FOSTERING A VIBRANT RENEWAL OF JUDAISM IN POLAND
"[w]e learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are" (Leszek Kolakowski)
These webinars will be in Polish and English simultaneously. Enable the Interpretation mode and choose the preferable language after joining the meeting.
POLES and JEWS: A Call for Myth Reconstruction
June 8, 2025
10AM Los Angeles / 12N Chicago / 1PM New York / 6PM London / 7PM Warsaw / 8PM Jerusalem
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.
Through accessible language, Stark-Blumenthal brings the complexity of history to the reader while proposing an important moral reckoning for both Poles and Jews. Through a clear-eyed inspection of the past, this book invites a new moment to emerge in Polish-Jewish relations.
The dean of Polish/Jewish historians, Antony Polonsky, will join the conversation. This will be the second time that Professor Polonsky has joined us (see Barry Cohen’s Opening the Drawer: The Hidden Identities of Polish Jews). Polonsky is the senior editor of series of Jews of Poland.
REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR *CLICK HERE*
READ THE INTRODUCTION HERE
BUY THE BOOK HERE
Freighted Legacies is planning a series of film discussions; cultural and musical presentations
Dr. Michael Steinlauf will discuss his two books:
Michael Steinlauf’s scholarship has framed the issues of memory for Jews descended from survivors who retained a connection to the culture of Poland. Steinlauf’s rich historical and emotional memories are spread out in moving detail. For many years, before the travel to Poland fads, Steinlauf’s work was the single reliable perspective. The impact of Bondage to the Dead (1997) was not only on English readers but on Polish readers as well. Beginning in 2014, Elzbieta Janicka initiated with Steinlauf a “river interview” that saw its English debut in 2022. Polish scholar Janicka and Steinlauf engaged in lengthy conversations spanning the years and changing political and cultural situations entitled, This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History. These two books will make up the basis of a conversation that will feature Professor Steinlauf in conversation with Rabbi Haim Beliak and Dr. David Kader.
BUY THE BOOK: BONDAGE TO THE DEAD HERE
BUY THE BOOK: THIS WAS NOT AMERICA HERE
READ THIS BLOG POST HERE
WATCH THIS WEBINAR HERE
WATCH THE VIDEO IN POLISH HERE
April 27, 2025 – 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.
Dr. Samuel Kossow’s Who Will Write Our History is now augmented with the translation of Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament including Kassow’s annotations. Auerbach devoted her life to documenting the Warsaw Ghetto struggle through her work at Yad VaShem, initially in Yiddish and eventually in Hebrew. Roberta Grossman’s documentary, Who Will Write Our History featured the character of Auerbach.
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March 23, 2025 – 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.
Dr. Diamond will apply his deep learning to introduce us to this Hassidic teacher’s profound thinking in the midst of the struggle to survive.
Dr. James A. Diamond holds the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo. His vast writings include Jewish Theology Unbound, and Maimonides and The Shaping of the Jewish Canon, as well as numerous articles.
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February 16, 2025 – 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.
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January 12, 2025 – When Jews visit Poland, the past can present itself as a complex matter. Historian Bernheim created a unique people-to-people experience that framed his visit to his great-grandfather’s village. Robert Bernheim’s third visit to his great grandfather’s Polish hometown, Kanczuga, Poland, and the place of the old bakery was an inspired attempt to connect to the town’s residents. He began making bagels. Over thirty years of visiting Poland, Professor Bernheim has formed important ideas about what we should seek in these visits. Join in an intimate journey told by an unusual “bagel” emissary.
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December 15, 2024 – Poland, the epicentre of the Holocaust, began denying responsibility as soon as the Nazi atrocities ended. The nation’s distortion of history continues today – with disturbing consequences. World-renowned Holocaust historian Jan Grabowski examines how the government, museums, schools and state never came to grips with the dark past. This tour de force reminds one of the power of historical research based on documents and historical reasoning.
Professor Grabowski’s research includes the issues surrounding the extermination of the Polish Jews as well as the history of the Jewish-Polish relations during the 1939-1945 period. He is the author of several monographs, including Hunt for the Jews and On Duty. Professor Grabowski has recently completed a project dealing with the involvement of the Polish “Blue” and criminal police in the Holocaust. His forthcoming research focuses on the open ghettos in the Generalgouvernement. A recipient of the 2014 Faculty of Arts Professor of the Year Award.
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May 12, 2024 – In Cursed: A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the immediate post-Holocaust events impacting Jewish life in Poland and the Jewish diaspora. This massacre compelled thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust to flee postwar Poland. It remains a negative reference point in the Polish historical narrative and represents a lack of reckoning with the role of antisemitism in postwar Polish society and identity politics.
Cursed is a microhistory that recreates the events of the Kielce pogrom step by step and examines the dominant hypotheses about the pogrom through the prism of previously classified archival evidence.
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April 7, 2024 – The Light of Learning tells the story of an unexpected Hasidic revival in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of World War I, the Jewish mystical movement appeared to be in shambles. Hasidic leaders had dispersed, Hasidic courts lay in ruins, and the youth seemed swept up in secularist trends as a result of mandatory public schooling and new Jewish movements like Zionism and Socialism. Author Glenn Dynner shows that in response to this, Hasidic leaders reinvented themselves as educators devoted to rescuing the youth by means of thriving networks of heders (primary schools), Bais Yaakov schools for girls and women, and world-renowned yeshivas.
During the ensuing pedagogical revolution, Hasidic yeshivas soon overshadowed courts, and Hasidic leaders became known more for scholarship than miracle-working. By mobilizing Torah study, Hasidic leaders were able to subvert the “civilizing” projects of the Polish state, successfully rival Zionists and Socialists, and create clandestine yeshiva bunkers in ghettos during the Holocaust. Torah study was thus not only a spiritual-intellectual endeavor but a political practice that fueled a formidable culture of resistance. The Light of Learning belies notions of late Hasidic decadence and decline and transforms our understanding of Polish Jewry during its final hour.
A Roundtable Discussion with Rabbis Marc Rosenstein, Barry Schwartz, Menachem Mirski, Mati Kirschenbaum, Drs. Miroslaw Patalon, and Dominika Zakrzewska
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March 17, 2024 – The Polish translation of Rabbi Marc Rosenstein’s Turning Points in Jewish History will give the Polish reading public a greater understanding of Jewish history. The historical volume makes accessible over thirty pivotal moments from biblical times to the near present to provide the reader with “the big picture.” Its teachers will augment and embellish the Polish version using text and online sources as a core. This is similar to the process developed by the Jewish Publication Society, which has licensed this effort.
The presentations focus on “turning points” from Hellenistic-Roman times, five in the Middle Ages and thirteen in modernity. A group of Polish-speaking Professors and educators will work to adapt the lesson plans to Polish realities alongside adult education leaders such as Rabbi Barry Schwartz and other congregational leaders. We are pleased that noted translator Dorota Golebiewska has agreed to work on the central text. The committee of Polish and International scholars will develop accompanying materials.
A Suddenly Familiar Voice
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January 21, 2024 – Professor Shoshana Ronen’s presentation based on her book, A Prophet of Consolation on the Threshold of Destruction will introduce us to the remarkable Polish Progressive Rabbi Ozjasz (Joshua) Thon. Until recently the legacy of Rabbi Thon’s intellectual and lived experience was shrouded by the Holocaust and subsequent events, most importantly the establishment of the state of Israel. Now, Rabbi Thon’s significance emerges for Diaspora communities committed to their national identity and to Jewish cultural and political Zionism. Today’s Jewish world may be astounded to learn that the largest number of Progressive Jews in the world once lived in pre-World War II Poland. Polish Jewry’s dilemmas and lessons are relevant to our moment. In Thon’s thinking Poland’s Progressive Jews would aspire ideologically/religiously to situate between the classical German Jewish reform and the Russian Jewish Haskalah. By following the long and complex career of this pre-Holocaust leader we will learn much about Progressive Polish Jewry. Dr. Ronen will introduce us to the remarkable pulpit orator, parliamentarian, Hebraist, Zionist polemicist and rabbi of the Krakow Temple Synagogue from 1896 – 1935.
A Provocative Reflection on Aharon Appelfeld’s Novel
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November 19, 2023 – Posthumously, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld (died 2018) released his final book in English translation this Spring 2023. The haunting, evocative writer of over forty books who acquired the Hebrew language late in life may have come full circle. This last book, Poland, A Green Land‘s continuity with Appelfeld’s past writing, points to the confrontation of a second generation of Israeli Jews that grew up in an “Israeli” ethos of forgetting and being alienated from their European Jewish survivor generation (VIEW PDF). Ya’akov Fine, the main character, travels to Poland to recover his parents’ world for it retains significant meaning.
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December 17, 2023 – Recent writing of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors is creating a new literary community genre. Transcending national boundaries, Second and Third Generation children of survivors are encountering each other. Dr. David Kader will lead us in his own exploration that is both literary and personal. He has recently written of his parents’ lives and will share two short memoirs and invite conversation about the role of memory in the Second Generation.
David Kader was born in a displaced persons camp in the American zone of occupied Germany after World War II. His parents were Holocaust survivors. His mother – Lola was from Radom, Poland and his father – Israel Moshe was from Grojec Poland. The family migrated to the United states in 1949.
Webinar participants will be encouraged to briefly reflect on their own Second and Third Generation memories.
Marking the Polish Translation of Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust
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Estelle Glaser Laughlin is a child Holocaust survivor who was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1929. We are marking the Polish translation of her book Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust. This interview and other testimonies by Mrs. Laughlin will constitute a curriculum unit for Polish High school students.
In September 1939, Estelle’s family lived in Warsaw when Poland was attacked.. Along with her parents and sister, Freda, they were confined to the 1.3 square mile Ghetto area. The book recounts their struggle to survive in the Ghetto during the deportations from July to September 1942. In April of 1943, their bunker was discovered leading to their brutal transport to Majdanek concentration camp. Estelle survives with her mother and sister through other forced labor camps, Starzysko and Chestochowa.
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Two Lviv ensembles – “Sheyne Meydelekh” of the AUJCF Hesed – Arieh” and “Shtrudl-Band” of the community of progressive Judaism “Teyva” are again pleased to perform in online format with a 1-hour concert and to introduce a wide audience to their original interpretation of the traditional and modern Jewish songs in Hebrew and Yiddish. We promise you many bright impressions!
This is a benefit concert to support the basic needs of the community, featuring the Lviv, Ukrainian Community Musical Groups from the Progressive Jewish community, Teyva.
Michael Nutkiewicz
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July 16, 2023 – Michael Nutkiewicz translated and expanded Eli Gumener’s Yiddish memoir, originally published in Lithuania in 1921. Entitled A Ukrainian Chapter. A Jewish Aid Worker’s Memoir of Sorrow, the memoir depicts the fate of Jewish communities caught in the middle of the Russian Civil War and the challenges of providing relief to Jewish communities. Gumener (1886-1941) was Michael Nutkiewicz’s uncle and worked for major aid organizations between World War I and World War II. Michael was unaware of his story until he discovered the book in his parents’ vast Yiddish library after they passed away. Gumener’s memoir is a highly valuable and rare historical source that focuses on the two most devastating years of pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-1920. Eli Gumener lived a courageous and vulnerable life during and after the Civil War, providing aid to victims but finally becoming a victim himself twenty years later in the Holocaust.
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June 18, 2023 – A father, Igor Mikhaylov, took his Bar Mitzvah age son, Ilan on a trip to Poland in the Spring of 2023. They were spurred by Ilan’s Bar Mitzvah project at Temple Judea in Los Angeles, CA in November 2022. Ilan ambitiously raised funds for the Janusz Korczak Childcare Fund of Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland for Progressive Judaism supporting Spynka. The support for the network of 90 Day Care Centers called “Spynka” was one of many encounters with the Poland of today, which is offering refuge to Ukraine’s women and children. Father and son visited remnants of Warsaw’s Jewish past in the former area of the Warsaw Ghetto. They celebrated a Progressive Jewish Passover Seder with Rabbi Matti Kirschenbaum and Hania Gawronska-Spiewak, and 80 other Jews. Yes, they went to a soccer game!
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VIDEO AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST (English or Polish)
EMAIL: RabbiBeliak@JewishRenewalinPoland.org
June 27, 2023 – For the past few years, a group of Wikipedia editors has been spreading disinformation on the history of the Holocaust. With no obvious ties to any government, they slowly but relentlessly hack away at reason and accuracy to promote ideological zeal, prejudice, and bias. Due to this group’s handiwork, Wikipedia’s coverage of Holocaust history follows a narrative touted by right-wing Polish nationalists. Its articles whitewash the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolster stereotypes about Jews, spinning fantastical tales about Jews’ involvement in large-scale crimes against Poles, and wildly inflating the scope of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. Many editors have tried in vain to change the narrative over the years. How do so few editors – half a dozen at most – get away with twisting the truth?
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VIDEO AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST (English or Polish)
EMAIL: RabbiBeliak@JewishRenewalinPoland.org
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Jewish minority has been a part of Polish society for over 1000 years, during which the country has experienced alternating periods of development and destruction. Polish-Jewish relations were particularly affected by the tragic period of the Holocaust. After the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel and the tightening of Soviet-dominated Poland, the problematic knowledge of shared history with widely different interpretations translated into the complexity of Polish-Israeli relations. It contributed to a build-up of mutual distrust.
During the last decade, we observed several initiatives that aimed to overcome mutual stereotypes and prejudices and establish dialogue and cooperation between the citizens of both countries. How the meetings are prepared and conducted is particularly important for their success—the aim of the study conducted by Dr. Dominika Zakrzewska was to examine whether and under what conditions contact between young adults from Poland and Israel affects mutual prejudice and attitudes towards each other as well as selected national and ethnic groups. During the presentation, there will also be discussed the good practices in creating a curriculum for such meetings to ensure the implementation of their objectives and the emerging difficulties.
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07-04-22 – Good evening. I bring you greetings from my home city Los Angeles, with one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, approx.. 600,000! And I feel honored to share this solemn remembrance of the 1946 Kielce Pogrom with you. Music has always had healing powers and I hope that our program of classical music for violin, cello and piano will have a transformative and comforting effect for us.
I invited three musicians to join me to perform today: Marek Jezowski, violinist, is the president of Beit Polska, the Polish organization which promotes and facilitates progressive Judaism throughout Poland. The cellist, Dominik Płociński, is a serious young professional musician and a prizewinner in the prestigious Lutoslawski and Chopin competitions. Ludmilla Jezowska is a conservatory-trained pianist and is married to Marek Jezowski. I am a classical pianist who became interested in all aspects of Jewish music in the early 1970’s.
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VIDEO OF THIS WEBINAR COMING SOON!
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Our webinar with Goldie Morgentaler will discuss her mother Chava Rosenfarb’s Yiddish novel of Lodz, Poland January 1939 until the end of Lodz Ghetto in 1944. Dr. Morgentaler translated the book from Yiddish to English. Now there is an excellent Polish translation by Dr. Joanna Lisek . But this towering volume is virtually orphaned of a reading public. Noted author Dara Horn wrote: To call [The Tree of Life] a masterpiece would be an understatement. It is the sort of work—long, immersive, engrossing, exquisite—that feels less like reading a book than living a life.
Extensive references to the Tree of Life can be found at Yidlit, October 30, 2021 and at Yidlit February 22, 2022 and Yidlit April 23, 2022.
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THIS VIDEO WILL BE AVAILABLE SOON PENDING NEW EDITS
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Karen Goodman will introduce a folkloric trope of Ashkenazic dance through the work of four artists: S. An-sky, Nathan Vizonsky, Judith Berg and Benjamin Zemach.
S. An-sky wrote the 1915 play, The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, which was based on his ethnographic research between 1912-14 amongst rural Jews in what is now Ukraine.
Lodz-born and raised Nathan Vizonsky came to the U.S. in 1920 and became an early figure in American Jewish folk and modern dance. He wrote the 1942 book Ten Jewish Folk Dances. Warsaw-born Judith Berg choreographed the 1937 film, The Dybbuk. Bialystok-born Benjamin Zemach was in the original Habima production of An-sky’s play in 1922.
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10-23-22 – Three noted academics will address the challenges shaping Ukraine today. The bravery of the Ukrainian people is inspirational. What has created the remarkable resistance and cohesion the world has witnessed? Odesa-based academic Oksana Dovgopolova, as well as two of her Canadian colleagues, Aaron Erlich and Matthew Light, have studied the contemporary cultural and political landscape of Ukraine. Each panelist will focus on their area of research, and there will be a period for questions.
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September 18, 2022 – Join Kathleen A. Balgley in a discussion of just released Letters to My Father: Excavating a Jewish Identity in Poland and Belarus. Kathleen Balgley’s memoir begins with her childhood discovery of her father’s hidden Jewish identity. Seeking to learn more about her own suppressed Jewishness, she immerses herself in the historically terrorized heart of wartime Europe and the epicenter of Jewish suffering by accepting a Fulbright to communist Poland just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Balgley visits the archives of her father’s birthplace formerly in Poland (Brzesc), now Brest, Belarus and discovers the lives (and deaths) of her relatives. Throughout the journey, bashert (the Yiddish term for “destiny”) uncannily guides her to uncover deeply hidden stories. Her father, who had said he would not travel to Poland to visit, changes his mind after reading letters from his daughter. Touring the country together, father and daughter heal the rift between them.
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Josh Horowitz and Cookie Segelstein, two of the three members of the band, performing violin and accordion music from their Polish klezmer CD. Brostoff will discuss with them unique features of Polish klezmer music. Veretski Pass has performed throughout Poland frequently.
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The women and children who fled to Poland after Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, were traumatized, hungry, and without shelter. Your compassionate response allowed Beit Polska/Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland to assume a significant leadership role in addressing their immediate needs. We are reporting about those efforts. You gave us the tools to respond.
We joined you in leading with our hearts to address the immediate need. We are writing to thank you for your response and introduce ourselves more properly. Our current groundwork undertakings are to rebuild Progressive Jewish life in Poland. Our situation has been severely strained by the pandemic-related financial crisis and further exacerbated as we reach out to the Ukrainian war refugees in their hour of need.
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