FOSTERING A VIBRANT RENEWAL OF JUDAISM IN POLAND
Join members of the Rabbi Michael A. Signer Clergy Cabinet of Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland for a trip to Poland this May 14 thru May 22, 2025 (May 13th travel day). This Poland experience invites the group to gain a view of Poland’s historic significance, its memorial importance, as well as its contemporary Jewish communities. Our journey will speak to the challenge of Progressive Jewish values as we meet with leaders in Poland.
Dr. James Diamond’s book on “Raging Hassidic Sermons of R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira” will soon be published. We are fortunate to hear of the unique teachings of a Hassidic master known as the Piaseczner Rebbe. R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira continued to deliver sermons from September 1939 until the summer of 1942. Sermons from the Years of Rage and his other writings were included in the buried archives of the Warsaw Ghetto known as Oneg Shabbat.
Rokhl Auerbach’s many careers as a writer, philosopher, historian, Yiddish language advocate, and survivor are eclipsed by the outsized role she played in preserving the record of the Holocaust. In the Warsaw
Ghetto, Emmanuel Ringelblum conceived and organized over sixty people for his Oneg Shabbat archive. Auerbach worked the Ghetto’s soup kitchen and chronicled the struggle to maintain life. Auerbach was one of three people that knew of the buried archive, She remained in Poland to work on those materials when they were discovered and to collect other testimonies.
Freighted Legacies is a webinar on the cultural life and times of Jews from Poland, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe.
Menachem Mirski is serving Temple Shalom of Long Beach after completing the Ziegler Rabbinic Program. He often appears on our pages, and he frequently discusses the weekly Torah portion in both English and Polish. While very busy in developing a revitalized young generation at Beth Shalom, he supports the re-development of the Sunday and Hebrew schools. Rabbi Menachem Mirski is an outstanding musician with a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin.
We are pleased that we will learn more about Rabbi Mirski’s journey from Przemysl to Lublin to Warsaw and Long Beach.
Independent researcher Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal will present Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction, an expansive and engaging investigation into centuries of changing Polish-Jewish relations. With forthright honesty the author calls on Poles and Jews to recognize and challenge the “myths” each tells about the other and themselves.
