Next Year in Kraków? - The Polish-Jewish Heritage Fundation of

Peter Jassem, Toronto, July 21, 2015
Next Year in Kraków?
Jewish Carnival in the Former Capital of Poland
NOTES FROM THE 2015 FESTIVAL OF JEWISH CULTURE IN KRAKOW
This text is dedicated to Theodore Bikel, who died today
I have been at this festival a number of times and when it i ds do
at o e o’clock i the or i g o the day that it co es to a
end and I have been asked to go up on the stage and sing and I told the audience of thousands of people to be very still and very
quiet and to listen to the quiet and to the stillness because that is the stillness of the voices who are no longer with us, who could no
longer be with us, people who lived in this house and that one, in that one and in this house, and here their voice is gone and the only
oice that’s left is ours, i e, a d I ould si g Zog it key
ol, az du geyst de letst eg… : never say that you have walked the
final way because our steps proclaim we are still here.
Theodore Bikel
Two weeks ago I left the beautiful, magical city of Krakow, the city
which is over a thousand years old. It as ’t a eas departure as it
was preceded by almost a dozen days of long and cheerful line-up of
revels of the 25th annual Jewish Culture Festival, featuring over 300
events, including concerts, workshops, lectures, presentations,
gatherings, film screenings, exhibitions, sight-seeing tours, award
ceremonies, parties and more. They all took place in Krako ’s
Kazimierz district, once an independent city with mostly Jewish
inhabitants, and now a vital UNESCO heritage site crowded by
tourists. To this day seven historic synagogues stand here, part of the
evidence found in almost every street or square of the once thriving
Jewish community.
As one can learn while visiting the newly established Polin Museum of
the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, the former Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth – despite some hardships - seemed a much better
place for Jews to live than elsewhere in Europe at the time. The
famous 16th century Ra i Moses Isserles, the Re a , whose
tombstone stands in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Kazimierz to this day
and is visited annually by Hasidic pilgrims - also seen at the festival –
wrote: hatred i this ou tr has ot o er hel ed us as i the
German lands. May it remain so until the coming of our Messiah!
Indeed Jewish population here grew over the centuries to reach 3.5
illio or % of the ou tr ’s populatio
939.
Today the district is lined with Jewish-themed cafés, restaurants,
hotels, bookstores, museums, and institutions of Jewish culture that
target tourists but also cater to the locals. Some are more authentic
than others. But it also includes something unexpected and new, a
small but thriving reborn Jewish community. The local JCC run by a
New Yorker, Jonathan Ornstein, counts roughly 600 members,
including young children. The atmosphere of acceptance and
welcoming encourages unprecedented growth and produces a rich
variety of activities. As Michael Schudrich, the Chief Rabbi of Poland
o e said i the situatio of Pola d e eed to allow everybody to
return to their Jewish roots. When someone has Jewish ancestors,
e e o l o their father’s side, ut de lares that he or she a ts to
be Jewish, and if it shows clearly that they are determined, it means
that their ancestors pray for them to become Jewish. It is therefore
our dut to a ept the . Among members many are in fact the
recently-discovered or out-of-the-closet Jews and their children.
To me, coming to Krakow, my ancestral city, had another, personal
dimension. Most of the major concerts took place in the magnificent
Tempel Synagogue on Miodowa Street. This is exactly where my
father’s Bar Mitzvah was cancelled on the very day the German
troops marched into Krakow, on September 6, 1939. The street
continues to the New Jewish Cemetery, where the tombstone of my
great grandfather stands. The names of over two dozen of his
descendants, who perished in the Holocaust, were etched on the
stone by my grandmother after the war. It is only 20 kilometres from
here, in Zabierzó , here
father’s fa il
e t into hiding. My
great grandmother died of old age there in July 1942, when in Krakow
the liquidation of the ghetto was already underway. She was lucky to
have died on her own terms. I visited the Catholic cemetery where
she had to be buried under an assumed name.
I went there in the company of two wonderful human beings, Dr
Ja i a Roś isze ska a d Prof Le h Roś isze ski, who hold the titles
of the Righteous Among the Nations, and with Ja i a’s helpful
Catholic son Grzegorz, who found the burial record for me. The
Roś isze skis re ei ed Yad Vashem medals for saving a number of
Je ish li es i ludi g those of
father’s relati es, while risking their
own. We paused at the grave of Janina Pogan, a Polish underground
hero, who helped my family obtain forged documents, and who was
later captured by Gestapo and died of torturous
edi al
e peri e ts i nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. But it is not only
the former German death camp that casts a giant shadow of horrible
past over toda ’s Krakow.
I stayed in the hotel across the Vistula River from Kazimierz, in the
Podgórze District, which was made into a Jewish Ghetto during the
war. The bridge that I crossed every day, must have witnessed the
forced relocation to the ghetto. In fact, the former Concord Square, a
few steps from the hotel, has been renamed the Ghetto Heroes
Square, and the sixty-eight thousand victims shipped to their death
from there are now commemorated by sixty-eight oversized bronze
chairs permanently mounted to the pavement. One corner of the
square is marked by the museum of U der the Eagle pharmacy
which was run by Tadeusz Pankowski, also recognized by Yad Vashem
for rescuing countless Jews during the war. A short walk from there a
Schindler Museum stands to tell the story of a better known rescuer,
Oscar Schindler, and to offer a complete war-time history of the fate
of Krako ’s Je s.
The festival is the brainchild of visionary non-Jewish founder and
director, Janusz Makuch. The moment the festival began I was able to
leave behind those sombre thoughts and memories. My wife and I,
and many friends from around the world, who joined us, attended
many concerts and other events. The first concert, dedicated to the
City of Jerusalem, featured famous American and Israeli cantors,
including renown artists such as Yaakov Lemmer, Ushi Blumenberg,
and David Weinbach. The synagogue was packed and the atmosphere
was reminiscent of a rock concert, with a mostly Polish audience
endlessly clapping their hands in delight, giving standing ovations,
cheering loudly and demanding encores.
Two large concerts a day at Tempel plus additional ones in other
venues and late parties in night clubs offered masterfully selected
variety of excellent music bands and soloists. While many European
countries now engage in an anti-Israeli BDS campaign, this year’s
festival in Poland was dominated by many imports from Israel.
American and Polish performers; however, also played an important
part.
The Israeli selection included some of the ou tr ’s top a ds. The
Kutiman Orchestra, for instance, a blast for the younger audience,
was enjoyed by listeners of all ages. Kutiman, the inventor of
psychedelic funk, is also known worldwide due to millions of YouTube
hits. The charismatic Shlomo Bar and the cult band Habreera Hativeet
combined Sephardic music with Western, Persian and Arabic
elements and offered rich sound, ecstatic rhythms and emotional
performance. Shai Sabari & the Future Orchestra offered a masterful
modern electronic interpretation of Mizrahi sounds, brought to Israel
by immigrants from North Africa, Yemen and Iraq. Other Israeli
groups, (it was impossible to see them all) received warm receptions
and rave reviews as well.
composer and conductor, the musical director of the Jewish Theatre
i Warsa , Kozło ski is referred to as "the last klezmer of Galicia".
Countless programs of other types, in the Centre for Jewish Culture,
the Galicia Jewish Museum, Café Heder and other venues (such as a
bakery for challah baking workshops); complete the rich itinerary of
the festival, which is o e of the orld’s ost sig ifi a t e e ts of a
kind. Programs, with very few exceptions, were bilingual, in Polish
and English, by means of double introductions to the events,
descriptions on the exhibition panels in both languages, subtitling the
films, instant translation and use of headphones for the lectures, as
well as a choice of tour guides. All this made the festival languagefriendly to almost all foreign visitors.
La Mar Enfortuna - an American group featuring avant-garde music
based on the Sephardic tradition of a Golden Age Andalusia, where
Jews, Muslims and Christians lived together in harmony, was the
highlight of the Festival. Jennifer Charles with her velvet voice and
angelic appearance was absolutely magical and mesmerizing. The
Klezmatics, an accomplished US group that combines the traditional
elements of Yiddishland music with an explosive mix of jazz, rock ’ ’
roll, funk, pop and gospel come to Krakow almost every year to the
audie e’s delight. Another annual pillar of the festival, David
Krakauer, a dynamic New York-based clarinet virtuoso who
performed with his group Ancestral Grove, made the audience
virtually explode in cheer.
One program that was delivered entirely in Polish, but should be
mentioned here, was the reading from Polish writer Olga Tokar zuk’s
magnificent new o el Księgi Jaku o e The Books of Ja o
a
great Polish actress Anna Polony, an intimate gathering that sparked
tears and high emotions among the listeners. Although a work of
fiction, the book refers to historic events and figures and is laced with
a wealth of wonderful stories based on the Polish-Jewish tradition
and common past. The author’s u usual se siti it a d i agi atio
makes it a masterpiece worth broad readership. I will be surprised if
translation to English and other languages is not in the planning or in
the works already.
The Polish group Alte Zachen, from the Galician town of Rzeszów, the
place where my other great grandfather was born, offered
psychedelic rock ’ ’ roll interpretation of the local Hasidic nigunim,
the mystical songs of joyful prayer. The loud electronic music for the
young had clear undertones of Hasidic melodies. Many young nonJewish musicians in Poland today draw inspiration from Jewish tunes
of the past. At the other end of the musical spectrum was the
performance of the 96-year-old Leopold Kozło ski and his friends. A
cultural figure in Poland for decades, an accomplished pianist,
Also, I could not resist a tour of the Kazimierz District led by the young
Krakow-born scholar Agi Legutko, who teaches Yiddish at Columbia
University. Until her early 20s, while she was still living in Poland, and
having already expressed interest in Jewish culture and language, she
did not know that she was Jewish herself. She embraced her new
identity and today her daily tours, marked by enthusiasm and a
wealth of knowledge of Jewish history in Poland, are very popular,
most informative and truly enjoyable and are among hot picks in the
festi al’s s hedule.
A rather surprising accompanying event of a completely different kind
was a soccer match between two amateur sport clubs, Maka i
Krakó a d Maka i Warsza a that re i e a d o ti ue the lo g
and rich tradition of the Maccabi Jewish sport associations in Poland.
While I hoped for
Krako to i , the defeat on behalf of
Warsaw could not overshadow the satisfaction that the first such
game in 70 years in Poland had actually taken place.
The final open-air o ert “halo o “zeroka , a rip-roaring wrap-up
party that lasted some eight hours deep into the hot summer night
made many thousands of spectators, mostly non-Jewish Poles, dance,
sing and clasp their hands from start to the end. Festi al’s ajor
sponsor, a Polish-born American philanthropist and a Holocaust
survivor, Sigmund Rolat, the honorary chairman of the Friends of the
Festival, who rents a hotel suite overlooking the final concert every
year, refers to the view as t o stages fro
i do . O e is the
stage on which the performers play and sing and the other one is the
stage – equally worth watching - on which the spontaneous
performance is offered by the enthusiastic crowds responding to the
music. Towards the end of the concert a combination of classical
violinists and modern masters, including David Krakauer, gave a joint
performance together with the Brooklyn cantor Benzion Miller, who
is counted among the pillars of the festival, and who has received
high distinctions from the president of Poland and the mayor of
Krakow for his ongoing contribution to the Polish cultural life.
Miller, a religious man, sets a higher threshold when it comes to new
Jewishness in Poland (you cannot be a half-Jew, he told me), but he
has ade his support of his Polish frie d, the Krako Festi al’s
director, Janusz Makuch, the festival itself and the local community,
his never-ending mission. In fact he can be seen and heard in
Kazimierz every year.
Krakauer told me he believed that the new fascination with Jewish
culture in Poland and the desire to revive it, is a natural and
understandable phenomenon, considering the history, and he sees in
it a great artistic potential. But Krakauer also notices the kitschy by-
products of this nostalgia such as highly questionable figurines of
Jews holding coins. I could see some in the Sukiennice, the beautiful
renaissance former cloth market in the middle of old Krako ’s Mai
Square. Yet Krakauer’s overall experience in the city that his ancestors
have been named after is very positive and he counts it one of his five
most favourite cities in the world.
Genevieve Zubrzycki of the University of Michigan, a keen observer of
Poland, explains this wide interest in Jewish culture, as expressed by
over 40 Jewish festivals across Poland annually, as a push from Poles
in different political and social circles to expand Polish national
identity beyond the Catholic Church and therefore embrace
Je ish ess a d Je ish ulture while Concordia-University cultural
anthropologist Erica Lehrer writes of the figurines that to the
outsider’s e e, espe iall the Je ish o e, their egati e ale es can
e pai full o ious , ut adds that the e od ot o l ti e or
stereotypes, but also traces of history, traumatic memory, and
u spoke
ostalgia . Both Zubrzycki and Lehrer could be seen in
Kazimierz this year.
Frequent festival participant and supporter Ted Taube, the Krakowborn Bay Area philanthropist and chairman of Taube Foundation for
Jewish Life and Culture, oti es that these ki ds of e ha ges do ’t
wait for the Krakow festival to roll around, but rather take place all
over Poland every day, in local schools and community centres, at
academic conferences, and at the recently opened POLIN Museum of
the Histor of Polish Je s i Warsa . Indeed as far as in Sejny, the
north-eastern corner of Poland bordering Lithuania and Belarus, far
from Krakow, a multicultural initiative of Krz sztof Cz że ski called
Borderlands takes place. For his activities, including, among others, a
theatre and a publishing house that issued Jan T. Gross’s Neighbours
about the infamous pogrom in Jedwabne in 1941, which triggered the
nation-wide soul searching 15 years ago, Cz że ski re ei ed the Ire a
Sendler Award at the festival and is a recipient of the 2014 Israeli Ben
David Prize.
During the festival, JCC leader Jonathan Ornstein, along with chief
Rabbi Michael Schudrich and Helise Lieberman, the Taube Center’s
director in Warsaw, received the Bene Merito medals for their
contribution to Polish-Jewish relations. In another ceremony,
members of Polish Strongmen Association received an annual
Keepers of Memory Award , funded by Michael H. Traison of
Chicago, for their contribution to preserving Jewish heritage by
moving heavy Jewish tombstones used in pavements and buildings
into their rightful location in the restored Jewish cemeteries. Creators
of the Polish film Aftermath that refers to Jedwabne pogrom,
Jabłonski, Pasikowski and Stuhr, were among the laureates as well.
The film, along with the Oscar Ida by Paweł Pawlikowski and the
recently released Karski o e man, who tried to stop the Holocaust )
by “ła o ir Grünberg were among several shown in the Galicia
Jewish Museum.
Ruth Ellen Gruber, an American journalist and author, in her talk
devoted to the revival of historic Jewish quarters in East-Central
Europe has commented that efforts by non-Jewish Poles to preserve
Jewish heritage, as reflected by a large number of various welldeserved annual awards, warrant much more publicity, both in
Poland and abroad.
On the last Friday of the festival a Shabbat dinner for 450 people, in
the historic street-car depot turned banquet hall, in which Ornstein
proposed to his Krako ’s girlfrie d, was held. Such relationships are
not uncommon. Toro to’s a tor Mi hael Ru e feld arried the Beit
Krakow leader Magda Koralewska two months earlier in the Old
Synagogue in Kazimierz and completed the civil marriage during the
festival. They already have an interesting artistic project for Krakow in
mind.
Duri g last ear’s ope i g of the Warsa ’s museum, Polish President
Bro isła Komorowski noted that e a ot u dersta d the histor
of Pola d ithout k o i g the histor of Polish Je s . We may also
conclude that the culture of Poland would be incomplete without the
Jewish culture. The festival is a testimony to this and, I would
recommend it to my fellow Canadians, whether Jewish, Polish or
other, as a perfect, meaningful and enjoyable vacation destination.
Ne t ear i Krako …?
_____________
Peter Jassem is an architect and a social activist who discovered his
Jewish roots after moving from Poland to Canada. His leadership in
Jewish heritage and genealogical organizations focuses on preserving
and promoting the rich history and unique culture of Polish Jewry,
fostering genealogical research and encouraging Polish-Jewish
dialogue. He currently chairs the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of
Canada in Toronto and the Canadian Committee for the Support of
Warsa ’s Poli Museu of the Histor of Polish Je s.
The following pages present photographs from
THE 25TH FESTIVAL OF JEWISH CULTURE IN KRAKOW,
June 25-July 6, 2015
Mi hał Ra us, ourtes of Krakow Jewish Culture Festival
The Final Concert Shalom on Szeroka
The Cantors in Concert In the Gates of Jerusalem
Audience of the Cantors' Concert, including Sigmund Rolat and Shana Penn
Benzion Miller in Classics at Noon
Benzion Miller in Shalom on Szeroka
David Krakauer and Ancestral Groove
David Krakauer
Jennifer Charles and La Mar Enfortuna
La Mar Enfortuna
Midnight Session - The Klezmatics
Shai Tzabari and the Future Orchestra
Shlomo Bar & Habrera Hativeet
The Future Orchestra
The Kutiman Orchestra
The Kutiman Orchestra saxophonist
The Kutiman Orchestra
Audience at Shai Tzabari and the Future Orchestra concert
This article, including the photographs, has originally appeared i
Plotkies , No. 65, Fall 2015