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…
The City of Warsaw has agreed to return and preserve 1,000 Jewish headstones that were used to construct a recreational facility inside one of the city’s parks. The headstones, which are currently part of a pergola and stairs at a park in Warsaw’s Praga district, will be returned in the coming months to the Brudo…
In Poland, where 3 million Polish Jews died at Nazi hands, not one but two new monuments are being planned in Warsaw that will memorialize — and, some fear, distort the role of — the several thousand non-Jewish Poles who tried to save them. As Holocaust Remembrance Day approaches, both projects are generating heated criticism….
Warsaw residents, including representatives of the Jewish community, marked the 71st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Saturday’s ceremony featured prayers and the laying of wreaths at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in the Polish capital. The approximately 200 participants then marched to the Umschlagplatz square, the site where Jews in the early 1940s…
A Passover Seder in prewar Europe. Every other spring, the Zionist-Socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair takes its bogrim, the group of usually 16-year-old leaders from around the world, on a weeklong trip to Poland. When it was my turn in 2006, the dates fell on Passover. The nine of us from Vienna boarded a night…
Dariusz Stola, the newly appointed director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, never seems to tire of discussing the groundbreaking institution’s most important mission. The bespectacled history professor, who is not Jewish, says the museum aims to show off the richness of Polish Jewry’s 1,000-year history, not its devastation in the Holocaust….
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