TORONTO — Kazimierz, the traditional Jewish district in the Polish city of Krakow, was home to 45,000 Jews before the Nazis arrived. In 1941, Nazis evicted the town’s Jewish population. Few returned to this district after the Holocaust.
However, many Jews are returning as tourists to the streets of Kazimierz today. In the 21st century, to walk into this quarter is to interact with the historical Polish-Jewish spirit.
Although the area may not house many Jews, Kazimierz is still home to Jewish cafes and bookstores, as well as guided tours of prewar life. There is the Tempel Synagogue, an active site for religious and cultural gatherings, and even a Jewish community centre. You can also buy kosher food if you look in the right place, or attend a concert playing klezmer music.
The gentrified Jewish section of town is a new social space that can be used for dialogue and learning, says Erica Lehrer, an anthropologist who has focused her studies on heritage tourism in post-Holocaust society.
“Poland has boasted a particularly spectacular Jewish heritage renaissance, largely at the hands of non-Jewish Poles,” Lehrer told a standing room only crowd at Temple Sinai on April 29.
This revival is so significant for Poland because the country has one of the smallest Jewish populations in Europe, as well as being the site of several Nazi death camps. This interest in Jewish history and culture could surprise many foreign Jews who look at Poland as a symbol of death and devastation.
Lehrer first visited Kazimierz in 1990, and said she felt the district was surreal and uncanny, a town with few remainders of the prewar Jewish world.
“It was, for me, like entering a black-and-white photograph of a mythical idea of a very grey place from the past,” she said.
Efforts were then made to replicate the same layout and architecture of the main street from nearly a century earlier. In her later trips to Kazmierz, she became enthralled by how both Jews and non-Jews reacted to this entryway into Jewish history.
Lehrer, an associate professor in the history and sociology-anthropology departments at Concordia University, wrote about this Polish Jewish revival in her 2013 book, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places.
This revitalized area is also a symbol of a renewed interest in the Jewish history in Europe. Here, Jews can interact with others and practise their customs – wearing a yarmulke, eating kosher food and hearing klezmer music – without feeling like a minority.
“Our concerns about Polish non-Jews doing Jewish stuff may, at times, draw our attention away from the important questions about renewal, creativity… and, most importantly, new ways of imagining cultural interconnectedness,” she says.
Nevertheless, this historical and cultural revival has been met with much criticism among Jews and non-Jews.
Some insist that returning to a prewar appearance erases the Holocaust. The presence of Jewish customs, culture and food in a mainly non-Jewish domain has also been dismissed as inauthentic and exploitative.
One of the audience members at Lehrer’s presentation spoke to her about a recent visit he made to Kazimierz. He was startled by how few Jews occupy this Jewish space, making the town feel more like a relic of a bygone period than a thriving, revitalized site.
Meanwhile, stereotypes still perpetuate in several of the items sold in Kazimierz. In the district, some wooden figurines and carvings of Jews that are sold to tourists depict cultural stereotypes that can be offensive. In 2013, Lehrer curated an exhibit at the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow about these toys and figures.
Regardless, a revived interest in Jewish history fits with the re-emergence of a Jewish community in Poland. A 2010 census showed that around 10,000 Jews live in Poland. As many Poles do not identify as Jews or know of their religious heritage, the Jewish population is likely to be higher.
There are not many spaces for one to express one’s Jewishness in Poland, Lehrer explained, so places like Kazimierz are essential to bridging cultural and historical gaps.
“Poland is the country in eastern Europe that is taking the most responsibility for working through this difficult past,” she told The CJN. “I find that very hopeful.”
