Mazel tov to the recipients of two awards honoring Jewish heritage activists in Poland: Tomasz Kuncewicz, the director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation in Oświęcim, the town in southern Poland where the Nazis built the Auschwitz death camp, and Prof. Andrzej Żbikowski and the “Świętokrzyski Shtetl” Educational and Museum Center in the small town of Chmielnik — which before the Holocaust was 80 percent Jewish.
Tomasz Kuncewicz received the 2022 Irena Sendler Memorial Award, an award presented annually by Taube Philanthropies to honor people “who have been exemplary in preserving and revitalizing Poland’s Jewish heritage.” The Award, founded in 2008, is named for the Polish social worker who saved hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation. It was announced May 9, marking the 14th anniversary of her death.
Kuncewicz was was honored for his “visionary leadership” of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation since its establishment in 2000. Located in a complex anchored by the only synagogue in Oświęcim that survived WW2, the AJCF is dedicated to study, education, and commemoration and also provides a space for prayer and reflection. It includes a museum about the Jewish history of the town, which before the Holocaust has a majority Jewish population.
Recent AJCF projects include an award-winning memorial park on the site of the town’s destroyed Great Synagogue.
Tad Taube, Chairman of Taube Philanthropies and Honorary Consul of the Republic of Poland in San Francisco, said in the announcement that Kuncewicz has
with vision, persistence, and innovation, undertaken and achieved an ambitious mission to restore dignity to and understanding of the Jewish community that lived in the town closest to the Nazi extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau before and during WWII. Mr. Kuncewicz and his team of educators, curators, and heritage conservationists have created a seminal educational complex, the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, located in reconstructed physical spaces representing prewar Jewish life — including a synagogue, a home, and a park — and breathed new life into them for contemporary educational programs that teach about the Holocaust and promote understanding and reconciliation
Read the full announcement of the Irena Sendler Memorial Award
Prof. Andrzej Żbikowski and the “Świętokrzyski Shtetl” Educational and Museum Center located in Chmielnik’s former synagogue, received the 2021 Maria and Łukasz Hirszowicz award, presented by the Jewish Historical Institute (ZIH) in Warsaw.
Żbikowski, a distinguished historian, received it in recognition of scholarly achievements and the “Świętokrzyski Shtetl” Educational and Museum Center received it in the field of commemoration.
The award ceremony May 12 was attended by representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the diplomatic corps, local government authorities, cultural institutions and Jewish communal organizations.
Żbikowski is head of the Scientific Department of the Jewish Historical Institute, with which he has been associated for almost 40 years. He is also a co-founder of the Center for Research on the Extermination of Jews and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. He is the author or editor of many works on the subject of the Warsaw Ghetto and Ghetto Uprising, including the first full edition of Jürgen Stroop’s report on the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The “Świętokrzyski Shtetl” Educational and Museum Center is a state of the art museum and educational center housed in the 17th century synagogue. The museum design includes a unique replica of the bimah, made in glass, and the Center offers a wide range of educational and cultural programming.
Chmielnik today has a population of fewer than 4,000. But before the Holocaust it has around 9,000 residents — 80 percent of whom were Jewish.