All Photos: Liam Hoare The histories of the Jews of Europe can often best be gleaned not from monographs, museums, or synagogues, but from cemeteries. The details of the matzevot, or tombstones — the size and shape, location, condition, detailing, symbolism, text and language of the inscriptions — can be decoded to reveal not only…
Police in Warsaw arrested a man for allegedly assaulting a 78-year-old man while shouting anti-Semitic insults. The suspect, identified in Polish media as a 30-year-old man whose first name is Pawel, hit the victim outside a store on Friday, causing him injuries that required his hospitalization. Police found Pawel L., as the news website fakt.pl…
In August 1942, as Jews were being deported from the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish artist Gela Seksztajn wrote her last will and testament. “I donate my work to the Jewish Museum to be founded in the future to restore pre-war Jewish cultural life and to study the terrible tragedy of the Jewish community in Poland…
The presidents of Israel and Poland together took a guided tour of a new museum of Jewish life on Tuesday that tells the story of how Poland was for centuries home to a flourishing Jewish community before becoming a graveyard for Jews in World War Two. Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, his Israeli counterpart Reuven Rivlin,…
Poland’s culture minister said the multi-million-dollar generosity of Jewish donors to the new Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews represented a sign of trust, or even forgiveness. More than 500 private and institutional donors, many of them Jewish, contributed $48 million to the Museum’s core exhibition, whose grand opening was Tuesday. “The donations…
Poland, the country on whose soil Nazi Germany carried out the darkest acts of the Holocaust, is starting to re-connect with its other role in Jewish history, as a home for 1,000 years to one of the world’s biggest Jewish communities. The country will take a step in that direction next week with the opening…
Jewish headstones used after World War II to help build a gazebo in a Warsaw park are on their way back to a historic Jewish cemetery in the city. The return of the headstones from Praga Park to the Brodno Jewish Cemetery — the largest Jewish cemetery in Poland and among the biggest in Europe…
As I travel through Poland and Israel, watching, discussing and writing about films, I find myself tracing the continuities, as well as the tensions, of Jewish identity. The only child of Polish Holocaust survivors, I am returning to Poland for the first time in 25 years, exploring what Judaism means there now. My mother, who…
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