Excerpt from the article: Zvi Rav – Ner: We will never get back to having a Jewish community of 3.5 million people in Poland. Before the war, 80% of the inhabitants of Białystok were Jews. Now there is only one person there, and this person is introducing non-Jewish people to Jewish culture and tradition. It is…

Families with two fathers or mothers no longer raise eyebrows in Israel. The discussion about allowing homosexual couples access to surrogacy in the country has resurfaced following the earthquake in Nepal, one of the places where Israeli gay couples go to have children via surrogacy. At the very time that we had agreed to meet,…

  In the past few decades our generation has witnessed milestone events and historic gestures that have significantly transformed relations between Christians and Jews. Thanks to these developments, today the dialogue between Christianity and Judaism seems so natural and obvious that we rarely think the mutual relations had not always been that cordial. Before the…

Homosexuality is a deviation, and as such, it should be banned. Birth control denies our natural duty to procreate. Abortion is infanticide. Some social roles are strictly meant to be carried out exclusively by men – after all, Jesus did not choose any women to be apostles. These are just some arguments that were used…

The opening of the core exhibition at POLIN Museum (Museum of the History of Polish Jews) marked, in my opinion, a fundamental change within the Diaspora in Poland. I had been skeptical about this project, fearing it might border on the kitsch and not be entirely free from manipulation. I am happy to say that…

  Magdalena Wójcik, Michał Bojanowski: Is the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews a Jewish institution or not? Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: Until very recently the website URL was jewishmuseum.org.pl. Taxi drivers would call us either the Jewish Museum or the Holocaust Museum. I would like to think of us as an international museum and…

Although the history of the Jewish Community in Wrocław dates back to the thirteenth century, its most fascinating period started in the nineteenth century, parallel to the Jewish emancipation in Prussia which fueled the community’s unprecedented development. It was at that time that one of the most important Haskalah centers arose there and where the…

  Following last year’s squabble over ritual slaughter, this year we’ve been busy quarreling about the monument to the Righteous Among the Nations. As was the case earlier, this quarrel also failed to evolve into a serious debate on either the national level or within the Jewish community itself. We are not skilled in handling…

  MAGDALENA WÓJCIK: WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO BE JEWISH UNDER COMMUNISM? Konstanty Gebert: The answer to this could be an entire series of seminars, because it all depends: what kind of a Jew, in what year, and where. However, generally speaking, it was common knowledge that being Jewish was not a good idea. The…