Veltroyer is a performance ritual of grief, calling on traditional Yiddish land practices to mourn the loss of more-than-human worlds. The project emerges from an ongoing collaboration between Jerry Lieblich and Anna Lublina. Together, we’ve been exploring ritual and ceremony as performative practice and investigating traditional Yiddish cultural forms as ancestral groundwork for contemporary spirituality and aesthetics.

Our time at ID Frankfurt will mark the beginning of this project. It will give us time for research and to develop initial practices. We will begin by exploring Jewish rituals of grief. How do Jews grieve loss? What regional and temporal variations are there in these practices? What structures can hold the process of loss? What is the relationship to time? Space? The body? Isolation or collectivity? We are interested in seeing how these embodied traditions have shifted over time, and how they may disappear altogether.

We will also research Jewish land practices and conceptions of the natural world.  How does Judaism consider the lives of animals, plants, rivers? Where has Jewish culture drawn the line between “nature” and “culture”? How does it conceive the connections or borderlands between those two realms? What regional, folk, or non-doctrinaire practices exist within the tradition?

Once we have a foundation of research, we will begin to develop our own practices of grief and nature-connection. For instance, we can imagine writing obituaries for the severe loss of birds globally. An obituary for a specific species might be sung or danced in the rhythm of its birdcall. Practices of shrine-building, place-naming, listening, attending, laughing – in what ways can we practice our grief?