by Dorothee C. von Tippelskirch-Eissing
Since the last Newsletter from March 2018, PCCA has had two important events:
We have organized another PCCA conference, directed by Louisa D. Brunner in Den Dolder in the Netherlands, August 30th – September 3rd 2018 under the title:
“Exclusion, Resentment and the Return of the Repressed. Europe in a Globalized World.”
It was the 11th conference in the series of the so-called Nazareth conferences that PCCA has organized since 1994. In this newsletter, you can read the director’s report, that Louisa Brunner has written after the conference.
Secondly, we had our annual meeting of the board of PCCA in November 2018 in Berlin. We could welcome in Berlin the following board members of PCCA: Louisa D. Brunner, Mira Erlich-Ginor, H. Shmuel Erlich, Christoph Freytag. Oren Kaplan and Nadine Tchelebi. Unfortunately, we had two cancellations in the last moment, from our colleagues M. Fakhry Davids and Jona Rosenfeld, both who could not travel to be with us. We missed them in our work and are looking forward to seeing them in our next board meeting, which we will hold in November 2019.
Maybe the most important outcome of this past board meeting has been the decision to dare changing for the time being the rhythm of our conferences.
In the past, those who have followed us know that we have been organizing a conference in this series every two years, with only two exceptions, one in the beginning after the first two conferences in Nazareth (1994 and 1996) – the other one after the conference in 2000. The death of one of our founders, Rafael Moses, and of the first director of the conferences, Eric Miller, called for a longer phase in order to develop a new orientation for our work. This was eventually found in 2004 with the new director Anton Obholzer at a new venue in Cyprus.
Now we have decided to have the next conference already this year, in 2019, that is 80 years after the onset of World War II, and 25 years after the first conference. It will take place again in Cyprus, under the directorate of Mira Erlich-Ginor and her associate director Olya Khaleelee, from Sept 11th – 16th 2019, with the title:
80 years later: Will history repeat itself? The Fallout of the Holocaust over Those Affected. Looking Back, Moving Forward.
You will find more information about the conference on the website created specifically for this conference: http://pcca2019.org.
At the same time, we have decided to continue the project started in 2018 with the conference in the Netherlands. This project will also continue to take place in 2020. Louisa Brunner will be the Conference Director. We shall inform you about further developments in the future.
As the core of our work in both projects we have discussed intensively: “Society and Trauma”, which we see actually at work in so many Societies in Europe and beyond. Maybe the fact that at this moment, we propose a conference every year reflects our worries and the fact that it is urgent to create a space for a better understanding of our societal developments in so many countries.
It has not been decided yet whether we might continue in this rhythm! But we wish to take seriously the experiential character of the work that PCCA is calling for and proposing to everybody who wishes to join our work.
Another aspect of our engagement will be the change in our way to keep you informed through our Newsletter. Nadine Tchelebi, the editor of the newsletter, has proposed a structure, and we will be sending out the Newsletter in a new format three times a year, in March, July and November.
Concerning the group of Supporters of PCCA, we have chosen to experiment and to invite more people to join us. We do have a steering group in Berlin, consisting of Ekkehard Raehmer and Bettina Jesberg and the chairperson of PCCA. We would like to create a network of supporters in the different countries from where we have already received members for our conferences. But in principle, everybody who wishes to support our work, to promote it through various ways (papers, lectures, talking about it, recommending it to others and / or financial contributions, donations), is welcome.
Please have a look at the letter of Bettina Jesberg and Ekkehard Raehmer in this Newsletter.
As you might know, PCCA has been registered as a charity. Therefore, all financial contributions are tax deductible. We might contact you in situations where we do have a specific project on the way and will be grateful for financial support in order to be able to do our work.
If you have the impression of some new energy and freshness, you are right. I think we have been working intensively for a while on our transgenerational transition, involving younger colleagues in the work of the board of PCCA, and at the same time trying to enlarge the broad spectrum of where we come from in different ways, personally and professionally.
We felt very content all together about this new energy, the fact that people were sitting around the table who reacted in surprising ways, so that we would not know in advance what the contribution might be. We enjoyed these aspects. And at the same time, we understand that this transition needs to be understood and worked with. Thus, we have been working on issues like trust and mistrust. We think that it is on one side an issue for our working group, but at the same time, we discussed this issue in relation to our European situation, the societies and even globally.
We need to manage more differences also among us, which we consider a relevant part of our work.
In this sense, we invite you to join us in our learning, inviting you to register for our upcoming conference in Cyprus.
We will be happy to see you there for a new experience of learning about our societal reality and conflicts 80 years after the onset of World War II, where we are still dealing with the fallout of the Holocaust potentially afflicting individuals and nations, determining anxieties, modes of coping, interpersonal relationships, as well as national and international dynamics.
Berlin, March 2019
Dorothee von Tippelskirch-Eissing
Chairperson of PCCA e.V.