KRAKOW, Poland —The Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow, which is far bigger than a similar festival in Warsaw, takes place annually, starting in late June or early July, and lasts for nine days. This year’s version ran from June 27 to July 5.
Janusz Makuch founder and director
KRAKOW, Poland —On a balmy night late last month, hundreds of people crowded into the Tempel Synagogue on Miodowa Street in Krakow’s old Jewish Kazimierz quarter.
Janusz Makuch founder and director
They waited patiently until burly ushers allowed them into the ornate, gold-leaf decorated mid-19th-century Moorish Revival Reform shul, which was desecrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust but renovated in the 1990s.
They had come to hear a concert by the Emil Zrihan Ensemble from Israel at the 19th Jewish Cultural Festival, the biggest such event in Europe and probably the world.
Apart from Zrihan, a Moroccan-born cantor living in Ashkelon, the group consisted of Yoram Azulay on the tar, Shimon Eliahu Vanunu on the oud, Haim Ohaion on the darbuka and Elhad Levi on the violin.
The band played sinewy and lilting Judeo-Andalusian music, while Zrihan, clad in a white jacket, black pants and a matching shirt, belted out one intense and captivating song after another, his face growing red as he displayed a vocal prowess of formidable proportions.
The crowd loved Zrihan, popularly known as the Moroccan nightingale, calling him out for no less than three encores as he brought down the house in a cascade of rhythmic clapping and cheering.
What was significant about the concert, aside from its sheer virtuosity, was the fact that the audience was primarily composed of Catholic Poles, reflecting Poland’s relatively new-found interest in Jewish culture and history, particularly since the end of the communist era in 1989.
The Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow, which is far bigger than a similar festival in Warsaw, takes place annually, starting in late June or early July, and lasts for nine days. This year’s version ran from June 27 to July 5.
Call it Poland’s Jewish Woodstock.
Designed to educate Poles about a huge and venerable Jewish community that was decimated by the Nazis in a six-year orgy of unprecedented violence and brutality, the festival featured concerts, plays, movie screenings, workshops, lectures, exhibitions and tours.
There were concerts by American cantors and Polish bands, and workshops on Yiddish, Hebrew, Jewish dance and Jewish cooking. There were lectures on Jewish life in present-day Poland, Poland’s relationship with Israel and the mystical sources of Chassidism. There was a screening of an Israeli documentary film on the 1982 war in Lebanon, and there were exhibitions on Polish synagogues and Judaica, as well as tours of the remnants of shtetls near Krakow and of synagogues in Kazimierz.
Much of the festival unfolded in Kazimierz, a hub of Jewish Orthodoxy before the Holocaust. After World War II, Kazimierz fell into a decrepit state.
Revived after Steven Spielberg filmed Schindler’s List in its atmospheric byways, Kazimierz today brims with Jewish-style restaurants and cafés and shops selling Judaica and books of Jewish interest.
The festival, observed Lech Kaczynski, Poland’s president, in a brief essay in its official handbook, summons up memories of “the shared history of Jews and Poles.”
Its founder and director, Janusz Makuch, works out of an office on Jozefa Street, in the heart of Kazimierz. It is near the High Synagogue, one of several shuls in this colourful and gentrified neighbourhood. On his desk was a brass menorah and on a wall were black-and-white framed photographs of chassidic Jews in full traditional garb.
A philo-Semitic Catholic in his late 40s, he was born in Pulawy, a small town in eastern Poland, half of whose population was once Jewish. Yet, until he was 14, he had no idea that Pulawy was so heavily Jewish. “I knew literally nothing about Jews,” said Makuch, a flamboyant man whose father was a member of the Communist party.
But then he met Michal Strzemski, a Polish professor who clued him in on Poland’s rich Jewish legacy. “He was my rabbi, my melamed. It was the turning point in my life.”
Immersing himself in things Jewish, Makuch became a devotee, if not a maven, in Judaica. “Jewish culture is my world,” he said in an interview. “It’s inside me, though I’m not Jewish. I couldn’t be who I am without this culture.”
Makuch, who speaks a little Yiddish and Hebrew and visits Israel and New York City regularly, launched the first Jewish Cultural Festival in 1988, just a year before Poland made its peaceful transition from communism to democracy and joined the western alliance.
“It was a dark time in terms of the political situation in Poland,” he said. “When I started the festival, I did not think, or dream, that it would evolve into what it is today.”
The debut festival, featuring a symposium on Polish-Jewish relations, was a modest affair of short duration and attracted about 1,000 people. Succeeding festivals took place every other year until the annual format was established. By one estimate, some 25,000 tickets have been sold at recent festivals.
In addition to familiarizing Poles with the beauty and range of Jewish culture, Makuch’s overarching objective is to foster a sense of pluralism in a nation that is now so ethnically homogeneous.
“Poland was created not only by Poles, but by Jews, Ukrainians, Russians and Germans. This is the key to understanding the real culture of Poland,” said Makuch, who conveyed the impression that he mourns the passing of prewar pluralistic Poland. (Due to border changes after 1945, Poland is more than 90 per cent ethnically Polish today).
Although he revels in and promotes Jewish culture as perhaps no other person in contemporary Poland, Makuch knows that the past is problematic and soaked in tragedy.
“I realize I live in the shadow of Auschwitz, in a Jewish graveyard. But at the festival, I don’t focus on the Holocaust. Is six years of Jewish trauma during the Holocaust more important than almost 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland?”
He added, “I’m trying to create a space of remembrance of what we have lost. The murder of so many Jews is a great loss for Poland. We lost almost everything.”