Poland: Longtime Jewish heritage activist Adam Bartosz to receive annual Irena Sendler Award

Mazel tov to longtime Jewish heritage activist Adam Bartosz, who is one of the recipients of the 2019 Irena Sendler Memorial Award.

The award, presented annually by the San Francisco-based Taube Foundation, also honors the public intellectual Zuzanna Radzik, recognized for her research, writing, teaching, and advocacy on issues such as Catholic-Jewish relations and Catholicism and feminism.

The awards will be presented at the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, on June 26, during the annual Krakow Jewish Culture Festival.

The award announcement notes that Bartosz, who has been a driving force in the preservation of Jewish heritage sites in the southern Polish town of Tarnow for decades, is

an ethnographer and museologist who founded, 30 years ago, the Committee for Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Tarnów. From 1980-2012, he was the director of the District Museum in Tarnów and organized, in 1982, the first postwar war exhibition dedicated to Jews outside of the Jewish Historical Institute. In 2011 he received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for actions to protect, preserve, and develop the cultural identity of national and ethnic minorities, particularly Jews and Roma.

He has written widely about Jewish heritage and history and was already the recipient of the “Preserving Memory” award presented annually to non-Jewish Poles who preserve, protect, and promote Jewish culture and heritage.

The announcement of the Sendler award comes just days before the re-dedication June 25-26 of the historic Jewish cemetery in Tarnow following two years of extensive restoration work.

Restoration work (done under the supervision of the Chief Rabbinate of Poland) has included rebuilding the walls of the cemetery, installing sidewalks, cleaning away decades of brush and vegetation, restoring many toppled and eroded tombstones and a Shoah monument, converting the former Bet Taharah (funeral preparation room) into a mini-museum, and indexing thousands of tombstones in the cemetery to preserve those records on-line for access in posterity.

The indexing project has already led to many descendants finding physical connections to their ancestors in the cemetery.

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The Irena Sendler Memorial Award was created in 2008 by Taube Philanthropies in memory of  partisan Irena Sendlerow, a Polish social worker who saved hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation.  Yad Vashem named her a “Righteous Among The Nations.” Each year, notes the Taube Foundation,  “in commemoration of the May 12 anniversary of Sendler’s death, the award is presented to Polish citizens who have been exemplary in preserving and revitalizing​ their country’s Jewish heritage.” Nominations are reviewed by a panel of Taube Philanthropies advisory board members and Jewish community leaders in Poland.