The Annual Spiro Tribute Lecture is sponsored by the Pears Foundation to celebrate the tremendous work of Robin (z”l) and Nitza Spiro and their contribution to Jewish cultural life in Britain over the last 40+ years.
We are delighted that this year’s speaker is Professor Eli Vakil, head of the Memory and Amnesia lab at the Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar Ilan University.
Professor Vakil will be discussing remembering and forgetting and their implications for collective memory.
Included in our calendar are private memorial days in memory of our dear departed relatives, and public memorial days for traumatic events in the life of the Nation: events from the distant past such as the destruction of the Temple and going into exile (9th of Av), or from more recent history (Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day), or the more contemporary IDF Memorial Day. But have we stopped to ask what Remembrance implies? Is it something beyond simply remembering a departed person or the trauma that happened? Does this memory have consequences for our lives, or will we return to our routine until the next memorial day, once the ceremony is over?
Research on memory teaches us that personal memory has a variety of functions: First and foremost, a survival role, but that is not all. Memory enables the formation of our identity, allows us to develop as a human society in terms of our daily well-being, but also in terms of developing our moral identity. In addition, recent studies show that forgetfulness is not a malfunction of the nervous system, but rather plays an essential and complementary role in memory processes. Forgetting plays an important role in coping emotionally with life's events, and beyond that forgetting is cognitively essential, by allowing for abstract thinking.
As a neuroscientist dealing with the processes of memory and forgetting, Prof Vakil will apply accumulated scientific knowledge about the individual's memory to understanding memory processes as a nation. Like an individual, a proper balance between memory and forgetting is required for a nation to function properly. And finally, we will discuss the implications of these insights regarding memorial rituals in general, and with regard to our memory of the Holocaust in particular.
