Poland: New online photo book traces development of Krakow’s Kazimierz Jewish district from empty ghost-scape to Jewish heritage tourism attraction

A new book of photographs — available online — documents the transformation of Krakow’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, from a derelict post-Holocaust ghost-scape to one of the major Jewish heritage attractions in Europe.

The book, called Krakowski Kazimierz: Faces & Places, is a collection of photographs by Jerzy Ochoński, who first started visiting Kazimierz and taking pictures there in the late 1970s and continues to document the neighbourhood and its people today. 

It is a Flipbook, available for free online.

Ochoński’s earliest photographs show Kazimierz as a depopulated slum, its buildings crumbling and its Jewish heritage all but forgotten except by the tiny remnant Jewish community. Over the decades his images show the dramatic changes, particularly with the launch of the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival in 1988 and the post-communist development of Jewish heritage-themed tourism. 

“Over the years, I have taken thousands of photos in Kazimierz – some better, some worse,” Ochoński is quoted as saying in an article about the book on the web site Notes from Poland. “I still photograph the district, as I am fascinated with its history and culture, which I am constantly exploring and learning about.”

Ochoński’s images focus on specific buildings, Jewish heritage sites (such as the synagogues and cemeteries), people, and general street scenes. They encompass the Jewish community and other local residents as well as visitors, ranging from orthodox Jews to revellers at the annual Jewish Culture Festival to patrons at the popular pubs and cafes that make up the trendy new tourism and nightlife scene.

Kazimierz includes the most extensive and intact collection of Jewish built heritage in central Europe, including seven synagogues and two Jewish cemeteries, as well as prayer houses, tenements, squares, and other infrastructure.

One two-page spread in the book contrasts the facade of the 19th century Tempel synagogue in 1985, with the same facade 30 years later — the synagogue underwent a full restoration in the 1990s.

The photographs bring home that Kazimierz is a place full of complexities and nuance that reflect its layers of history, writes Jakub Nowakowski, the Director of the Galicia Jewish Museum, located in Kazimierz, in the Foreword:

It’s a complicated place. It’s a place people come to visit, sometimes travelling a long way to do so. But it’s also a place from which, for decades, people fled. It’s a place where people live, where people use to live and where people dream of living […] 

But Kazimierz is not all about absences.

We continue to write our own, new stories in the shadow of the history of the Kazimierz Jews. Sometimes these stories are linked to the past and occasionally they have an inextricable connecti with it [….] More often than not, however, these stories have nothing in common with this Jewish world. they fill the space with their voices, they reimagine it and they write their own stories.

Click here to view the book online 

Click here to read the article on  Notes from Poland