The annual Day of Jewish Monuments in the Czech Republic, sponsored by the Prague Jewish Community, the Federation of Jewish Communities and others.
Click to see the preliminary program
This is the 20th Edition of the Singer’s Warsaw Festival, Warsaw
The premier Jewish culture festival in Poland, aside from the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival. It celebrates its 20th edition jubilee this year.
Theatre performances, concerts, films, guided tours, lectures, food, books — and more.
Click here for the full program (including some preliminary events in Bilgoraj)
The second edition of Štetl Fest centers on the theme of trains.
Trains served as a means of transport for Jewish emigres as well as connection among families and businesses. They also served as escape for Jewish and other refugees seeking freedom from the gradually occupied territories under Nazis control. But tragically, the infamous death trains transported thousands of Jews to death camps and concentration camps. However, trains also carried survivors home and to this day continue to aid those fleeing the ongoing war in Ukraine.
As part of the festival, a memorial dedicated to the deported Jews will be unveiled at Platform 5 of the Brno Main Train Station.
There will also be concerts, talks, and guided tours of the Brno Jewish cemetery and Jewish architectural heritage (some tours in English).
The ŠTETL FEST festival is held under the auspices of the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, the Ambassador of the State of Israel, the Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic, the Mayor of the Statutory City of Brno, the President of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic, the Governor of the South Moravian Region and the Rector of Masaryk University.
Click here to see the full program,
Romania’s annual Night of Open Synagogues takes place in a number of synagogues around the country.
We know of events in synagogues in Bucharest, where four synagogues will be open, in Satu Mare, and in Iasi.
We have not seen a full list, however.
The synagogues are open to visitors after the close of Shabbat, and there are also various events planned in some of them.
Speakers will look for answers to these and other questions during the webinar, entirely devoted to the role that places of difficult heritage can play in multidimensional education about human rights. They include memory activists, the academia, and individuals actively working with difficult heritage sites on a daily basis.
The meeting will be conducted in English with simultaneous interpretation to Polish. 
PROGRAM 18.15–18.35: Falstad Centre
18.35–19.00: Engaged Memory Consortium Poland & NeDiPa
19.00–19.15: The EU perspective: site-specific education about past violences and Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme of the EU?
19.15–19.45: Discussion – what the Polish and Norwegian partners can learn from each other? Is there a universal model?
19:15–20.00: Q&A
Jewish cemetery clean-up, organised by the oPŘISe, z. s. NGO
Work will entail removal of ivy from gravestones and other necessary activities. Bring your own tools (sickles, scissors, machetes). Men need to wear head covering. Refreshments will be provided.
Since 2007, forensic archaeological investigations have revealed new evidence of the crimes undertaken at the notorious Treblinka Extermination Camp in Poland.
In this talk, Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls will outline some of the key findings of this research and discuss the ways they have inspired Holocaust survivors and their descendants based in the UK to undertake their own journeys to commemorate their loved ones.
Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls’ pioneering research focuses on the application of interdisciplinary approaches to the investigation of Holocaust landscapes. She conducted the first forensic archaeological investigations at Treblinka Extermination and Labour Camps, the results of which will be presented in her forthcoming book Finding Treblinka. She is also the author of several other books including Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (2015), the Handbook on Missing Persons (2016) and ‘Adolf Island: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney (2022).
There were more than a thousand shtetls in today’s territories of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus. The Second World War and the Holocaust obliterated the world of shtetls completely. Today, in Opatów—as well as in tens of other Polish towns—there are no more Jews left.
The OPOLIN Museum’s new temporary exhibition titled (post) JEWISH… demonstrates that Polish towns hide two parallel histories. The history of their Polish inhabitants is well known and remembered. The one of their Jewish neighbours who are no more is forgotten or left unsaid.
Guide in the exhibition will be the late Mayer Kirshenblatt, a painter who emigrated to Canada with his mother and brothers as a teenager, in 1934. Mayer recalls the shtetl of his youth, restoring vivid memories of the people, events, daily life and customs. His paintings—full of color, imagination and humor—show us a world that is no more. Looking at them, we learn about our shared Polish-Jewish history.
The exhibition also features a documentation of artistic interventions carried out in today’s Opatów, aimed at discovering and restoring the vestiges of the pre-war Jewish life.
Special guided tour of the temporary exhibition “(post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt” by curators Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Natalia Romik.
- 18 May (Saturday), 12 noon, BUY TICKET →
- Temporary exhibition “(post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Throught the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt”
- Tickets: regular 30PLN, reduced 25PLN
- Guided tour in English
As Mayer Kirshenblatt’s daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will talk about the history of pre-war Jewish towns, about their typical features and the role they played in the Jewish community. While analysing Mayer’s paintings, we will learn about the functions of the selected buildings, about old rituals and Polish-Jewish cohabitation. Natalia Romik, on the other hand, will talk about these towns’ postwar fate. While drawing our attention to the exhibition design and the selected artefacts, she will raise the issue of Jewish property and tell us what happened to it after the Holocaust.
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