Take a a virtual tour of Bialystok with Tomasz Wisniewski, an expert in Jewish history of Podlasie region, who will guide viewers through the city space and history of Bialystok, a home to Jewish community from the mid-17th century. Join in to listen to the history of Jewish community of Bialystok: its role in the rapid development of the town in the 19th century, social and cultural life in early 20th century, and the fate of Jews during Soviet and Nazi occupation.
The tour is part of the regular “Zoom in” program of the Forum for Dialogue NGO.
Wisniewski has been working for more than 30 years to preserve the memory of the Jewish communities of Poland’s eastern borderland. He created the web site jewishbialystok.pl as an online museum of Jewish history in the region and he received the POLIN museum award in 2018.
He has written several books, including a guidebook to Jewish Bialystok and surroundings, and on his YouTube channel you can find more than 2,000 films presenting Jewish history of the region. He has documented Jewish cemeteries and runs the site bagnowka.pl, which collects data on almost 40,000 tombstones, mainly Jewish ones, and also presents other heritage information.
The opening of an exhibition of virtual reconstructions of synagogues destroyed by the Nazis.
It is mounted at the the NS Documentation Center in cooperation with the Technical University of Darmstadt.
The exhibition “Synagogues in Germany – A Virtual Reconstruction” runs from from June 11th to September 19th.
The TU Darmstadt has been working on the virtual reconstruction of synagogues that were destroyed in Germany for 25 years. The initial spark for this long-term project was the attack by neo-Nazis on the synagogue in Lübeck in 1994. In 2019, an attack was carried out on the synagogue there in Halle. With this project, the TU Darmstadt shows the cultural loss, the importance of synagogues in the cityscape and the beauty of the architecture.
The exhibition also shows synagogues that were built in Germany after 1945.
The tiny former synagogue in the village of Gleusdorf, out of use for more than a century, opens as an information center about local rural Jewish life and history.
The inauguration ceremony will be a closed event for invited guests because of COVID restrictions.
The synagogue has been owned since 2016 by the Untermerzbach municipality, which sponsored and oversaw the €174,000 project. Funding included a €87,500 grant from the EU’s LEADER funding program for the development of the rural economy.
The synagogue will be operated in cooperation with the Friends of the Synagogue association in nearby Memmelsdorf, and the preservation concept accords with that of the Memmelsdorf synagogue –“conservation instead of reconstruction” — that is, not to reconstruct or restore the building, but to conserve it in a way that shows the history of what it has gone through.
Click to read our article about the restoration and project
The 30th Krakow Jewish Culture Festival will take place on-site and also on-line.
Live-streamed events can be accessed on the new website: 30.jewishfestival.pl
They include the events held in the JCF Tent, concerts organized in the Museum of Urban Engineering, Collegium Maius and the Tempel synagogue.
After the end of the live stream, they will be able to be accessed in the event archives.
The former synagogue in Görlitz reopens after around 30 years of gradual renovation as the “Kulturforum Görlitz Synagogue.”
The Görlitz synagogue is the only community synagogue in saxony that survived Kristallnacht in 1938.
According to the city administration, the total cost of the renovation was 12.6 million euros.
The opening had been postponed several times due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The full-scale replica of the wooden synagogue of Połaniec one of the hundreds of East European wooden synagogues destroyed during WW2, will be formally opened — it has been installed at Poland’s largest open-air ethnographic museum, or skansen, the Folk Architecture Museum in Sanok, in the far southeast corner of Poland.
Click here to see our September 13 article and photos about the synagogue and replica.
The two-day opening event includes the inauguration on-site on October 7, plus an excursion to the masonry synagogue and historic Jewish cemetery in nearby Lesko.
The day-long conference takes place October 8, at another location in Sanok, the Jan Grodek State Vocational Academy — ul. Mickiewicza 21.
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