Excerpt from the article: He used to think his grandparents had phone numbers tattooed on their forearms. His father used to count the steps to the basement of the building in the Marymont district where he hid during the war. He used to get beaten up at school for murdering Jesus. Years later, he organized…
Excerpt from the article: “I won’t tell you more than I can, and I cannot tell you much,” she says, opening a brochure entitled Balanit’s Mission. We’re sitting at her desk by the entrance to the mikvah in Łódź. Teresa, called ‘Aunt’ by local Jewish community members, chooses her words carefully. She won’t disclose the…
Summary of the most important events of Jewish life in Poland between February 2017 and March 2018
Excerpt from the article: German soldiers were murdering children in the market square and leading the last Jews from Korczyna to death. She was eleven years old. Her mother told her to go over to a stranger. She didn’t say anything else and didn’t give her anything to take with her. The man put her…
Excerpt from the article: In 2000, the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland submitted a request to the Property Commission for the old Jewish cemetery in Kalisz to be returned to its rightful owner. It took years for the local authorities and the Union to negotiate and draft a complex agreement stipulating its return.…
Excerpt from the article: A bill drafted to defend the good name of Poland has caused the biggest crisis in Polish-Jewish relations since the anti-Semitic campaign of March ’68, which resulted in the majority of Polish Jews being forced to leave the country. This barely a few weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of the events…
Excerpt from the article: Life goes by, day after day. It has its ups and downs. His wife is unwell again. He stands in front of the synagogue in Wrocław and lights another cigarette. “It would be silly to die for no reason”, he says, and laughs. “His aunt lived nearby. “What do you want…
We put together a selective overview of the past 16 months especially for this issue in hopes of presenting an accurate picture of the social and political situation in Poland during that period, highlighting the most important occurrences of Jewish life, and providing a context for the events mentioned in the articles.
Below you will find a chronological outline of recent events (September 2015 -December 2016) we consider the most important for Jewish life in Poland, including those we think will be particularly interesting for our readers abroad.