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 winds down at one o’clock in
the morning on the day that it comes to an 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 voice
that’s left is ours, mine, and I would sing “Zog nit keyn mol, az du geyst dem letstn veg…”:
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
wasn’t an easy 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 Krakow’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 Rabbi Moses Isserles,
“the Rema”, 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 in this country has not
overwhelmed us as in 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 million or 10% of the country’s population by 1939.
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 once said “in the
situation of Poland we need to allow everybody to return to their Jewish roots. When someone has Jewish
ancestors, even only on their father’s side, but declares that he or she wants 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
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therefore our duty to accept them.” Among members many are in fact the recently-discovered or out-ofthe-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 Zabierzów, where my
father’s family went 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 Janina Rościszewska and Prof Lech
Rościszewski, who hold the titles of the Righteous Among the Nations, and with Janina’s helpful Catholic
son Grzegorz, who found the burial record for me. The Rościszewskis received Yad Vashem medals for
saving a number of Jewish lives including those of my father’s relatives, 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 “medical experiments” in nearby AuschwitzBirkenau in 1944. But it is not only the former German death camp that casts a giant shadow of horrible
past over today’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 “Under 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 Krakow’s Jews.
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 country’s top bands. 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
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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.
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 ’n’ roll, funk, pop and gospel come to Krakow almost
every year to the audience’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.
The Polish group Alte Zachen, from the Galician town of Rzeszów, the place where my other great
grandfather was born, offered psychedelic rock ’n’ 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 non-Jewish 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 Kozłowski
and his friends. A cultural figure in Poland for decades, an accomplished pianist, composer and conductor,
the musical director of the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw, Kozłowski 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 one of the world’s most significant events 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 language-friendly
to almost all foreign visitors.
One program that was delivered entirely in Polish, but should be mentioned here, was the reading from
Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s magnificent new novel “Księgi Jakubowe” (The Books of Jacob) by 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 unusual
sensitivity and imagination 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.
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 festival’s schedule.
A rather surprising accompanying event of a completely different kind was a soccer match between two
amateur sport clubs, “Makabi Kraków” and “Makabi Warszawa” that revive and continue the long and
rich tradition of the Maccabi Jewish sport associations in Poland. While I hoped for “my” Krakow to win,
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.
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The final open-air concert “Shalom on Szeroka”, 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. Festival’s major 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 “two stages
from my window”. One 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 made his support of his Polish friend, the Krakow Festival’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 Krakow’s Main 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 Jewishness and Jewish culture” while Concordia-University cultural anthropologist
Erica Lehrer writes of the figurines that “to the outsider’s eye, especially the Jewish one, their negative
valences can be painfully obvious”, but adds that “they embody not only timeworn stereotypes, but also
traces of history, traumatic memory, and unspoken nostalgia”. Both Zubrzycki and Lehrer could be seen
in Kazimierz this year.
Frequent festival participant and supporter Ted Taube, the Krakow-born Bay Area philanthropist and
chairman of Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, notices that “these kinds of exchanges don’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
History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.” Indeed as far as in Sejny, the north-eastern corner of Poland bordering
Lithuania and Belarus, far from Krakow, a multicultural initiative of Krzysztof Czyżewski 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, Czyżewski received the Irena 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
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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 (“one man, who tried to stop
the Holocaust”) by Sławomir 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 well-deserved 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 Krakow’s girlfriend, was held. Such relationships are not
uncommon. Toronto’s actor Michael Rubenfeld married 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.
During last year’s opening of the Warsaw’s museum, Polish President Bronisław Komorowski noted that
“we cannot understand the history of Poland without knowing the history of Polish Jews”. 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. Next year in Krakow…?
_____________
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 Warsaw’s Polin Museum of the History of
Polish Jews.
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THE 25TH FESTIVAL OF JEWISH CULTURE IN KRAKOW, June 25-July 6, 2015
Pictures by Michał Ramus, courtesy of Krakow Jewish Culture Festival.
The Final Concert “Shalom on Szeroka”
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The Cantors in Concert In the Gates of Jerusalem
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Audience of the Cantors' Concert, including Sigmund Rolat and Shana Penn
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Benzion Miller in “Classics at Noon”
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Benzion Miller in “Shalom on Szeroka”
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David Krakauer and Ancestral Groove
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David Krakauer
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Jennifer Charles and La Mar Enfortuna
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La Mar Enfortuna
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Midnight Session - The Klezmatics
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Shai Tzabari and the Future Orchestra
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Shlomo Bar & Habrera Hativeet
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The Future Orchestra
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The Kutiman Orchestra
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The Kutiman Orchestra saxophonist
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The Kutiman Orchestra
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Audience at Shai Tzabari and the Future Orchestra concert
This article has been originally published in “Plotkies”, No. 65, Fall 2015
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