Aidan Josiah Spector Delgass

VISITING SCHOLAR INFO

PROJECT TITLE: House of the World to Come: The Continued Legacy of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe through Plants and Their Maintenance

HOME INSTITUTION: Stanford University

DATES IN RESIDENCE: 24 of June - 29 of June 2024

YEAR: Completed third year of undergraduate

PROGRAMS:
Pursuing a B.A. in Slavic Studies in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Pursuing a B.S. in Geophysics from the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

E-MAIL: delgass@stanford.edu

SUPERVISOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF RZESZÓW: dr Joachim Popek

Project:

The project, which carries the working title "House of the World to Come: The Continued Legacy of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe through Plants and Their Maintenance," intends to look at Jewish Cemeteries as sites with evolving relationships to territory, land, and the environment that involve both Jewish and non-Jewish communities. At this stage, I (Aidan J.S. Delgass) visited Rzeszów and the surrounding region in order to collect images and primary accounts of the states of several cemeteries in various dynamics of management. The purpose of this project is to both shed light on the struggle to preserve these sites and their histories, as well as to take a multidisciplinary approach in generating knowledge and meaning from them — namely through ethnobotanical and historical analyses. "House of the World to Come" frames the Jewish cemetery not as a space disconnected from a surrounding non-Jewish world, but rather as an ever-shifting face of both its cultural and physical surroundings.