Vitebsk to host Limmud FSU Art Festival 12-14 September

VITEBSK, 10 September (BelTA) – Limmud FSU Art Festival will take place in Vitebsk on 12-14 September, BelTA learnt from the department for religion and ethnic affairs of the Vitebsk Oblast Executive Committee.

The conference Limmud (the word means “learning” in Jewish) will gather about 650 activists of Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, the UK, Israel, the United States and other countries. Among special guests will be outstanding actor Emmanuil Vitorgan, journalist and TV presenter Lev Novozhenov, poet Igor Irtenyev. Vitebsk is also expected to welcome Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Israel to Belarus Yosef Shagal.

The conference dedicated to the creativity, culture and art will comprise roundtables, lectures, trainings, excursions, master-classes, concerts, exhibitions and meetings. The three-day conference will include a total of about 120 events. The main venues of the conference will be the Belarusian theater Lyalka, the Art Museum and the Yanka Kupala Academic Drama Theater.

Belarus will host the conference for the second time and for the second time the participants of the forum will be welcomed in Vitebsk. The oblast executive committee stressed that this year Art Limmud will be held in a new format. The forum will be preceded by a number of events dedicated to founder of the state language of the Republic of Israel Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in Glubokoye (Ben-Yehuda’s bust was erected in a park of prominent countrymen) and Sharkovshchina District (on 11 September a tourist and information board in honor of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda will be unveiled in the agro-town Luzhki).

The organizer of the conference is the Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Associations and Communities.

The first Limmud Conference took place in England in the 1970s. The event was organized by a small group of volunteers. Forty people gathered for a couple of days to share their knowledge with each other. Annual Limmud Conferences are run in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Israel, the United States, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and other countries and gather thousands of participants. The first conference of the kind on the territory of the former USSR was held in Moscow in 2006.