Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland
Once, the term Polish rabbi was a reference to a ubiquitous type. Today, Rabbi Mati Kirschenbaum is a part of a unique modern phenomenon of modern urbane learned Jewish leaders with a wide range of skills. From pastoral work to engagement with modern culture, Rabbi Kirschenbaum has inspired the families Kol Tikvah.
Where possible, Rabbi Mati has lent a hand to the revival of Progressive Polish Jewish life.[…]
Poland’s modern-day emergence is connected to many storied names, but none exceeds Josef Pilsudski, the modern-day military hero, socialist activist, and head of state.[…]
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.
Among a welcome cascade of Yiddish books newly translated into English, Warsaw Testament calls out to be read now. Writer Rokhl Auerbach compiled and structured the bulk of the book’s narrative in Tel Aviv in 1973, drawing on her earlier eyewitness notes on Jewish suffering and resistance under Nazi occupation two decades earlier. In Tel Aviv, she wrote:
“Driven by an uncontrollable impulse, I wrote in secrecy and solitude. . . . In the autumn of 1943 and during the winter of 1943-44, working between midnight and 5 a.m., I wrote two works: They Called it Resettlement, on the Great Deportation of 1942, and what became, as I kept adding more material, an early draft of this book. In the daytime I would hide my notebooks at the bottom of a drawer and cover them with the apples, pears, dark flour, and barley cereal bought with the ration cards. (p. xlii).”
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