehrer and Meng 2015), the house (Bronner 2010), or the garden (Gov et al 2022; Kupferberg 2018). Interestingly, no single study has attempted to discuss the Jewish relationship to Europe as a conception of home.

This special issue takes a first step toward such a study. Recognizing that one way for a space to become infused with meaning is through human beings’ interaction with objects, ideas, and each other (Löw and Weidenhaus 2017, 557; Tuan 2011/1997, 102), we understand Europe as a location of multiple, versatile, and on-going meeting points. As such, these spaces are positioned on the “frontier” (Gilman 2003) or the “threshold” (Schlör 2017), offering Jews and non-Jews a “conceptual and physical arena where groups in motion meet, confront, alter, destroy, and build” (Gilman 2003, 15). It is “the very point where […] constructions, assumptions, negotiations, and representations of identity and difference take place” (Schlör 2017, 236). Such cultural borders exist for all European inhabitants. Language, religion, ethnicity, and nationality are negotiated across the continent, as well as European unity. Mats Andrén (2022, 2) even argues that the very concept of Europe is “intrinsically associated with unity and borders.” His assertion could guide us to understand the Jewish/non-Jewish co-construction of “Jewish spaces” as a European phenomenon in itself.

However, when Europe as a concept is approached by scholars in Jewish studies, threats to Jewish existence understandably remain in focus. Haim Fireberg, Olaf Glöckner, and Marcela Menachem Zoufalá (2020b, x) state that one of the main characteristics of European Jewish life is the “generally lower quality of life of Jewish communities” imposed by the various faces of antisemitism. Contributions to their edited volume paint a rather dim picture of a numerically small and creatively hollow European Jewry, culturally overtaken by non-Jews (Fireberg et al 2020a). Antisemitism, particularly in relation to right-wing movements, Islamism, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, has emerged as the conceptual border (frontier or threshold) that sparks negotiations of Jewish belonging to Europe (Ben-Moshe 2015; Zoufalá 2014). However, in a follow-up edited volume published in 2023, Menachem Zoufalá and Glöckner (2023a, 2) show more optimism; while European Jews still encounter “new threat scenarios […] this collective monograph abundantly testifies that Jewish cultures and religious traditions are witnessing a unique and unforeseen rise.” The anthropological research of Jewish communities in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Germany that forms the base for their edited volume highlights a Jewish sense of belonging through reconciliatory processes with Vatican and Christian majorities, as well as creative cultural co-constructions, although national claims of tolerance toward Jews are mistrusted (Menachem Zoufalá and Glöckner 2023b). Clearly, “Jewish Europe” is not on a one-way trip toward extinction. What role might the digital world play in its survival?

Research in the last decade has demonstrated the importance and centrality of digital practices in facilitating familial, collegial, and global networks, meeting points, and communities. Dov Winer (2019) names online resources as imperative for the cultural and religious practice of the worldwide Jewry, intrinsic as they are with Jewish real-life practices. In fact, cyberspace is not only complementing the in-real-life (IRL) dimension of cultural construction and religious performance but also opens up new pathways for the practice and memory of European Jewish culture. Digital spaces are nowadays known to influence how Jewish individuals engage with their past and their identity. For example, the possibilities of sharing and commenting on various topics via social networking medias, such as Facebook, have altered the way generations impacted by the Holocaust deal with translocated identities, lost family members, and trauma, turning silence into an emotionally shared experience of nostalgia, commemorative rituals, and recovery (Faro 2015; Menyhért 2017; Schlör 2023). In the case of Ladino, Michal Held (2010) argues that digital spaces provide a spatial (albeit imagined) anchor—in her words, a “Digital Home-Land”—of its culture in lieu of the geographical homeland long ago lost by its diaspora. Taking her idea further, Carlos Yebra López (2021) understands the multimodal activities of these “re-assembled” ethnolinguistic communities as a “reterritorialization” of the Sephardic world, thus conceptualizing digital spaces as a basis for a national community.

Yebra López could not have issued a stronger argument for digital communicative platforms as just another space in and through which human beings co-construct and defend the shape of their existence. Furthermore, the versatile, creative, and community-building aspects of digital spaces were highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic as the Jewish world strove to maintain its ritual practices. As numerous contributions to an earlier special issue on “COVID-19 and Contemporary Jewry” in this journal (Hartman 2021) attest, some religious communities allowed for, or were forced to become flexible with, the formation of a digital minyan to ensure the practice of rituals such as the recitation of Kaddish and the observance of Passover, and these social gatherings sometimes even fostered a stronger sense of Jewishness and belonging than their IRL counterparts (Cooper 2021; Langer 2021; Trencher 2021; Yares and Avni 2021). These snapshots into how cyberspace helped Jewish life to survive, and in some ways thrive, during a crisis such as the pandemic assure us that it is timely and vital to focus on the very nature of the digital world and how it aids, changes, or hinders spaces of European Jewish history and culture.

It would no longer be provocative to argue, as we do, that digital spaces are not mere stand-in platforms for IRL gatherings. The digital world is clearly integral to what it means to be human, not only reflecting but also affecting the fabric of reality. But despite the irrefutable importance of cyberspace, little research has offered insight into how it is entwined with, builds on, and extends meanings of European “Jewish spaces” (with few but notable exceptions, such as Bareither 2021). In what ways is the digital world sha** the conceptualization, understanding, and existence of Jewish spaces? What new (or familiar) meanings are co-constructed or disputed by Jews and non-Jews as the digital component is added to urban commemoration and co-religious gatherings? And what can digital activities performed in relation to “Jewish spaces” unveil about Jewish belonging in today’s Europe?

Defining the Virtuality of “Jewish Spaces”

This special issue’s focus on digital spaces and their relationship to real-life practices taps into our field’s approach to virtuality and authenticity. Ruth Ellen Gruber, who coined the aforementioned (and often misunderstood) concept of “virtual Jewishness,” defines it as an “intense, visible, vivid [Jewish] presence in places where few Jews live today” (Gruber 2014, 336), emphasizing both the relational process of Jewish/non-Jewish cultural co-construction, and the Jewish past as a product that comes in manifold shapes and sizes. In her keynote during our conference, she emphasized that the notion of virtuality should not be flattened into something “fake.” Instead, she defined virtuality as the creation of something new, something that should also be understood as “authentic” and “real.”Footnote 3 Similarly, in relation to Holocaust memory, Victoria Grace Walden (2022, 626) argues that virtuality is not a technological medium or an absolute space but an affective process that allows the visitor to engage “in the processes of memory by necessitating their full-body movement in ways that place them in an interstitial space between pasts and presents from which they must negotiate the relationship between them.”

Gruber and Walden refer to virtuality as a productive practice and a relational process, respectively, that occurs as the Jewish past(s) is actively encountered and related to contemporary life. To them, virtuality is about a (Jewish or non-Jewish) person’s conscious and bodily engagement and interaction with Jewish cultures and involves actors taking “responsibility for memory” (Walden 2022, 630). Echoing Gruber’s thesis, Walden even suggests that virtual spaces do not have to come in digital forms. Can we extend the same understanding to a virtual “Jewish space,” anchoring its defining characteristic in the active, creative involvement it is supposed to facilitate rather than a digital mode? While other definitions of virtuality make sure to situate it in the digital world, thus stressing the symbiosis between online and offline spheres, they simultaneously underline its inherent characteristics of personal choice, novel interpretation, voluntary participation, and individual empowerment, which ultimately lead to redefinitions of what it means to be Jewish (Margolis 2023, 202–203). Virtuality, and the (digital or IRL) space in which it develops, should then be approached as a socially dynamic and culturally authentic process. In this sense, the virtual space is as real as the hardware of screens (and headphones, microphones, virtual reality glasses, and other gadgets) that facilitate its relational processes.

Yet, Pinto and Gruber’s concepts of “Jewish spaces” and “virtual Jewishness,” respectively, are predominantly based on relations to a European Jewish past that no longer exists, having been brutally and relentlessly extinguished. How can the needs of present-day Jewish communities, who have inherited such a traumatic past, become part of the equation? Within Pinto and Gruber’s terminology lies a hope for the relational possibilities that the creative process of Jewish/non-Jewish cultural co-construction might lead to. In an extension of her original thesis, Pinto (1999) wrote that the Jewish space:

Is an open cultural and even political agora where Jews intermingle with others qua Jews, and not just as citizens. It is also the place where even a few Jews can obtain the highest resonance, since it will carry their voices and identities much further than their sheer numbers would allow, further into the very core of their respective societies. It is also the place where debates should emerge, where opinions can be confronted, tensions resolved or first of all brought out in the open because the Jewish Space could not exist without a democratic pluralist space. It is its crown jewel, perhaps a useful model for other ethnic, religious, cultural spaces that must still come into being. The Jewish Space may be the first in a long array, the first because of the extensive and historical presence of Jews on the continent.

The space is destined to grow and to even take over the more concrete and predictable (even if highly polemical) Jewish Spaces such as museums and memorials. For it is a virtual space, present anywhere where Jews and non-Jews interact on Jewish themes or where a Jewish voice can make itself heard. It will be a way of being and of living and not a way of commemorating death through the Holocaust. It goes without saying that this space is open to all; it is controlled neither by Jews, nor by non-Jews, but rather it is a meeting point. Jews must learn to navigate in it just as their non-Jewish interlocutors do. Out of these interactions new symbioses will be born, new identities composed while older ones can also be strengthened.


Written in 1999, Pinto similarly does not conflate virtuality with digital activities but highlights the social interaction, the non-authoritative setting, and the democratic function that, according to her, defines it. As is clear from the quote above, she had high hopes for the impact of the interethnic relations that might be nurtured through “Jewish spaces,” viewing them as possible vanguards against racism and fascism. Today, almost 30 years later, as the European world has changed through digitalization, increasing nationalism, and rising antisemitism, the question of the relationship between “Jewish spaces” and the creativity and openness offered by virtuality seems all the more poignant. How are digital activities and physical places, as they intersect in “Jewish spaces,” related to such a relational understanding of virtuality? Might the insertion of digital practices into the Jewish/non-Jewish co-construction of “Jewish spaces” serve as a vitalization of the latter’s virtual characteristic? Or are digital platforms removing the virtual component of “Jewish spaces,” thus leaving “Jewish Europe” in a poorer state?

Outline of the Special Issue

To tackle these questions, contributors to this special issue have examined case studies of “Jewish spaces” with a digital component. Their analysis of Jewish/non-Jewish interactions connected to digital memorials, online communities, digital exhibitions, and virtual events paint a contrasting picture. On the one hand, Jewish/non-Jewish relations via digital interfaces seem to partly grow out of the idea that the latter are uniquely formed to allow different ethnic and religious groups to intersect and mingle. Still, recent political changes in Europe pose questions about whether digital “Jewish spaces” are indeed used as their creators hope for and imagine. They provided continuity and support during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, but are, on the other hand, as fragile to antisemitic attacks as real-life spaces, and run the same risk as IRL meetings of not facilitating intersectional relations. In other words, while exploring the virtual possibilities of digital spaces, the following articles also account for challenges and limitations that deserve our attention, particularly in relation to a Jewish future in Europe.

A digital memorial of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Łomża serves as the first case study. Combining data and life stories from memoirs, family letters, testimonies from Holocaust survivors, a Yizkor book, and telephone directories, Kyra Schulman explains how she—together with an American family of a Holocaust survivor from the Polish town and a local historian and teacher—mapped places and memories related to the Jewish life that had once existed. Proposing that the endless space of the virtual world holds potential to allow various memories to exist in tandem, Schulman simultaneously underlines that “the digital topography served as a tool to negotiate and express diverging agendas.” The Jewish and non-Jewish collaborators of the digital memorial had different audiences and social priorities in mind, which led to contestations on which maps, narratives, and places of memory to use and include. Nevertheless, and contrary to similar contests of memory in the physical world, Schulman stresses that in using a digital interface the memorial of Łomża could expand and shift to incorporate solutions that suited everyone’s agenda. As “a kind of technological heterotopianism,” a digital site that mirrors Łomża “from its past to its present,” the memorial carries multiple narratives of Jewish Polish history. More importantly, since no one has the “home court advantage” in the digital sphere, Schulman poignantly showcases that “the virtual world stimulates a world where Poles and Jews are neighbors again.” In her case study, the digitization of a Jewish space does not only favor the creative and co-constructive processes associated with virtuality. It also offers redemption and a hope for Jewish/non-Jewish cohabitation in Europe.

Susanne Korbel dives deeper into the relationship between urban space making and the digital world, arguing that their negotiation should be understood as a “new spatial practice.” To explain “how a mutual back and forth between online and physical spaces fosters sociability,” Korbel takes the example of a Hebrew street sign that was anonymously put up on Taborstraße in Vienna in the summer of 2017. Located in Leopoldstadt, the historical center of Jewish life in Vienna, the sign immediately caught attention and its removal by local authorities caused upstir online. In the end, protests via Facebook and Instagram groups resulted in the reinstallation of the street sign. Its unveiling ceremony hosted members from both Jewish and non-Jewish communities and was reported on by local newspapers. Yet, as Korbel attests, the debate surrounding the Hebrew sign “was a beginning rather than an end of a hybrid way of constructing Jewish urban spaces”: it not only created a global digital community that now collects information on similar street signs around the world but also adds layers to how Leopoldstadt is perceived today. The street sign’s combined physical and digital presence acted, and still acts, as a unifier of Jewish and non-Jewish actors and cultures in Vienna: It brought the Jewish past into contact with everyday urban life, it digitally organized people with various backgrounds and identifications to strategize for its continued presence, and it now serves as an icon and meeting place for virtual and IRL tourists. In underlining the street sign’s journey into being, Korbel emphasizes that digital platforms can amplify and solidify material manifestations of Jewish pasts in contemporary European cities, a process that hinges on a Jewish/non-Jewish relationship that is built upon creativity and empowerment.

While the first two articles highlight the possibilities of the digital world to, in seemingly organic ways, serve a virtual Jewish/non-Jewish relationship—in the co-constructive, democratic, and immersive sense proposed by Gruber, Pinto, and Walden—Dekel Peretz turns our eyes to cracks that reveal the medium’s challenges in facilitating such co-creations. In his article, Peretz examines virtual events that were organized during the COVID-19 pandemic via communicative interfaces to prompt or continue Jewish–Muslim dialogues in Germany. Promoting encounters and dialogues, the various community and entertainment programs studied in his article acted as “an expression of a common search for belonging as minorities in a religiously and culturally Christian Europe.” Although their collective goal was to reshape the meaning of Europe to include Judaism and Islam on equal terms, Peretz shows that both the nature of digital interfaces and the objectives of institutions are prone to popularization and politicization that often obstruct co-construction. For example, interfaith dialogues promoted by religious and communal institutions seldom reached an audience beyond previous networks, their democratic social landscapes were already in place before the pandemic, and “online spaces are also susceptible to Christian interference.” Similarly, podcasts created by institutions aimed for harmony and conviviality, not dialogue. Peretz finds that mainly virtual events organized by private people, without connection to institutions, were able to “connect hitherto separated bubbles and [allow] the young creators to take a conscious heads-on approach in challenging discourses of Othering.” In other words, virtual events planned by institutions largely enabled encounters, not cultural co-construction. In this sense, the article reminds us that the digital sphere does not inherently promote “radically independent spaces.” The act of moving events to digital communicative interfaces did not in itself create better opportunities for Jewish/non-Jewish virtual processes during the pandemic. The digital world remains connected to the major discourses of today’s European sociopolitical landscape and Peretz directs our gaze toward how these attachments shape and potentially hinder Jewish/non-Jewish relations.

And yet, the digital sphere continues to be a powerful tool for some institutions to render a forgotten Jewish past visible. In the fourth article of this special issue, Éva Kovacs and Kinga Frojimovic explain, analyze, and contextualize a digitized interactive map, created and hosted by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, of Hungarian Jewish slave laborers that were forced to live in Vienna in 1944 and 1945. Collecting and georeferencing data from various archives, including the Jewish Community of Vienna, protocols from People’s Court, and lists of transportation compiled by local Nazi authorities, as well as 278 eyewitness accounts, the website functions as both a guide to a forgotten past and a prompt for further research. Equally important for Kovacs and Frojimovic, the interactive website imprints life stories, memories, and voices of a largely unknown category of Jewish Holocaust victims onto Vienna’s well-known topography. Hungarian Jewish slave laborers regularly visited Schönbrunn Palace and Gardens, Vienna’s Central Cemetery, and Wienerwald, as well as local shops and personal homes of Viennese inhabitants. They, and the yellow stars and wooden clogs that they wore, “were part of the cityscape,” but only a few commemorative plates exist of this urban Holocaust. In reminding visitors that “Vienna’s traditional landmarks also became places of suffering,” they and the website strive to produce an alternative reading of the city. While not powerful enough to alter the general narrative of everyday life in Vienna during the Second World War, the online presence of this forgotten Jewish past has facilitated commemorative events by local authorities, schools, and relatives of Holocaust survivors, thus prompting the embodiment of new layers of meaning in the urban landscape.

Finally, Phil Alexander takes us to the Gorbals in Glasgow, an urban area of notably less historical trauma. Although the Gorbals is arguably nowadays as empty of Jews as Łomża, the void was created by social mobility and demolishment rather than persecution and genocide. Still, the silence of this Scottish Jewish past—emphasized by the physical reconstruction of the district—has solicited digital responses that feed on historical and contemporary representations of historical Gorbals as an exotic and romanticized slum area. Alexander traces this trope through ethnographic interviews, memoirs, novels, and, finally, newspapers from the beginning of the twentieth century, portraying how “a rich seam of memory meets a contemporary physical limbo simultaneously paralleled by a lively online discourse.” He shows how the “physical limbo”—a lack of historical buildings, heritage tours, and museums—of the Jewish past gives rise to a digital imagined community. Photographs, historical maps, and memories are shared and discussed online via libraries and archives, and people have been inspired to create photography books and three-dimensional models of the Gorbals. The case study’s likeness with the Polish and Austrian Holocaust-related case studies above is curious and gives much food for thought. Clearly, as Alexander discusses, memories and representations of a Jewish life long gone evoke an “understanding of virtuality that, while linked to absence, in fact suggests new ways of engaging with contemporary physical space.” The fact that literally nothing remains of historical Gorbals seems to have been a vital factor for the facilitation of virtual processes, such as cultural co-construction and digital tools that enable encounters with a Jewish past.

With this in mind, might we argue that the digital platforms and virtual processes linked to Jewish pasts in Berlin, Glasgow, Łomża, and Vienna and discussed in this special issue hinge on an absence of absolute topographies or infrastructures? Whether derived from trauma or not, a lack of contemporary Jewish life, visible connections to a lost past, and a historically related urban landscape, or indeed pandemic shutdowns, seem to have spurred Jewish/non-Jewish co-construction, facilitated through digital mediums and leading to innovative online solutions that put (digital and IRL) visitors in contact with Europe’s Jewish history. In turn, these online interfaces add another spatial dimension to today’s urban framework: The reconstruction of a Jewish past long gone complicates present-day understandings of local societies and encourages an inclusion of Jewish history into European Christian narratives. Catering for geographical areas or societal processes that have not (yet) been reached by a “Jewish Space,” digital spaces seem to function in lieu of physical notifiers or prompters. In so doing, they provide (Jewish and non-Jewish) individuals with a platform that enables an interchange of memories, a discussion on the role of Jewish history in local societies, and sometimes also an amplification of Jewish presence—either in the mind of visitors or as physical signs in the urban landscape.

But do they guard against antisemitism and safeguard Jewish presence in Europe? Do they emphasize Europe as a Jewish home or articulate further questions about the future of the European Jewry? While the case studies presented in this special issue give us cause to hope for a sociability between Jews and non-Jews in and through online spaces in situations or locations where IRL meetings are difficult or impossible, they also ask us to pause and consider the challenges that come with digital interfaces. Online events and projects are defined by their creators. As social products, they stand the same risks as absolute spaces of being performative and symbolic, encouraging only encounters rather than relations and co-construction. Cyberspace is not in itself offering a platform defined by creativity, openness, democracy, personal choice, and empowerment. Its potential for virtual processes can never be taken for granted. Although highlighting the vitality and liveliness of digital “Jewish spaces” in ensuring a continuous presence of Jewishness in Europe, contributions to this special issue also remind us that “Jewish spaces”—in any shape or form—are both fraught with the complexities and challenges of contemporary sociopolitical landscapes and bound to societal hierarchies and injustices. Nevertheless, digital spaces offer yet another arena in which Jews and non-Jews can and do meet. As this special issue shows, when these interactions happen, virtual processes of co-construction—of memory, of identities, of urban landscapes, and of Europe—might also take place.