Poland -- Tablet magazine on Krakow (mentioning Virtually Jewish)

Crowd gathers for the final concert. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Though I was in Krakow for the last few days of the Festival of Jewish Culture, I haven't (yet...) contributed to the annual crop of articles about it... but I was happy to see this nice mention of Virtually Jewish in the "Letter from Krakow" piece by Roger Bennett run in Tablet Magazine.

Krakow is a town in which the Holocaust is everywhere—thanks to the battery of brightly colored wagons, little bigger than golf carts, that litter the streets, energetically competing to lure visitors onto a series of niche tours they market via menus emblazoned on their sides. Trips to Auschwitz, “Kazimierz Ghetto,” and “Schindler’s Factory” are advertised alongside “Pope’s Krakow” and Wawel Castle as if they are all great days out for the whole family, despite the fact that while the last two are national jewels, the former are scars that stretch across the heart of the city. 65,000 Jews lived in Krakow before the war, amounting to 25 percent of the population. They now number a mere 200. Their absence hangs heavy, and if these tour carts were the sole custodians of their memory, they would surely soon be forgotten. But over the past 19 years, the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival has provided a critical public space for its audience to grapple with the stains of their history. This tangled phenomenon has been well-documented by the remarkable Ruth Ellen Gruber in her book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe and our first encounter with it on this evening served to underline just how complex a task it can be.

Budapest -- Night of the Museums Includes Jewish Sites

Wintertime view of the Dohany st. Synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest are participating in the annual "Night of the Museums" -- which this year takes place Saturday night, that is, tomorrow, June 20. Museums all around the country will stay open late -- sometimes very late, even all night -- and will feature a variety of special programs and events. I'm told that it is the first time that Jewish community operations are taking part.

The Jewish Museum is located next door to the splendid Dohany St. Synagogue (which this year celebrates its 150th anniversary), in an annex built in the 1930s on the spot where Theodore Herzl was born. There will be jazz, classical, Gypsy and Klezmer music and special exhibits, games, guided tours and other activities.

Hungarian Jewish Museum

1077 Budapest, Dohány utca 2.

Music of Happiness, gypsy-jewish music festival at the Night of the Hungarian Jewish Museum

The Federation of Jewish Communities of Hungary is participating first time on the Budapest event „Night of the Museums”. You will have the opportunity to hear concerts, literary conversations and to visit on free guided tours in the Jewish Museum and on Herzl square from 22:00 till the morning.

Full Jewish Museum program

The program at the Holocaust Memorial Center, on Pava street, just outside the city center, looks even more interesting. The center is a striking modern building -- it looks as if it should be in a German expressionist film -- built around the restored Pava Street synagogue, designed by my favorite architect, the prolific Lipot Baumhorn. (I have written extensively about L-B, who is one of my heroes.) Anyone in town should try to see the concert by the great Roma cimbalom player Kalman Balogh, which runs from 8 p.m. til midnight. Kalman takes part this summer in "the Other Europeans" project, and later this month and in July will be performing with that group -- mixed Yiddish and Gypsy musicians -- in Vienna, Krakow and Weimar, Germany.

Holocaust Memorial Center

1094 Budapest, Páva utca 39.

Phone: Telefon: +36 1 455-3333 | Web: www.hdke.hu

On the Night of Museums, there is a lively mood beginning from the afternoon. Family programs entertain the smallest ones, special guided tours begin every hour in Hungarian, English and German. From 6 o’clock we take visitors back to the world of old newsreels, we investigate – with the help of a discussion – the responsibility of the media then and today. The evening is devoted to music and dance. You can listen to klezmer, gipsy and jazz, and dance with a champion of swing. If you feel like doing so, you can change books and ideas in the History Corner, or glance into the Mirror of Tolerance. Hungry and thirsty wanderers can refresh themselves in the Bar of Acceptance.

Full program here

Holocaust Memorial Center. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Poland -- Upcoming commemorative and cultural events

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

In Poland, there may be only 15,000 (or so) Jews -- but the summer months are filled with Jewish culture and heritage events. This year is no exception.

From big Jewish culture festivals, to individual commemorative events marking sites of Jewish heritage, much is going on. Some are sponsored by local civic organizations, some by committed local activists, some by the Israel embassy, some by local Jewish communities and Jewish organizations -- and some by a combination of organizers and funders who work together on the projects.

This month will see at least two commemorative events.

This Sunday, June 14, a ceremony will take place in the little town of Brzostek to memorialize the destroyed Jewish community there. It will formally rededicate the Jewish cemetery, which has been newly fenced put in order, and also unveil a Hebrew-language monument. In the course of restoring the cemetery, some 30 old tombstones, which have come to light in recent years, were re-erected. In addition, a plaque will be dedicated in the town center -- in Polish and English -- in memory of the former Jewish residents of the town. The project is being carried out in full co-operation with both the chief rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, and the Brzostek town council.

Rabbis and local dignitaries will attend the ceremony, as will pupils from local schools.

"The town is regarding it as a major civic event and organizing various exhibitions on Brzostek's Jewish history," writes Connie Webber, the head of the Littman Library Jewish publishing house, said in an email. "Everyone with a Brzostek connection is invited to participate. Buses will be arranged to and from Krakow on the Sunday, and arrangements have been made for kosher food to be available both on the Sunday and for the preceding Shabbat in Krakow."

Connie and her husband, the scholar Jonathan Webber -- who family stems from Brzostek -- have been instrumental in organizing the commemoration.

Just one week later, on June 22, a plaque commemorating the former Scheinbach Synagogue building (today the town library) will be unveiled in Przemysl, in the far southeast of Poland on the border with Ukraine. Participating will be guests from Poland and abroad. The plaque is a joint initiative of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland and Michael Freund of Raanana in Israel.

Located at ul. Slowackiego 15, the synagogue was built for the Reform community in 1886-1890 and was designed by Marceli Pilecki. (Another synagogue in the town, built in 1909, stands abandoned and falling ever more into ruin on Plac Unii Brzeskiej, in the Zasanie district across the river. There is a large Jewish cemetery next to the main municipal cemetery, with tombs from the 19th and 20th centuries.)
(Synagogue photo fodz.pl)

As for Jewish culture festivals -- everyone knows about the big Krakow Jewish Culture Festival -- but a a number of others are in the works in Poland. They include:

Gdansk -- 10th Baltic Days of Jewish Culture. June 14-15

Bialystok -- 2nd Zachor Festival of Jewish Culture. June 15-16

Chmielnik -- VII Meeting with Jewish Culture, June 19-21

Krakow -- Festival of Jewish Culture, June 27-July 5. The Other Europeans concert will be July 3.

Warsaw -- Singer's Warsaw Festival of Jewish Culture, Aug. 29-Sept. 6. A big festival, increasingly similar in scope to that in Krakow.

Lodz -- Festival of the Dialogue of Four Cultures. Usually in September

For an ever-growing list of Jewish festivals in all parts of Europe, check the link in the side bar of this blog!

Europe -- Jewish culture festivals

Cantorial concert Jewish Culture Festival Krakow, 2008. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

A number of Jewish culture festivals of all sorts take place around Europe in the spring and summer. Some are dedicated just to music. Others are much broader. As far as I know, there is no central web site where you can find information on all of them. I will begin to post information here on dates and venues. I ask my readers to please send me information to include!

The culture festivals and other smaller events make good destinations around which to center a trip. Some, like the annual Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, are huge events lasting a week or more, which draw thousands of people and offer scores or sometimes hundreds of performances, lectures, concerts, exhibits and the like. Other festivals are much less ambitious. Some are primarily workshops but also feature concerts. Many of the same artists perform at more than one festival.

Dance workshop, Krakow, 2008. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

A highlight this summer will be three concerts by the 14-person ensemble of The Other Europeans project on Jewish and Roma culture, music and identity. This is an EU-co-financed project of the Yiddish Summer Weimar, The Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow and the KlezMORE Festival Vienna.

Here is a partial list, with links to web sites -- I will add to it (here or on separate posts) as information comes in:

All Over Europe -- 10th annual European Day of Jewish Culture. Sept. 6. Events take place in nearly 30 countries. The theme this year is Jewish Festivals and Traditions.


Austria

Vienna -- KlezMORE Festival -- The festival itself is Nov. 7-22. But on June 28 it will present The Other Europeans concert. For detrails contact weimar@the-other-europeans.eu or Ruth Schwarz, tel. +43(0)699 - 1270 8645; e-mail: ruth(at)klezmore-vienna.at


Canada

Montreal -- International Yiddish Theatre Festival -- June 17-25. Not in Europe,
but with a lot of European Jewish/Yiddish Theatres participating.

Laurentian Mountains, Quebec -- KlezKanada Summer Institute, Aug. 24-30

Czech Republic

Boskovice -- Boskovice Festival 2009. July 16-19. Many types of music, performance and exhibitions, etc, aimed at supporting the restoration and promotion of the historic Jewish quarter


France

Paris -- Klezmer Paris -- July 6-10. Mainly workshops in dance, singing, playing.

Germany

Weimar -- Yiddish Summer Weimar. Workshops and concerts the whole month of July. The Other Europeans concert will be July 5.

Great Britain

London -- Nine Gates International Festival of Czech-German-Jewish Culture. May 30-June 1.

London -- Klezfest. August 9-14. There is also a Yiddish crash course August 2-7.

Hungary

Bank Lake -- "Jewstock", August 6-8 (Now called Bankito, with new web site.)

Budapest -- Jewish Summer Festival, Aug. 30-Sept. 7

Lithuania

Vilnius -- Klezmer Festival. Aug. 25-29 (This will take place within the framework of the Third Litvak Congress, a meeting of Jews with origins in Lithuania, Aug. 23-31)

Poland

Wroclaw -- Simcha - 11th Jewish Culture Festival in Wrocław. May 31-June 5

Gdansk -- 10th Baltic Days of Jewish Culture. June 14-15

Lodz -- Jewish Culture Days, Lodz. June 14-30.

Bialystok -- 2nd Zachor Festival of Jewish Culture. June 15-16

Chmielnik -- VII Meeting with Jewish Culture, June 19-21

Krakow -- Festival of Jewish Culture, June 27-July 5. The Other Europeans concert will be July 3.

Warsaw -- Singer's Warsaw Festival of Jewish Culture, Aug. 29-Sept. 6. A big festival, increasingly similar in scope to that in Krakow.

Lodz -- Festival of the Dialogue of Four Cultures. Usually in September

Romania

Oradea, Cluj, Sighet -- Mamaliga and Gefilte Fish. Klezmer workshops and dance house. June 16-24. Oradea June 16, Sighet June 21, Cluj june 24. For Information contact klezromania@gmail.com

Poland -- Shabbat in Rymanow and other festivals

I have added some new festivals to the growing list of Jewish festivals in Europe. They include a Shabbat in Rymanow festival this coming weekend, August 12-14.

It is part religious observance and part culture festival, with concerts, lectures and even food and wine tastings.

PROGRAM

THURSDAY, AUGUST12, 2010

10.00-10.45 Workshops at the Jewish cemetery in Rymanow – Explanation of
function of cemetery and symbolism of headstones and graves. Remembrance of
famous Tzadikim from Rymanow.
11.00-11-45 Ecumenical prayers at the Jewish cemetery.
12.15-12.30 Remembering those who gave their lives to save the Jews of
Rymanow – Catholic cemetery in Rymanow.
12.30-15-00 POLIN film screening with the participation of the director Jolanta
Dylewska. Next, fragments of a pre-war film from Rymanow.
(at big hall, Jas Wedrowniczek – free entry)
16.00 – 18.00 Culinary workshops ( Jewish kitchen at the Rymanow Rynek )
This will be led by a daughter if a Rymanow native, Malka Sacham Doron.
There will also be an exhibit of traditional Jewish dishes.
16.00-17.30 Historic trail of Rymanow properties. A walking tour of the long gone
Rymanow with participation of former Jewish residents. It will be
conducted in English and Polish, starting in the parking lot at the Rynek.
19.00-21.00 Artistic performance "Musical Stories of Chassidim" A dramatic
musical spectacle, which retells the story of Menachem Mendle the great
Tzadik of Rymanow, with Chassidic dancing. Performed by Mendy Cahan from
Israel accompanied by Olga Mieleszczuk.
Big hall – Jaś Wędrowniczek
Tickets -- 10zl. for purchase in the hotel.
21.30 – Rymanow encounter with Hungarian wine – tasting of wine from the
Tokay district, with the participation of members from the Portius and
Krosno district.

FRIDAY, AUGUST13, 2010

10.00-11.00 workshop in Yiddish language and singing of Niggunim. Melodies
without words – Mendy Cahan and Olga Mieleszczuk.
Big hall – Jas Wiedrowniczek
12.00-13.45 March of Remembrance, from Rynek to Wróblik Szlachecki.
Tracing the final walk of the Rymanow ghetto,
Prayer of Kaddish in Wroblik.
Starts at Monument of Victims of Totalitarianism at the Rynek.
15.30-16.30 Monodram " We Also need a Miracle "
Big Hall – Jas Wedrowniczek, free entrance
19.00 – 19.30 Singing of Nigunim in front of Synagogue
19.40 – 21.00 Kabbalat Shabbat and greeting the Shabbat at the Synagogue,
Services will be conducted by Rymanow native Moshe Barth.
21.30 – Shabbat in Rymanow, Festive Shabbat dinner for all participants.
Hotel Bogmar in Rymanow

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

8.30-11.30 Prayers at the Synagogue
13 .30-15.00 Historic trail of Rymanow properties. A walking
tour of the long Rymanow with the participation of former Jewish residents.
It will be conducted in English and Polish, starting in the parking lot at
the Rynek.
19.30 – 20.30 Havdallah, saying goodbye to the Sabbath.

Hungary -- Bankito festival coming up

My latest article for JTA looks at Budapest's progressive Jewish music scene, as a sort of preview to this year's Bankito Jewish culture festival, held near Budapest August 5-8.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to get to Bankito -- I'm going to southern Italy with my father and brother to attend a conference on the art work that my mother carried out in a small Calabrian village in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the Bankito line-up looks good -- and fun.

Jewish fusion music key to Budapest’s ‘Jewstock’ festival

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · July 22, 2010

BUDAPEST (JTA) -- Flora Polnauer, 28, tilts back her head, half closes her eyes and hums a few bars of a song by her hip-hop/funk/reggae band HaGesher. The song is "Lecha Dodi," the Shabbat evening prayer -- sounded over a Yiddishized version of the Beatles song "Girl." It's just one of the many unconventional songs of the band, whose vocalists rap their own lyrics in Hebrew, Hungarian and English.

"It's modern Jewish music because it's influenced by Jewish things, but it's not the replaying of old Jewish songs," says Daniel Kardos, 34, a composer and guitarist who plays with Hagesher and several other bands. "I pick up many things and mix them."

Hagesher is one of about half a dozen bands in this city of European Jewish cool blending jazz, hip hop, rap and reggae with Israeli pop and traditional Jewish folk tunes and liturgy to form an eclectic urban sound.
"It's a big mix of contemporary Jewish musical identity," said vocalist Adam Schoenberger, the son of a rabbi. "All of us find Jewish culture very important. Hagesher is a platform for us to articulate musically our different musical interpretation of Jewish cultural heritage."

As the program director of the popular Siraly club, whose dimly lit basement stage is a regular venue for Hagesher and other groups, Schoenberger, 30, is a leader in Budapest's Jewish youth scene. He is also one of the organizers of Bankito, sometimes referred to as "Jewstock" -- a youth-oriented Jewish culture festival Aug. 5-8 on the shore of Bank Lake, north of Budapest.

Bankito includes concerts, exhibitions, performances, workshops, seminars and lectures, a poetry slam, sports events, movies, and Jewish and interfaith religious observances. A number of events at this year's festival will highlight Roma, or Gypsy culture, and focus also on social and civic issues such as the rights of the Roma and other ethnic minorities.

Music is a highlight of Bankito. Hagesher, the Daniel Kardos Quartet and other Jewish bands such as Nigun and Triton Electric Oktopus will perform. "We're at a fascinating moment in Jewish music: It's hip again," said Michigan's Jack Zaientz, who authors the Teruah Jewish music blog. "There's an amazing gang of musicians who are young, smart, urban and Jewish, and making their Jewish identities a core part of their music and stage identities."

Read full story at jta.org

Poland -- CNN on Jewish cultural and other revival

CNN has run a piece on Poland's rediscovery of its Jewish past I'm delighted that it mentioned the Jewish culture festival in Bialystok, as well as that in Krakow.
  

This phenomenon has, of course,  been going on for several decades already. By now, at least a score of Jewish culture festivals of one sort or another take place in Poland each year -- I've listed quite a few of them in the sidebar of this blog. Krakow's is the oldest and biggest; founded in 1988 it marked its 20th edition this year.

The success of the Krakow Festival  helped spark other Jewish festivals of various types around the country. In 2000, the a mapping of Jewish culture project by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research i London identified seven of them. In 2009, I counted more than 20, including at least two Jewish film festivals. Some were one-day affairs, others spanned a weekend or longer.

Some took place in towns with small Jewish communities, such as Wroclaw, Poznan and Gdansk. Others took place where no Jews live today. These included the sixth edition of a festival dedicated to the Yiddish author Shalom Asch, scheduled for early December in the central town of Kutno, the third edition of an annual Jewish culture festival in the village of Checiny, a Jewish theatre festival in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, the annual Jewish culture festival in Chmielnik, a Jewish culture festival in Bialystok, another in Szczekonciny, another in Przysucha, and so on. Festivals celebrating a diversity of cultures and religions, including Judaism, took place in Lodz, Wlodowa and Szczebrzeszyn.

‘I often joke that now the mayor of every small town feels obliged to make excuses [if] he/she has no Jewish Festival in his/her town,’ Anna Dodziuk, a psychotherapist who is also a Jewish activist and editor, told me. ‘To put it short: it is politically correct now to explore the Jewish history of the local communities, to commemorate Jews of a shtetl who perished in Holocaust, to celebrate somehow Jewish culture. So more and more Jews start to feel secure enough to be openly Jewish (or to be visible).’

Poland -- Festivals (not Krakow....)

 Synagogue in Chmielnik, 2006. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

By now, the Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, which marks its 20th edition this year (June 26-July 4), is wellknown around the world. But Poland is host to many other Jewish culture festivals of one sort or another, which frequently take place in towns and villages where Jews no longer live. This month, for example, there are at least three: in Bialystok, Sejny and Chmielnik.

The Zahor: Color and Sound Jewish culture festival takes place June 13-15 in Bialystok. It features lectures, concerts and films.

Another edition of the annual Musicians' Raft  series of workshops/concerts/events on Yiddish culture, held in Sejny, near the Lithuanian border, June 13-19 and organized by the Borderland Foundation, a wonderful foundation dedicated to presenting and preserving minority cultures in Poland and elsewhere.

Young music bands from Central Europe, Israel, Turkey, Denmark, New York and Great Britain will to participate in the project: Steve Swell (NY), Mikołaj Trzaska (Gdańsk), Mark Sanders (London), Olie Brice (London), Raphael Rogiński (Warszawa), Paul Brody (Berlin), Gökçe Kilincer (London), Tahir Palali (London), Peter Ole Jørgensen (Kopenhagen) and Klezmer Band from Sejny. The meeting of experienced musicians, who refer to tradition, and young artists, who prefer the new sounds, will be really interesting. Rummy music experiments are expected! The seminars about the yiddish culture in Central-Eastern Europe are the integral part of the project. The seminars are set to lead by well-known scholars and attended by 15 students who would like to learn more about Jewish history.

June 18-20, the 8th annual "Meetings with Jewish Culture" takes place in the small villages of Szydlow and Chmielnik, in south-central Poland. No Jews live in either village, but both  boast huge historic former synagogues.

VIII MEETINGS WITH JEWISH CULTURE


SZYDŁOW – CHMIELNIK


18-20 JUNE 2010



Friday, 18 june 2010 – Szydlow



17:00 (5 p.m.) - Theatrical spectacle: “Chasidy Stories” by Jewish Theatre.


18:00 (6 p.m.) - Theatrical spectacle in execution of young people from Szydlow’s school.


19:00 (7 p.m.) - Open the exhibition called "I see faces, hear steps" made by Malgorzata Gladyszewska and the painting-sculpturing of the Plastic Arts Association in Kielce.


19:20 (7:20 p.m.) - The "Qartet Klezmer Trio" team from Krakow concert on the market.


20:35 (8:35 p.m.) – finish show.



19 – 20 JUNE 2010 – CHMIELNIK

Saturday, 19 june 2010 - the House of Culture in Chmielnik


17:00 (5 p.m.) – open the photo exhibition by Ryszard Biskup and drawing & graphic arts by Cezary Zdrojewski.


17:35 (5:35 p.m.) – premiere the videoclip of “Chmielnikers” band.


17:40 (5:40 p.m.) - dancing show inspired by the Jewish music made by children from the Elementary School in Chmielnik.


18:00 (6 p.m.) - Theatrical performance called "On the world borderland" made by Poem Theatre "In Radziwill" from Szydlowiec.


18:40 (6:40 p.m.) - Theatrical performance called "Jonash – The Prophet" made by Theatre Team "Bonteo" from Krakow.


19:15 (7:15 p.m.) - dancing show inspired by the Jewish music made by children from the Basic School in Chmielnik.


20:00 (8 p.m.) – “Jidisze Perl” – Jewish religious songs by Nina Stiller. Piano – Artur Jerzy Zielinski.


21:00 (p.m.) - finish show.


Sunday, 20 june 2010.


12:00 (12 noon) - The solemn holy mass in the Church in Chmielnik.


In the Synagogue in Chmielnik:


13:30 (1:30 p.m.) - Open the exhibition called "Jews from Chmielnik story" made by Leszek Wawrzyk.


13:45 (1:45 p.m.) – Performance called “This cities wasn’t there…” – singer Ewa Warta Smietana, recite Jerzy Trela.


15:00 – “Around Chopin music” – piano Krystyna Man-Szczepanczyk.


At the time: 13:00 - 20:00 at the Synagogue on the Sienkiewicza and Wspolna street will be the introductions of handicraft, Jewish food, plastic performances as well as the demonstrations of Jewish art of boiling, illumined the performance of klezmer team called the "Klezmafour".


On the Market:


16:00 (4 p.m.) – Shows by the children and youth:


- dancing show inspired by the Jewish music made by children from the Elementary School in Chmielnik.


- “Szmoncesy” - theatrical performance by children from Elementary and Basic School in Chmielnik.


16:15 (4:15 p.m.) – Jewish dance practice part 1 – by Ewa Gajo.


16:45 (4:45 p.m.) – The final of the Second Youth Jewish Songs Contest in Chmielnik.


17:30 (5:30 p.m.) – Band “Chmielnikers” concert.


18:15 (6:15 p.m.) – Results of the Second Youth Jewish Songs Contest in Chmielnik.


18:30 (6:30 p.m.) - dancing show inspired by the Jewish music made by girls from the Basic School in Chmielnik.


18:45 (6:45 p.m.) – Jewish dance practice part 2 – by Ewa Gajo.


20:00 (8 p.m.) – Leonard Cohen’s songs “The deep of the heart” by Pawel Orkisz & Band.


21:30 (9:30 p.m.) – finish show.

Romania/CZ -- Czech 9 Gates Festival in Bucharest

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This year, the annual (and of late traveling)   9 Gates Festival of Czech Jewish Culture is being hosted in Bucharest, Romania.

The schedule includes:

EXHIBITIONS

Neighbors who Disappeared
The project Neighbors Who Disappeared provides young people (12-21 years old) with an opportunity to search for neighbors who "disappeared" from their neighborhood - particularly during the Second World War. Students and children in the same schools children go to today, and what were the reasons for their sudden departure.

Tribute to the Child Holocaust Victims
The second stage of the project called A Tribute to the Child Holocaust Victims addresses again young people aged 12-21 and proposes tht they work independently on the stories of people who lived with their neighbours in a harmony until WWII and who were then mostly marked, restricte, persecuted, and finally liquidated. This projct’s topic, however is in the first place the life of the children and youngsters in the same community where children-participants live today.

FILM
Short Long Journey, Czech Republic, 2009, 82 min.
Director: Martin Hanzlicek
Producers: Fedor Gal, Jarmila Polakova
„About people, not only about Jews, about the evil in us, not only about the holocaust, about the present not only about the past“
In April 1945 Vojtech Gal was murdered on the way from Sachsenhausen to Schwerin. In April 2008 his son walked the same route in an attempt to find his father’s grave and leave a testimony. He was accompanied by friends, film makers and fellow pilgrims. They did not understand everything they came across. They could not comprehend some of the people with whom they talked. But it never occurred to them even for a moment that they were travelling without aim and meaning. They give harsh personal witness of their journey, anticipating neither agreement nor tolerance.

Diamonds of the Night, Cehoslovacia, 1964, 64 min.
Director: Jan Nemec
Screenplay: Arnost Lustig
Diamonds of the Night is set in Czechoslovakia during World War II. Two Jewish youths escape from a concentration camp-bound train. Captured by local peasants on a charge of stealing bread, the boys are sentenced to a firing squad. The men prepare to execute the boys, but simply laugh as they walk away instead of executing them. The ending is ambiguous: The men either actually spared the boys, or they could be walking into the afterlife.

MUSIC
Concert Naches
The Klezmer band NACHES interprets the traditional and the not so traditional folk music of the East European Jews. The band has taken part of many important Klezmer festivals, for example Klez- Fest in the UK.

For a full schedule click HERE

Jewish Quarterly -- Virtual Judaism, festivals and all

Even though I've never used the term "virtual Judaism," that's what the Jewish Quarterly in London titled my article that ran in December.  It deals with festivals and other cultural developments, mainly in Poland. Read the full article at the web site by clicking HERE (you have to register, but registration is free).

Virtual Judaism

December 21, 2009b
by Ruth Ellen Gruber

Representation is a moving target. Jewish culture is undergoing such changes that to pin it down to one representation is an illusion.
       Prof. Jonathan Webber, 1999

I’m a Jewish vegetarian atheist.
      Jonathan Ornstein, director, Jewish Community Center, Krakow, Poland, 2009


In the mid-1990s I began exploring a phenomenon that I described as ‘filling the Jewish space’ in Europe. Along with the efforts to revive Jewish communal life and reclaim and reassert Jewish identity in post-Holocaust, post-communist countries, I observed what I called a ‘Virtual Jewishness,’ or a ‘Virtual Jewish World,’ peopled by ‘Virtual Jews’ who create, perform, enact or engage with Jewish culture from an outsider perspective, often in the absence of local Jewish populations.

I wrote about non-Jewish klezmer bands, and Jewish museums and Jewish culture festivals organized by non-Jews for a primarily non-Jewish public. And I also described university Jewish studies programmes whose students were mostly Gentile, as well as the commercial exploitation of Jewish heritage, including the promotion of Jewish-themed tourism to synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and other sites of Jewish heritage where few if any Jews live today.

Although I discussed the ‘virtually Jewish’ phenomenon in a general European context, some of the most visible (and to some observers most troubling) manifestations were — and still are — observed in Poland, the historic heartland of Jewish life in Europe, where, as the scholar Jonathan Webber once noted, ‘the remarkable characteristic of anything to do with Jews…is its intensity.’ 

A project undertaken by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) provided a vivid statistical illustration of this. Between May 2000 and April 2001, it attempted to ‘map’ Jewish cultural activities in four European countries with small Jewish communities. The countries chosen — Poland, Sweden, Italy and Belgium — have a total Jewish population of well under 100,000 and had very different Jewish histories both before World War II and during and after the Shoah. 

‘The results are simply astonishing, and as yet we have no idea what to make of them,’ Webber, who was an academic consultant on the project, reported in July 2001 at a conference in Budapest on Jewish identities in the post-communist era. ‘There is clearly no correlation between the considerable size of this cultural production and the percentage of Jews in a given total population of a particular country.’ It is almost, he added, as if ‘once one starts to have public Jewish culture, it simply continues to generate further events.’
Indeed, out of the four countries surveyed, Poland, with its tiny Jewish population (depending on how one defines ‘Jew,’ estimates vary from 3,000 to 20,000 or more in a total population of about 40 million), was by far the Jewish cultural champion, with 196 individual events and fully seven Jewish cultural festivals, including the annual Festival of Jewish culture in Krakow — the ‘largest and most important event’ recorded in the JPR survey.

The Festival — founded in 1988 by two young, non-Jewish intellectuals for a primarily non-Jewish public — takes place in Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter of Krakow, and nowhere, perhaps, has become more symbolic of the ‘virtually Jewish’ trends and the questions they raise than here.Centered on the most extensive surviving complex of Jewish built heritage in east-central Europe — synagogues, cemeteries, homes, marketplaces and other buildings and monuments, Kazimierz since the early 1990s has grown, and, indeed, been molded, into one of the major centers of Jewish tourism in Europe.

The post-communist development has seen the restoration of several synagogues and has brought new life and new business to what had long languished as the archetypical ‘Jewish ghost town.’ Even 15 years ago, much of Jewish Kazimierz was a derelict slum. At the same time this development has made the district one of the most prominent symbols of what has been called the marketing or ‘commodification’ of Jewish culture. The new Jewish-style cafes, boutiques, souvenir kitsch and constantly roving tour groups create an environment that has caused (and still causes) a deep sense of unease among some visitors, particularly as Krakow is only an hour’s drive from Auschwitz and often serves as a focal point for visits to the notorious death camp. 

Writing about Kazimierz in 2006, for example, in a review of Jan T. Gross’s 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, the American journalist Ruth Franklin scorned what she termed the ‘much ballyhooed renaissance of Jewish culture in Poland, complete with sold-out klezmer festivals and a popular brand of spirits called “Kosher Vodka.” She wrote: ‘Half a dozen Jewish-themed hotels welcome visitors to Kazimierz, with names like “Alef” and “Ester” and “Klezmer Hois”; the “Eden” sports mezuzahs on every door and advertises ‘the only mikveh bath in Poland,’ as if it were a Jacuzzi.’ She goes on, ‘This grim carnival of Holocaust tourism and Western capital is neither a sign nor a symptom of a greater change in Polish society. It is evidence only of the Polish national schizophrenia on the subject of Jews. It is lovely to restore old buildings and to cherish a culture that has perished. But the celebration of the Jews of Poland cannot substitute for a genuine confrontation with the manner of their disappearance: when, where and by whom. There is no indication that the consumers of ‘Kosher Vodka’ are interested in engaging in such a reckoning any time soon.’  

While it is hard to disagree with Franklin’s assertions, there is a bigger picture which she ignores. Poland does, indeed, have a certain schizophrenia towards its Jewish past but this schizophrenia has been demonstrated in loud and even lacerating public nationwide debates which is infinitely better, and ultimately more healthy, thatn the absolute denial and silence that existed until the 1980s. 

‘When I began working in Poland in 1990, it was almost completely taboo to tell your friends that you are Jewish,’ Poland’s American-born chief rabbi Michael Schudrich told me recently. ‘Today, it is just a normal thing to say to almost anybody here in Poland. What was taboo only 20 years ago, is today a curiosity or interesting or [indicates] respect — and for some [it is] of no consequence at all.’
Likewise, in July 2006, Michael Steinlauf, an American academic expert on Yiddish culture and Polish-Jewish relations and the author of the book Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997), told me that to him, during the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, the Kazimierz district’s main square, Szeroka street, formed a symbolic ‘headquarters of the Diaspora’ thanks to the numerous cultural events and the many international Jewish artists, performers and fans who attended. I was speaking to him after he had enjoyed Friday night dinner with friends and family at one of the Szeroka street restaurants — a newly opened ‘mainstream’ restaurant, not one of the Jewish-style cafes. ‘We had a table for 11 and lit the candles,’ he told me. ‘The couple from the next table came over saying “Shalom Aleichem”. I’ve never done this anywhere else. It’s never been as easy to be a Jew than on Szeroka street the night before [the Festival’s outdoor final concert there].’

Krakow is home to several institutions promoting education on Jewish subjects. These include the Jewish studies centre at Jagiellonian University, founded in 1986, as well as the Jewish Culture Centre, established in 1993, as well as the Galicia Jewish Museum, founded by the late British photographer Chris Schwarz in 2004. The Jewish Culture Festival recently opened its own permanent culture and education centre called Cheder.
These institutions, which offer varied programs of lectures, classes, concerts and workshops, are generally run by non-Jews to serve the general public, including tourists. But all benefit from the input of Jewish scholars and Jewish religious and cultural figures.

The number of Jews in Krakow remains tiny — somewhere between 200 and 400 depending on whom you talk to. But the Jewish community has raised its own profile in recent years, in part thanks to the formation of a Jewish youth group, Czulent, in 2004 and also to the opening in 2008 of a modern Jewish Community Centre. (Mainly funded by World Jewish Relief and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the JCC project had a somewhat high profile from the outset. It came about, remarkably, at the urging of Prince Charles, who had visited Krakow in 2002 and was moved by the plight of the poor and aging Jews of the city. Charles himself returned to Krakow last year for its inauguration; wearing a kippah he helped affix a mezuzah to the door.)

The JCC director, Jonathan Ornstein, is a 39-year-old New Yorker who made aliyah and then moved to Krakow about seven years ago to teach Hebrew at the Jagiellonian University. Ornstein contradicts the stereotype of the traditional Jew as portrayed in the old paintings and photographs that fill books, decorate the local Jewish-style cafes or are caricatured in the wooden figurines for sale in souvenir shops and craft markets. Knowledgeable but iconoclastic, and an avowed ‘Jewish vegetarian atheist,’ he took part in an ‘atheist pride’ march in Krakow this year, carrying a sign reading ‘Thank God I’m an atheist.’ Not only that, he created a Facebook group called ‘I want the Beastie Boys to play the XX Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow.’
Recently, I noted to Ornstein that that is increasingly little direct memory anymore in Poland of a time when the country was home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. For the student-age crowd that attends Jewish Culture Festival events or hangs out in the music pubs that have made Kazimierz the scene of trendy night life, what goes on today is what ‘Jewish’ means. Few of them can even remember a time before the Festival existed or before the district was a Jewish tourist attraction, with all the attendant commercialization.
He agreed. Kazimierz, Ornstein said, was to his mind not the ‘former’ but the ‘present’ Jewish quarter of Krakow.

‘Nobody alive today has a good memory of Kazimierz when it was better than it is now,’ he said. ‘There was the war, and then after the war it was derelict for decades. Now, it’s the hippest place in the city. The whole ‘former’ thing is based on history, not living memory.’
The success of the Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow helped spark other Jewish festivals of various types around the country. In 2000, the JPR Mapping project identified seven of them. Today, the number is much greater: in 2009, I counted more than 20, including at least two Jewish film festivals.
Some were one-day affairs, others spanned a weekend or longer. Some took place in towns with small Jewish communities, such as Wroclaw, Poznan and Gdansk. Others took place where no Jews live today. These included the sixth edition of a festival dedicated to the Yiddish author Shalom Asch, scheduled for early December in the central town of Kutno, the third edition of an annual Jewish culture festival in the village of Checiny, a Jewish theatre festival in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, the annual Jewish culture festival in Chmielnik, a Jewish culture festival in Bialystok, another in Szczekonciny, another in Przysucha, and so on. Festivals celebrating a diversity of cultures and religions, including Judaism, took place in Lodz, Wlodowa and Szczebrzeszyn.

‘I often joke that now the mayor of every small town feels obliged to make excuses [if] he/she has no Jewish Festival in his/her town,’ Anna Dodziuk, a psychotherapist who is also a Jewish activist and editor, told me. ‘To put it short: it is politically correct now to explore the Jewish history of the local communities, to commemorate Jews of a shtetl who perished in Holocaust, to celebrate somehow Jewish culture. So more and more Jews start to feel secure enough to be openly Jewish (or to be visible).’
In fact, some of the festivals had religious observance at their heart. One of these was a Shabbaton weekend held in October in Kielce. Most of Kielce’s 25,000 pre-war Jewish were killed in Treblinka, but the town is far better known for what happened after the war; it is infamous for the July 1946 pogrom that killed 42 Jews, an attack that formed the basis of Jan T. Gross’s book Fear.

The event brought prayers to the synagogue for the first time since the Holocaust — the building has been used as an archive for nearly 60 years. It also included lectures, workshops, exhibitions, concerts and film screenings. It was the latest in a series of Shabbaton programs in long-disused synagogues in Poland organized by Michael Traison, an observant Jewish America lawyer who has an office in Warsaw and has spent much of his time in Poland over the past 15 years.

Jews and Catholics took part in the event. ‘For the first time in my life I could celebrate the beginning of the Shabbat,’ a Catholic man wrote on the Shabbaton web site. ‘I could feel myself what I already knew theoretically, namely — what the Shabbat means for Jews who treat their faith seriously. Boi kala is also a challenge or a question on how I, a Christian man, treat my “shabbat” — Sunday. Thanks to Jews’ testimony of how they treat their holy day, I treat my one more seriously.’
The biggest Jewish Culture Festival outside Krakow was the sixth edition of the annual ‘Singer’s Warsaw’ festival in the Polish capital at the beginning of September. Singer’s Warsaw is sponsored by the secular Jewish Shalom organization. Shalom was founded in 1988 and is headed by the Yiddish singer Golda Tencer, now in her 60s, who for years was the star of Warsaw’s State Yiddish Theatre — her husband, Szymon Szurmiej, has been head of the Theatre since 1969.

The Shalom Foundation has sponsored events such as highschool essay competitions on Jewish topics, concerts, art exhibits, Jewish film festivals, a Jewish song competition, and the like. Outside of Poland, however, it is best known for the remarkable 1996 exhibition and book And I Still See Their Faces.This was a collection of more than 450 photographs of Polish Jews, ranging from formal studio portraits to faded snapshots of everyday life. They were culled from photographs sent in — mainly by non-Jewish Poles — from all over Poland. The number of photos sent in, about 8,000, more or less equals the number of self-identifying Jews living in Poland today.

The exhibit showed the broadest cross-section possible of Jews in pre-war Poland, orthodox and secular; assimilated and traditional. As such it turned somatic and other stereotypes (including that of Jews as victims) on their head. In the pictures, wrote Tencer in an introduction to the book, ‘the light falls on faces still free of terror and fear. We can see on them quiet reflection, the joy of family life, a smile that manifests belief in a friendly world.’

Paradoxically, much of this sensitivity is trumped by theatricality in the way that the Singer Festival is mounted.

The Festival’s stated aim, according to its web- site is ‘to reconstruct the prewar atmosphere here in order to present the annihilated world of the Polish Jews.’ Unlike in Krakow, where the entire Kazimierz district remains largest intact, almost all of downtown Warsaw, including the Jewish quarter and wartime Ghetto, was destroyed during the Second World War. The Singer festival takes place in and around one-block-long Prozna street, one of the only streets in Warsaw’s historic downtown Jewish district to have survived.
During the festival, the dilapidated street is turned into a sort of stage, with old photographs of Polish Jews affixed to windows or hung from wires attached to the buildings. I admit that I haven’t attended the Singer Festival, but — from afar — the costumed, Renaissance Faire-style ‘performing the Jew’ that is described on the festival’s web site (and shown in posted pictures) makes me rather more uneasy than do many of the other manifestations of public Jewish culture:

Along Próžna Street we create Jewish cafés, quaint shops and workshops. We construct an old bookstore and a newspaper office in which [Isaac Bashevis] Singer worked in New York before the war. Each year we make a wine bar and a bakery. Everyone can come inside, and have a look at collected odds and ends in use at the beginning of the twentieth-century. There are lots of souvenirs to be bought from street vendors and many home-made tidbits to be tasted. Many characteristic figures appear in the streets during the festival: Hasidics, merchants, painters, shoemakers, tailors, printers, blacksmiths, barrel organ players, entertainers, florists. All of them contributed to making Warsaw uniquely colorful. During the festival, just as in the past, one can hear klezmer music, chants from synagogues, as well as well-known traditional Jewish songs, in the heart of the Polish capital. The past reality is revived by many exhibitions and plays, artists’ installations, scientific sessions, and meetings with writers and Jewish artists. Yiddish culture returns through prewar films, song and dance workshops, paper cutting, ceramics as well as Hebrew calligraphy, lectures and discussion groups.

My use of the term ‘Virtual’ deliberately played on the cyberspace concept of virtual worlds and virtual communities exiting on the Internet. Even back then, these included many, many Jewish websites.
‘People can enter, move around and engage in cyberspace virtual worlds without physically leaving their desks or quitting their “real world” identities,’ I wrote in my 2002 book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe:

Online, however, they can assume other identities, play other roles and be, or act as if they are, whoever they want. Like virtual worlds on the Internet, the various aspects of ‘Virtual Jewry’ are linked together and overlapping. One can approach them either passively, as a mere consumer, or ‘interactively,’ in a participatory manner, through, for example, performance and interpretation. They may be enriched by input from contemporary Jewish communal, intellectual, institutional, or religious sources, or they may be self-contained within totally non-Jewish contexts.

Virtually Jewish came out several years before the advent of social networking sites such as Facebook, and also well before what has been called a ‘Virtual Diaspora’ took root in the online world known as Second Life, where a ‘virtual synagogue’, Temple Beth Israel, was established there in 2006.
One year later, reported 2Life Magazine, Second Life’s Jewish community was ‘more diverse in age, religious affiliation and […] geographical origin than any community could be in the real world, and it also includes many religious seekers who use Second Life as a tool to explore their own roots, many of them with little to no Jewish educational background.’

Second Life Judaism, it said, was ‘a unique intercultural dialogue within various streams of Judaism, within various Diasporas and Israel, within various age groups and with Jews and non-Jews. Judaism in Second Life is a mélange of different identities, in which age, origin, gender, and even religious affiliation are unimportant. It is an experiment with an uncertain outcome, but with obvious potential for new and creative ways to explore culture, heritage and identity.’

The ‘virtual diaspora’ in Second Life is symptomatic of an even broader Jewish presence in cyberspace which has grown exponentially in the past decade and which now includes many websites, blogs and Facebook groups that originate in Poland — among Jews and ‘virtual Jews’ alike.
Among the most impressive and inclusive of these is the so-called ‘Virtual Shtetl,’ a web portal set up by the huge new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is under construction in Warsaw. Its aim is to be both an information portal as well as a sort of Jewish social networking site. 

‘The “Virtual Shtetl” is a museum without barriers, a consequent extension of the real Museum,’ the website says. ‘Its main objective is to provide a unique social forum for everyone interested in Polish-Jewish life.’
The website includes constantly expanding databases of historic and contemporary photographs and archival information about specific towns all around Poland, as well as blog-like, frequently updated news items and announcements of Jewish interest related to Poland. In October alone there were more than 60 items posted.
‘Currently, our portal is a source of information but, in the future, it will also include an interactive system by which Internet users will interact with each other,’ the site says, in phrases that echo my own description of interaction in the flesh and blood ‘virtual Jewish world.’

The Virtual Shtetl, it says, ‘will create a link between Polish-Jewish history and the contemporary, multi-cultural world.’

These ‘virtual’ links will enhance links that already exist, creating a sort of clearing house for many activities that already take place. Indeed, the past decade already the Krakow Jewish Festival has included a ceremony at which the Israeli ambassador honors non-Jewish Poles who preserve, conserve and promote Jewish culture and memory.

It is all part of a process of ‘normalisation’ Dodziuk said. ‘I’m sure it has its influence on a Jewish perception of the situation in Poland.’ For local populations in many places, she said, ‘These pre-war Jewish inhabitants have become “our people,” part of our local tradition.’ Earlier this year, she added, on a trip with an Israel friend through eastern and southeastern Poland, she met many people in small towns who now considered the Jewish history of these one-times shtetls part and parcel of their own local past and personal memories.
‘It is,’ she said, ‘obviously much more and much deeper than political correctness.’

List of Jewish festivals is growing

Just a reminder for readers to check the list in the sidebar -- of Jewish culture/arts/music/film, etc festivals coming up in Europe this spring/summer/fall.

So far, I have put nearly 30 festivals on the list.... with more, I'm sure, to come.

Click HERE to see the full list.

Jewish Culture/Music/Etc Festivals 2010

 Posters for last year's Quarter6Quarter7 Hanukkah festival in Budapest. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

                                                                                            

A number of Jewish culture festivals of all sorts take place around Europe in the spring and summer (and beyond). Some are dedicated just to music. Some to film. Others are much broader. As far as I know, there is no central web site where you can find information on all of them. I will begin to post information here on dates and venues. I ask my readers to please send me information to include!

The culture festivals and other smaller events make good destinations around which to center a trip. Some, like the annual Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, are huge events lasting a week or more, which draw thousands of people and offer scores or sometimes hundreds of performances, lectures, concerts, exhibits and the like. Other festivals are much less ambitious. Some are primarily workshops but also feature concerts. Many of the same artists perform at more than one festival.

 The list will be growing and growing -- and again,  I ask my readers to please send me information and links to upcoming events. Thanks!


ALL OVER EUROPE -- 11th annual European Day of Jewish Culture. The first Sunday in September -- Sept. 5. Events take place in nearly 30 countries. The theme this year is Art and Judaism.

AUSTRIA

April 22-27 -- Vienna --  Stay Jewish! (Film Festival)

October 14-November 14 -- Vienna -- Yiddish Culture Autumn (web site under construction)

November 6 -  21 -- Vienna -- KlezMORE festival (this year's program is not up yet)

CROATIA

Aug. 23-31 -- Opatija -- Bejahad 2010


CZECH REPUBLIC

July 8-11 -- Boskovice -- Boskovice Festival. Mainly jazz, but also an emphasis on Jewish culture, given the importance of the well-preserved former Jewish quarter, cemetery and Jewish museum in the restored synagogue.

July 29-31 -- Trebic -- Seventh edition of the Trebic Jewish Culture Festival, held in the Czech Republic's most extensive preserved former Jewish quarter

FRANCE

April 9 - July 18 -- Paris -- Radical Jewish Culture exhibit (and concerts), Jewish Museum

June 13-28 -- Paris --  6th Festival of Jewish Cultures

July 5-9 -- Paris -- Klezmer Paris festival Lots of workshops from an all-star international team of  musicians and teachers.


GERMANY

March 5-14  -- Fürth -- Fürth International Klezmer Festival (12th edition)

July 3-August 2  -- Weimar -- Yiddish Summer Weimar

October 17-31 -- Dresden -- The 14th Yiddish Weeks Dresden

November 20-30 -- Munich -- The 24th Jewish Culture Days, Munich (devoted this year to Jewish Berlin)

HUNGARY

April 2-4 -- Budapest -- Mini-Israeli-Film-Festival, Kino cinema club

August 5-8  -- Bank Lake -- Bankito Festival

August 26-Sept. 6 -- Budapest -- Jewish Summer Festival


 ITALY

 March 11 -- Barletta --  Festival Musica Judaica 2009-2010

April 17-21 -- Ferrara -- Festival of the Jewish Book in Italy


April 23-May 23; Sept. 26-Oct. 31 -- Casale Monferrato -- OyOyOy Festival

NETHERLANDS

April  18-25    -- Leeuwarden -- Yiddish Festival Leeuwarden (takes place every other year)

Oct. 28-31 -- Amsterdam -- International Jewish Music Festival

POLAND

April 9-11 -- Warsaw -- Festival of New Jewish Music

April 20-25 -- Warsaw -- Jewish Motifs International Film Festival

May 23-28 -- Wroclaw -- 12th Simcha Jewish Culture Festival (note -- other events take place May 5-9, with the gala re-opening of the newly restored White Stork Synagogue)

May 15-23 -- Warsaw -- "Otwardatwarda" festival

May 23-26 -- Warsaw --  13th Jewish Book Fair

 June 13-19 -- Sejny -- Musicians' Raft

June -14-16 -- Bialystok -- Zahor Festival of Jewish Culture

June 19-20 -- Chmielnik -- The Eighth "Meetings with Jewish Culture" festival

June 22-26 -- Piotrkow Trybunalski -- Days of Judaism

June 26-July 4 --Krakow -- Festival of Jewish Culture --20th Edition!

 July 13-17 -- Kazimierz Dolny -- Klezmer Music Festival

July 23-25 -- Poznan -- 4th Tzadik Jewish Culture Festival

August 11 -- Lublin -- Shalom. Meetings with Jewish Culture

August 12-14 -- Rymanow -- Shabbat in Rymanow

August 28-Sept. 5 -- Warsaw -- Singer's Warsaw Jewish Culture Festival

ROMANIA

May 24-27 -- Timisoara -- Jewish Culture Days


May 26-29 -- Bucharest -- Czech Nine Gates Festival

June 19-22 -- Sighet -- Sighet Jewish Festival

September 2-5 -- Bucharest -- World of Yiddish Festival

RUSSIA

March 29-April 4 -- Moscow -- Yiddish Fest


SWITZERLAND

March 6-April 25 -- Geneva - Printemps Sefarade

U.K.

Feb. 27-March 7 -- London -- Jewish Book Week

June 21-24 -- London -- Cantors Convention

August 8-13 -- London -- KlezFest

Ukraine

July 25 -- L'viv -- LvivKlezFest

Amsterdam -- Jewish Music Festival Coming Up

Just got sent the link for another upcoming Jewish culture festival -- the 15th International Jewish Music Festival in Amsterdam, to be held Oct. 23-25.

From the web site:

The 15th edition of the International Jewish Music Festival will be held in Amsterdam October 23-25, 2009 the brand new concert halls of the Amsterdam Conservatory. Last year, 24 ensembles from 15 countries battled it out for prize money, concert engagements and a chance at a recording contract with Universal Records. This year we welcome back the winners for a weekend full of concerts, workshops, an open podium and much more...

The ensembles will give concerts and workshops in the most diverse Jewish music sub-genres: hip-hop and reggae for kids, Yiddish song, Sephardic music, klezmer and Balkan music, close harmony and classical.

The free Open Podium gives starting ensembles and soloists a chance to take the stage and show what they've got. The bustling Jewish Cultural Market will feature booksellers, CDłs, sheet music and various Jewish cultural organisations. And our grand prize winner from last year, She'Koyokh, will host a swinging jam session open to everyone.

Romania/Hungary -- Getting Ready to Go to Radauti

Dohany St. Synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I’m in Budapest this weekend, getting ready to head off to Radauti, Romania (the ancestral village on my father's side of the family) on Sept. 1 to carry out the photographic documentation for my (Candle)sticks on Stone project on representing the woman in Jewish tombstone art.

The annual Summer Jewish Culture Festival in Budapest starts tomorrow, and I hope I can catch some of the events. There will be celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the Dohany St. synagogue on Sept. 6, but I wont be able to attend because of the Romania trip. (They also are not listed, somehow, as part of the Festival...)

I also just found out that there will be some sort of ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the synagogue on Dozsa Gyorgy avenue -- designed by my hero, Lipot Baumhorn, built in 1908 and long used as a sports/fencing hall. But I so far have not been able to find out details...

A major part of the "Candlesticks" project is a photo documentation of the stones in the Radauti Jewish cemetery. (Alas, my good camera has broken, so I have to scramble to find a replacement...)

As I wrote for the web site I have set up for the project:

In Jewish tradition, Sabbath candles are a common, and potent, symbol on women’s tombs. That is because lighting the Sabbath candles is one of the three so-called “women’s commandments” carried out by female Jews: these also include observing the laws of Niddah separating men from women during their menstrual periods, and that of Challah, or burning a piece of dough when making bread.

The first time I saw a Jewish woman’s tombstone bearing a representation of candles was in 1978, when for the first time I visited Radauti, the small town in the far north of Romania near where my father’s parents were born. The tombstone in question was that of my great-grandmother, Ettel Gruber, who died in 1947 and in whose honor I received my middle name. Her gravestone is a very simple slab, with a five-branched menorah topping an epitaph.

Since then, and particularly over the past 20 years, I have visited scores if not hundreds of Jewish cemeteries in East-Central Europe, documenting them, photographing them, and writing about them in books and articles.

Carvings on Jewish tombstones include a wide range of symbols representing names, professions, personal attributes, or family lineage — as well as folk decoration. In northern Romania and parts of Poland and Ukraine in particular, cemeteries include a variety of wonderfully vivid motifs, and some stones still retain traces of the brightly colored painted decoration that once adorned them.

Candlesticks on women’s tombs are more or less a constant: sometimes they are very simple renditions, yet they can be extraordinarily vivid bas-relief sculptures. In some instances, broken candles represent death. And in some cemeteries, the carving is so distinctive that you can discern the hand of individual, if long forgotten, artists.

I won’t be going alone on the trip, as I had thought — three of my cousins are coming with me: Arthur, and Hugh and his son Asher. (I hope we all fit in the car!) So it will be a combination art trip and roots trip, with some family gossip and tourism thrown in. I look forward to re-visiting some of the painted monasteries in the region and also eating well...

In addition, as part of the trip — and also as part of the annual European Day of Jewish Culture — next weekend I’m to take part in two presentations of Simon Geissbuehler's new guidebook on Jewish cemeteries in the Bucovina region (now divided between Romania and Ukraine). One presentation is i Radauti, and the other, on Sunday, is in Chernivtsi — Czernowitz — Ukraine, just over the border.

European Day of Jewish Culture Coming up -- Sept. 6

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the European Day of Jewish Culture, an event that takes place in nearly 30 countries and represents the biggest and most extensive Jewish culture festival in Europe. Begun as a local initiative in the Alsace region of France, Culture Day went international in 1999 and is one of the only such manifestations that has a cross-border character.

This year its theme is Jewish Festivals and Traditions. Its roster is likely to include as many as 800 separate, simultaneous events in 28 countries.

With so much going on at the same time in so many places, Culture Day is targeted more at local people than at tourists. It's aim is to enable the public at large to discover the cultural and historical heritage of Judaism and in doing so to combat anti-Jewish prejudice.

As I wrote last year in an article for Hadassah Magazine, Culture Day is loosely coordinated by the ECJC, B'nai B'rith Europe and the Red de Juderias, a Jewish tourism route linking 15 Spanish cities. On the ground, however, the operation is staffed by local volunteers in each participating country -- thousands of them, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The level of participation in each country is determined by local interest, resources and capabilities: some countries have only a few token events.

The Italian participation has, from the beginning, been among the most enthusiastic, thanks to good organization, hundreds of volunteers, and important support from state, regional and local authorities. This year, there will be a record participation in Italy -- nearly 60 towns, cities and villages will be scheduling some sort of event.

Each year in Italy, one city is chosen as the flagship, where official kick-off ceremonies and major events are held.

This year the choice is unusual -- it's Trani, a seaport town in the deep south of Italy, in Puglia, on the heel of Italy's boot. Jews were expelled from here half a millennium ago; it's only in the past few years that local people have begun to recover Jewish history. A tiny Jewish community was reconstituted five years ago.

Events there will center around what is being called the first Festival of Jewish Culture ever to be held in Puglia. Called "Negba", it takes place Sept. 6-9. The program includes performances, concerts, lectures, discussions, exhibits.

Many events will be sited at Trani's Scolanova synagogue, which was used for a centuries as a church but has been the center of Jewish life in the town since 2005.

You can see the full Italian schedule by clicking HERE.