Tadeusz Kuźmiński, an entrepreneur who rebuilt a wooden synagogue and created a “living shtetl skansen” without Jews in southeast Poland, has died after a long illness. He was 65.
Kuźmiński, who died Saturday, was a businessman and local philanthropist in Biłgoraj — a town that was a thriving Jewish center before the Holocaust but a place where no Jews live today.
It was there that he built a full-scale replica of the destroyed wooden synagogue of Wolpa (now in Belarus) standing in a replica Jewish marketplace aimed at anchoring a cultural-commercial-residential development designed to evoke a pre-WW2 village.
Kuźmiński called his project “City on the Trail of Borderland Cultures,” and his dream was to create a complex that reflected the multicultural character of pre-WW2 Poland, but which would serve as a cultural and commercial venue, and also a tourist attraction.
“He was a wonderful and very special person, a creative dreamer,” Emil Majuk, project manager of the Shtetl Routes initiative at the Grodzka Gate NN Theatre in Lublin told JHE. “His passing away is a great loss for the Lublin region. I hope that there will be some people to continue the work he started in Biłgoraj.”
The development of the “City on the Trail of Borderland Cultures” is overseen by the Biłgoraj XXI Foundation, which was established in 2005. The plan is for the complex to include museums as well as apartments, shops, restaurants, hotel accommodation, and sports facilities.
The replica Wolpa synagogue stands in the middle of a market-style square, lined by reconstructed buildings that evoke historic shtetl architecture, much the way buildings from various towns are arranged in skansens, or outdoor ethnographic or architectural museums.
During a visit to the complex in 2016, Kuźmiński told JHE director Ruth Ellen Gruber that each building was a replica, based on old photographs, of a house that was found in one of several pre-war shtetls. One building on the square houses a small museum/exhibition space dedicated to the Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who spent his childhood in Bilgoraj
To date, only the main part of the Jewish marketplace section of the 40-hectare development has been built.
However, after being idled for awhile, construction began again this spring on a second market square, where there will be replicas of wooden churches and a wooden mosque (such as the one or two still in use by the descendants of Tatars in eastern Poland).
See our report of Ruth Ellen Gruber’s 2016 visit to Bilgoraj
Bilgoraj 21 Foundation web site
See info and pictures of the development on the Facebook part of the real estate company handling it
1 comment on “Poland: RIP Tadeusz Kuźmiński, who rebuilt a wooden synagogue and created a “living shtetl skansen” without Jews in southeast Poland”
I visited thta place a year agao Thre is a nice coffe shoip and the ladies explained me about
I wnated to thank that Gentelman but he wasnt there at that time
Poland is not antisemitic get it out of your Head