We are delighted to present the first English-language issue of Chidusz the Jewish Magazine, published monthly in Wrocław since 2013 with support of the local Jewish Community. We have chosen twelve articles that we believe give an overview of the magazine’s profile and shed light on different aspects of Polish-Jewish reality. Chidusz in Hebrew means…
Asked about how to get to Wińsko, Natala sends me a detailed railway timetable. She offers to pick me up at the station in Ścinawa, and gives me a ride to the cemetery. She says not to worry about anything, as she will also take me back to the station at the end of my…
An article presenting testimony of the killing of Jews committed after World War II by their Polish neighbors is a small, yet, for us, highly significant element in the reconstruction of the history of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. In August 2014, 69 years after the murder of her Jewish neighbors, Helena wrote a letter…
John Calvin will soon be able to work again as a vendor after regaining the right to work in Canada, which was taken from him last fall. However, this year the fall season may mean something worse for him than losing his job. November 4th has been set as the date of his final deportation…
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…