Jewish Woodstock promotes pluralism in homogeneous Poland

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.”