Grapevine September 24, 2021: More to Jewish culture in Poland than is generally realized

• Published date: 23 September 2021
• Author: GREER FAY CASHMAN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

For many years, the best known of Yiddish cultural revivals was the Polish State Yiddish Theater located near the famous Nozyk Synagogue, which was the only synagogue in Warsaw that survived the war. The Warsaw Great Synagogue on Tlomacki Street was destroyed by the Germans in 1943, and for many years after the war, the site was spooked, and any other building plans were doomed to failure. This situation prevailed until the end of Communist rule. The Polish State Yiddish Theater was actually established in Lodz in 1949.

There was also another Yiddish theater company in Wroclaw, and the two merged and performed around the country. In a relatively short time the state provided them with a permanent home in Warsaw. Until 1968, the Yiddish Theater was directed by the great Yiddish actress Ida Kaminska (the daughter of Ester Rachel Kaminska, known as the Mother of the Jewish Stage), who introduced simultaneous translation so that performances would attract not only the vestiges of the Jewish community, and Jewish tourists, but also non-Jewish Poles.

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When Kaminska emigrated to the US in the mid-1960s, Szymon Szurmiej took over, as theater director and artistic director in 1969, and remained at the helm until his death in 2014. His widow, the actress and singer Golda Tencer, now runs the theater, and has also introduced an annual Warsaw Jewish Festival known as Singer's Warsaw honoring Nobel Prize-winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Arguably, the best known of Polish Jewish festivals is the annual Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, which was founded in Communist Poland in 1988 by Janusz Makuch, a non-Jew who knows more about Jewish culture in all its diversity than most Jews. The Krakow festival attracts audiences of up to 15,000 people who flock to the city from all over Poland and from many parts of the globe, proving that you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy Jewish culture.

While the Jewish festivals in Krakow and Warsaw are the best known and have the largest turn-outs. The Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, which is one of several foundations supporting the revival of Jewish life in Poland, has published a list of more than 50 Jewish festivals and other cultural events – many of them interfaith – that have taken place in Krakow Kalisz, Gdansk, Bobowa, Bialystok, Kielce, Warsaw, Slupsk, Szczecin, Chrzanow...