A tour guide in Krakow who specializes in Jewish history and culture has been tracing the sites on doorposts in the city where mezuzahs were once affixed and has developed a “mezuzah trail” of about 50 of these places to bring them to public awareness.
Janina Naskalska-Babik launched a Facebook page dedicated to the traces of mezuzahs in Krakow in 2019. She drew on her own research but also on the documentation of mezuzah-places carried out over the past 15 years and more by the Jewish heritage expert Krzysztof Bielawski and by the”Mi Polin” Judaica company team.
The NGO Humanity in Action has just posted a YouTube video about Naskalska-Babik and her project. She researches the people who lived in the buildings or individual apartments where the traces of mezuzahs can be found. Signs with the tour logo mark some of the sites, placed with the permission of current residents.
Bielawski, whose project we noted in the past, created a web site — mezuzy.eu — that locates the sites of mezuzahs he and others have found all over Poland.
The information (mostly from a decade and more ago) includes location and photographs, with the date each photo was taken. He writes that:
Before the Second World War, there were no less than several million mezuzahs in the territory of the Second Polish Republic, nailed to wooden frames or fixed in stone portals. Of these millions, only a few mezuzahs have survived to this day, and maybe a few hundred traces of them: longitudinal depressions or nail holes, sometimes barely visible. The passage of time means that there are fewer and fewer of them every year.
Traces of mezuzahs can also be found in other countries, too — Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Italy, Romania….
Mi Polin is a contemporary Judaica company created in 2014 by Helena Czernek and Aleksander Prugar.
One of the things they do is to find the scars where mezuzahs were once affixed, from all over Poland, and make bronze casts of them, creating new mezuzahs.
The resulting items are commemorative pieces of art, but also commercial products.
According to an article in Haaretz about the project published In April 2022, Czernek and Prugar to date had “documented 153 mezuzahs in 92 Polish cities […]. They have also cast mezuzahs in Ukraine, Belarus, Romania and even Morocco.”
See the Krakow Mezuzah Trail Facebook page
4 comments on “Poland: New video about a Mezuzah Trail in Krakow that focuses attention on the still visible traces where mezuzahs were affixed before WW2”
This Polish woman might be well-intentioned but I found this film obscene in its clueless failure to say openly, or to care at all, what happened to the missing Jews in these houses: they were killed by the Nazis and by Poles!!!!!!! It is not until 10 minutes into this cheery film that the Holocaust is mentioned, and only once. And what is that baloney at the end urging audiences to find traces of ancestors around your homes, taking what we see completely out of the context of the murdered Jews? Blasphemy!
This was absolutely fascinating. I am very grateful that someone spent the time and energy to include English subtitles so an international audience could appreciate this.
amazing project but also horrific in the scale of loss which can never be denied