Lotte Sophie Groenendijk speaks about her presentation and experience of the "Care and the Jewish Experience" Conference
In September 2025 Leiden University hosted a greatly successful academic conference "Care and the Jewish Experience" organized by the Leiden Jewish Studies Network. Among our guests and presenters were academics from many universities, many disciplines and at different stages of their academic careers.
Among them was Lotte Sophie Groenendijk with the presentation "Places that Speak: Caring for Holocaust Remembrance Sites". Lotte Sophie, who graduated with a master’s degree in history at Leiden University and currently works as an educator at the Anna Frank House shared her insights and perspective on the conference.
What did you present on at the "Care and the Jewish Experience" Conference?
I had the honour to present about care in regards to historical significant locations; the title of my presentation was "Places that Speak: Caring for Holocaust Remembrance Sites". In this presentation, there was a special focus on the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and the Anne Frank House in the Netherlands. The constant negotiation between wanting to keep these sites visitor-friendly and safe, whilst also preserving these places and keeping them as historically original as possible, was a central theme in this research. I would also like to highlight the amazing, yet often unseen, work of the cleaning and general maintenance crews of such museums.
How did you experience the overall conference?
It was wonderful to see so many different disciplines and takes on the topic of "Care"! It was interesting to learn more outside of my own field as a historian, and the broad interpretation of "care" made for a diverse programme. To me, one of the highlights was definitely the presentation by Nasreen Javanjoo on the phenomenon known as "tradwifes". Hortus Botanicus made for an amazing venue, with its own academic significance. The closing lecture by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten on care during the Middle Ages was also very interesting and a worthy finale to a fruitful day.
How is "care" a useful prism to think about the past and our present?
Care is very significant throughout all of human history. Every being has experienced care, whether they are aware of the forms they experienced or not. The limits of research angles on the topic are wide; the care for historical sites, like I researched, is also a form of care that is worth thinking about. In a sense, the very act of researching a topic already shows care for the topic, which I found illuminating to think about. There is much more to care than just the literal act of consciously helping someone or something vulnerable; care is everywhere around us and always has been.