Judaica Foumdation-Center for Jewish Culture, Cracow, Poland
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Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 08:59:44 +0200 (EET)
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Subject: Judaica Foumdation-Center for Jewish Culture, Cracow, Poland
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Original sender: Joachim Russek <[email protected]>
Judaica Foumdation-Center for Jewish Culture, Cracow, Poland
Ladies & Gentlemen
I am taking the liberty of sending you information introducing our
organization. It is a civiv and civil initiative born here in Cracow,
active in the field of Jewish history and culture addressed to the
main stream of the Polish society. The details you will find in the
enclosed
attachments.
With friendly greetings
Joachim S. Russek
Director
Judaica Foundation
Cracow - Poland
---------------------
JUDAICA FOUNDATION
CENTER FOR JEWISH CULTURE
I. BACKGROUND
The idea to establish the Judaica Foundation and the Center for Jewish
Culture in Cracow was formulated among Cracow university circles
during the late 1980s, a time which heralded great political, social
and economic changes in Eastern and Central Europe and the former
Soviet Union. This initiative was, in effect, an outgrowth of the
establishment in 1986 of the Research Center on Jewish History and
Culture in Poland at the Jagiellonian University, the second oldest
university in this part of Europe. At that time, this research center
was the first and only university institute of its kind in Poland.
The Judaica Foundation formally began its activity in 1991, and under
its auspices the Center for Jewish Culture was inaugurated in November
1993. The Center is housed in a former nineteenth-century prayer house
located at 17 Rabbi Meisels Street in Kazimierz, the former Jewish
quarter of Cracow. The building was renovated, modernized and expanded
thanks to the generous support of the United States Congress through
the Polish-American Joint Commission for Humanitarian Assistance. Some
additional financial support was received initially from the city of
Cracow, the Governor of Cracow Province (now Malopolska Province) and
the Ministry of Culture in Warsaw.
II. OBJECTIVES
Two principles underlie the Foundation's and the Center's work. The
first is best encapsulated by the motto L'dor v'dor - 'from generation
to generation.' The second refers to the notion that the lesson of
Auschwitz-Birkenau can be understood only if we know about the
richness and vitality of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust.
In essence, this project can best be described as a civic initiative
striving to cultivate an open society, with the following primary
aims:
- to preserve the still-existing Jewish heritage in Kazimierz;
- to disseminate knowledge about Jewish history and culture among the
younger generations;
- to protect the memory of the centuries-old Jewish presence in
Poland;
- to serve as a platform for Polish-Jewish dialogue; and
- to fight any form of anti-Semitism, discrimination and intolerance.
III. PROGRAMS & ACTIVITIES
In order to achieve these objectives, the Center offers extensive
educational and cultural programs that include conferences, lectures,
summer programs for participants from abroad, exhibitions, concerts
and film screenings.
A. Conferences
Each year the Center organizes and hosts a number of conferences on
historical and cultural issues, which further our understanding of the
past and inform the present generation. One recent conference,
entitled "The Century of Auschwitz," brought together young
journalists from all over Europe and the United States to meet with
leading historians and journalists. This was the second conference
co-organized by the European Jewish Congress held at the Center.
In September 1999, as a joint initiative with the Spiro Institute in
London and the Pedagogical University in Cracow, the Center hosted the
fourth annual teachers' conference on "How to teach about the
Holocaust." This year's participants included 80 high school teachers
from Poland and, for the first time, from Germany as well. The
conference brings together historians, Holocaust survivors, and
persons involved with Polish-Jewish dialogue. We hope in the not too
distant future to reshape and internationalize the conference into an
annual international teachers' conference under the same title. Also
of great interest was the 1998 conference, "The Golden Age of Jewish
Galicia," a joint project with the American Society for Polish-Jewish
Studies in Boston, headed by Irene Pipes.
B. Lectures & Meetings
The Center organizes a year-round series of lectures and meetings with
scholars, artists, activists and Holocaust survivors on a wide range
of topics concerning the past and present of Jewish life and culture.
Some of the themes that have been addressed include: the history of
the Jewish community in Poland and of Jewish communities abroad; the
anti-Semitic campaign of March 1968 in Poland; Jewish-Christian
dialogue; and democracy and tolerance. A regular lecturer on Jewish
religion and thought at the Center is Rabbi Sacha Pecaric, who heads
the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation Jewish Community Youth Center in
Cracow. A specially organized series of lectures entitled "Jewish
Philosophy and Jewish Philosophers" began recently.
Lectures and meetings are usually followed by open discussion and
exchange of ideas among the participants and members of the audience.
We thus hope to foster and promote a climate of respect, tolerance and
understanding; the Center serves as a forum for education and debate
concerning Jewish-related issues.
Over the years the Center has welcomed many eminent speakers,
including Shlomo Avineri of the Hebrew University in Israel; Abraham
Brumberg, a historian of the Bund living the United States; Marek
Edelman, the last surviving Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising;
Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Prize-winning poet; the Rev. Stanislaw Musial
(SJ) of Cracow; Richard Pipes of Harvard University; Shewah Weiss,
former head of the Israeli Knesset; and Simon Wiesenthal.
C. Publications & Book Presentations
In keeping with the mission to educate and disseminate information
about Jewish history and culture in Poland, the Center has begun to
publish books by noted authors, often appearing in bilingual
Polish/English editions. These books include:
- Poland, What have I to do with thee; Essays without Prejudice, by
Rafael F. Scharf, in Polish and English; - The Jews in Poland, vol.
II, edited by Slawomir Kapralski and dedicated to Rafael F. Scharf,
with essays by many distinguished authors including David Engel, Eva
Hoffman, Gershon David Hundert, Slawomir Mrozek, Antony Polonsky,
Andrzej Szczypiorski and Robert S. Wistrich;
- BELZEC, by Rudolf Reder, a Polish/English edition of testimony by a
survivor from Belzec, first published in Polish in 1946.
The Center hosts a number of book presentations, creating a unique
opportunity to meet and engage with Polish and international authors
as they discuss their newly published work. A few of the most
memorable presentations were those by Rafael F. Scharf and Slawomir
Kapralski on their respective books listed above; by Jerzy Berent,
about his Pieszo z Krakowa (On Foot from Cracow); and by Jan T. Gross,
about his book Upiorna dekada: 1939-1948 (The Ghostly Decade:
1939-1948).
D. Summer Programs for Students
In the summertime, the Center co-organizes academic summer programs
for foreign students, who can earn the equivalent of a semester's
credit at their respective universities. The first such program took
place from 1991 to 1993 under the auspices of the Research Center on
Jewish History and Culture in Poland, and was entitled "Tracing the
Jewish Heritage in Poland." Once the Center for Jewish Culture was
established, it co-organized together with New York University
(1995-96) and Brandeis University (1997-98) an intensive academic
summer program entitled "The Modern History and Experience of Jews in
Eastern Europe." These five-week programs offered courses by leading
scholars in their fields, including Professors Christopher Browning of
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; David Engel of New
York University (NYU), Jan T. Gross of NYU; Gershon Hundert of the
University of Toronto; Slawomir Kapralski of the Central European
University, Warsaw; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett of NYU; Antony
Polonsky of Brandeis University; and Steven Zipperstein of Stanford
University.
In addition to regular courses, students met with distinguished
visiting lecturers including Abraham Brumberg, Marek Edelman,
Konstanty Gebert, Ruth Ellen Gruber, Stanislaw Krajewski and the Rev.
Stanislaw Musial. A key element of the program was the six-day
research field trip to several towns with significant prewar Jewish
communities (among them Bobowa, Bochnia, Lezajsk, Przemysl, Ryman�w,
Rzesz�w and Tarn�w), where students visited important Jewish sites,
including the remnants of synagogues and cemeteries, and met with
historians and custodians of local Judaica. Finally, they were taken
on a three-day visit to the town of Oswiecim, where they met for
discussions at the International Youth Meeting House with historians
and survivors, who took them on extensive visits to the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp Memorial.
In the summer of 1999 we hosted a similar program specifically
designed for German students from Munich University, under the title
"Auf den Spuren des j�dischen Erbes in Galizien" ("Retracing the
Jewish Heritage in Galicia"), which is scheduled to take place again
in the summer of 2000.
We feel it is important to continue such programs in the future as
they provide a strong intellectual basis for the study of the history
of East European Jewry, and an invaluable personal encounter with
places and people, helping them to better understand the rich and
tragic past as well as the present reality of Jewish life in Poland.
E. Special Programs
One of the most important and successful of the Center's initiatives
is its annual Bayt Chadash program, which takes place in the Jewish
calendar month of Tishri, starting on Rosh Hashana and ending on
Simchat Torah. The title of the program, which means "new house" in
Hebrew, is taken from a work by Rabbi Joel Sirkes, one of the great
rabbis and Talmudic scholars of seventeenth-century Poland. Organized
since 1996, the month-long program of lectures, concerts, films and
meetings revolves around questions concerning the history of Jewish
life in Poland, and serves as a foundation for dialogue.
A Week of Jewish-Italian Culture is organized annually as a joint
project with the Italian Cultural Institute in Cracow; the Center
regularly cooperates with the Goethe Institute and the American,
Austrian, and French Consulates in Cracow; the Argentinean and Swedish
Embassies in Warsaw; and the Danish Institute of Culture in Gdansk. We
also collaborate with institutions abroad.
F. Exhibitions
Since its opening in November 1993, during the six years of its
existence the Center's art gallery has mounted 105 exhibitions in
various media (painting, sculpture, prints, photography, video). In
addition to exhibiting the works of international artists and
promoting young artists, the gallery also curates exhibitions of a
historical nature, such as "Gehat hob ich a hejm: Cracow's Kazimierz
in the Times of Mordechai Gebirtig," an exhibition of photographs
which, since January 1998, has traveled to various cities in Germany,
including Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne, Leipzig and Bremen. Recently, a
stirring exhibition entitled "Shoah: Fragments and Reflections" by two
Argentinean artists, Eugenia Bekeris and Perla Bajder, was on view at
the gallery.
G. Concerts
The Center - which has the only regular concert hall in Kazimierz -
organizes a rich program of musical concerts, including classical,
chamber, klezmer and jazz music, as well as multimedia concerts. In
addition to many acclaimed and emerging Polish artists, musicians from
Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, and the United States (among others
the pianist and conductor Neal Stulberg and the jazz pianist Adam
Makowicz) have played here. A favorite and regular performer at the
Center is the klezmer musician Leopold Kozlowski. The Center
occasionally invites theater groups to perform.
H. Film Showings
The Center regularly shows feature and documentary films on Jewish
themes under the title "Jewish Motifs in Polish Cinematography".
Screened in the past were Chronicles of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,
Dybbuk, The Unexpected Guest (a documentary about the largest
exhibition in postwar Poland on the history of Jews in Poland, held at
the National Museum of Cracow in 1989), and several films by Polish
director Andrzej Wajda. We also showed films from Britain, Germany,
Israel, and the United States. A special series of Italian films is
organized annually in cooperation with the Italian Cultural Institute
in Cracow. This past fall, the Center showed several films as part of
a larger series of meetings devoted to the Polish Jewish writer and
artist Bruno Schulz.
I. Visitors
The Center receives approximately 15,000-17,000 visitors each year,
including about one hundred organized groups from Poland and abroad.
Among the visitors from abroad, Americans are the most numerous,
followed by visitors from Germany and Israel, and then by guests from
all other European countries. Visitors have also come from Australia,
Central America, Japan, Korea, Singapore, South America and other
places.
Each year the Center is visited by a number of political, cultural,
and Jewish community leaders. Eminent guests from abroad in the past
have included Simon Wiesenthal; Richard von Weizs�cker, former
President of Germany; Professor Shewah Weiss, former speaker of the
Knesset; His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; Steven
Spielberg; Ehud Ulmert, Mayor of Jerusalem, and Shimon Peres.
IV. THE FUTURE & SUSTAINABILITY
After six years, the Center for Jewish Culture is recognized in Poland
and abroad for its work to perpetuate Jewish history and culture and
to promote tolerance. We hope to keep alive the memory of the
centuries of Jewish community life in Poland, to support the renewal
of interest in Jewish culture here, and to pass the flame to future
generations. As a civic initiative, we are the only institution of its
kind in Poland and in Central Europe. The particular location of the
Center - in Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter of Cracow -
underlies both the importance and purpose of the Center's activity.
We welcome opportunities to work in close cooperation with
institutions and individuals from abroad, and wish to enlist new
sources of support to help sustain and increase the Center's
activities.
We need your support to cover the costs of current programs and to
build an endowment to make the Center financially independent. Our
goal is to raise 1.5 million U.S. dollars. Thanks to the generosity of
the Aleksander Hertz Foundation in New York, we have already received
$31,524 for this purpose. Please help us to continue to make an impact
on future generations by fostering education, dialogue and
understanding.
Robert Gadek Joachim S. Russek
Director Director
Center for Jewish Culture Judaica Foundation
Cracow, April 2000
Judaica Foundation - Center for Jewish Culture
17 Rabbi Meisels Street, 31-058 Cracow
tel. ++ 48 12 / 430 64 49, 430 64 52, fax ++ 48 12 / 430 64 97
e-mail: [email protected]
Bank account: BPH S.A. IV / O Krak�w, 10601389 - 320000474253
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