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,
This year’s International Jewish Culture Festival „SHALOM IN ALL THE WORLD“ focuses on the Jewish woman, her role and importance in history, culture, traditions, social life.
Events will take place in Klaipėda, and also in Švėkšna and Gargždai, Lithuania.
There will be exhibitions, workshops, lectures, concerts, books presentations, films, and more.
In 2020, we were privileged to host an online exhibition of work by the Warsaw-based papercut artist Monika Krajewska. The pieces were drawn from her extraordinary cycle of papercuts called “Burning,” a commemoration of the physical destruction of the Shoah.
This fall, from October 4 to December 18, Krajewska’s Burning cycle will be exhibited at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
The exhibit consists of 31 works in which the artist refers to the objects related to synagogue cult and transfers them to the traditional Jewish paper-cutting technique, painstakingly recreating the symbolism and ornamentation of Jewish art from East-Central Europe—stylised floral decoration, symbolic representations of animals, a repertoire of traditional sacred Judaic symbols (a menorah, Torah and the Tablets of Law, the Temple) and calligraphic quotations from religious texts and prayers.
In order to introduce reflection on loss and destruction, the artist subjects her painstaking work to destruction: she tears apart sections of the works after cutting them out and burns the ends of the sheets. She uses tinted paper as a background for the cut-outs, incorporating the motif of fire, ashes and ruins. In the representations, she incorporates quotations from religious texts or classics of modern Jewish literature, in which there are references to flames and destruction, as well as to the hope of salvation.
“Burning,” an exhibition of paper cuts by Monika Krajewska, is now being shown in Radom, following an exhibit at the POLIN museum in Warsaw. We were privileged to host an online exhibition of some of her works in 2020.
The exhibit consists of 31 works in which the artist, using traditional Jewish paper-cutting technique, refers to objects related to the synagogue, painstakingly recreating the symbolism and ornamentation of Jewish art from East-Central Europe—stylised floral decoration, symbolic representations of animals, a repertoire of traditional sacred Jewish symbols (a menorah, Torah and the Tablets of Law, the Temple) and calligraphic quotations from religious texts and prayers.
In order to introduce reflection on loss and destruction, Krajewska subjects her painstaking work to destruction: she tears apart sections of the works after cutting them out and burns the ends of the sheets. She uses tinted paper as a background for the cut-outs, incorporating the motif of fire, ashes and ruins. And she incorporates quotations from religious texts or classics of modern Jewish literature, in which there are references to flames and destruction, as well as to the hope of salvation.
The latest edition of the exhibit Neviditelné Synagogy — Invisible Synagogues, photographs by Štěpán Bartoš.
Bartoš photographs the blank spaces in the Czech Republic where destroyed synagogues once stood and adds a ghostly silhouette of the destroyed synagogue to the exhibition photos of the places where they once stood.
On the Invisible Synagogues project web site (which is in German and Czech) you can see galleries of his photos, without the added silhouette, arranged according to region. They include sites in big cities, small towns, and tiny villages; there are fields and rural spaces as well as modern buildings, crowded city streets, and even artificial lakes.
Read our November 2021 post about his Invisible Synagogues project.
Photo exhibition by Rudolf Klein, author of the book Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries — which will be presented at the opening.
The opening takes place February 21, at 7 p.m.
There will be speeches by Klein and others.
A multimedia exhibition by the artist, architect and historian Natalia Romik dedicated to the creativity of Polish Jews seeking to survive the Shoah in hiding.
In Poland and Ukraine during World War II, approximately 50,000 people survived persecution by the German occupying forces in hiding. The majority of them were Jewish. They found refuge in tree hollows, closets, basements, sewers, empty graves, and other precarious locations. Natalia Romik’s exhibition “Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival” pays tribute to these fragile places of refuge and explores their physicality. The show poses basic questions about the relationship between architecture, private life, and the public sphere: it addresses the protective function of spaces and emphasizes the creativity those in hiding brought to bear in their attempt to survive.
In a research project extending over several years, Natalia Romik and an interdisciplinary team of researchers consulted oral histories to identify several hiding places, which they explored using forensic methods. The multimedia exhibition “Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival” presents the results of this research. It consists of sculptures bearing a direct connection to the sites and includes documentary films, forensic recordings, photos, documents, and objects found in the hiding places.
“Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival” is presented in cooperation with the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin. On the occasion of the show at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, a catalogue will be published in German and English editions by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
The exhibition was curated by Kuba Szreder and Stanisław Ruksza with the help of Aleksandra Janus (scientific collaboration). For the presentation in Frankfurt, Katja Janitschek, curator of the Judengasse Museum, was responsible for the curatorial project management. We would like to thank the Evonik Foundation for their generous support.
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).
An exhibition about Jewish cemeteries, prepared by the Galicia Jewish Museum.
In many places throughout Poland, Jewish cemeteries or what remains of them are the only visible sign of the centuries-long presence of Jewish communities in a given area. The exhibition “Houses of Eternity” is a reflection on what Jewish cemeteries mean to us today and an attempt to find an answer to the question of what we can learn from them. Its aim is to introduce the topic of Jewish cemeteries to the widest possible audience, help understand how important an element of cultural heritage the preserved Jewish cemeteries are and answer a number of questions related to cemeteries in the context of Jewish history and tradition.
The opening is at 1 p.m., April 2
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