Symposium Presenters
       

Keynote Speaker

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and is affiliated with the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship.

She is currently chairing the Core Exhibition Development Team of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw, Poland. She has been co-convening the Working Group on Jews, Religion, and Media at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, with Jeffrey Shandler since 2003. A major project of the group is Modiya, an online resource for scholars, teachers, and students (http://modiya.nyu.edu), which was recently chosen as one of the 50 most innovative Jewish projects in North America by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies Slingshot initiative. 

Dr. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is the author of numerous publications, including Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (University of California Press, 1998). They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust, a collaboration with her father, Mayer Kirshenblatt, will appear in September 2007 (University of California Press), together with a traveling exhibition to premier at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. Among her earlier books is Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864-1939, with Lucjan Dobroszycki (Schocken, reissued 1995). 

Other Participants

Dr. Eleonora Bergman is deputy director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the world’s most comprehensive archive of Polish Jewish history, with documents dating back at least 900 years. She holds a Ph.D. from the Warsaw University Institute of Art and has worked extensively to help document and restore Jewish cemeteries, sites and monuments in Poland. She is an architect and a historian of architecture in the special field of Polish synagogues, particularly wooden synagogues.

During her career, Dr. Bergman has collaborated with and advised, among others, the World Monuments Fund, the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, Yad Vashem (Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust) and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. In addition, she has been a member of the international planning team for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and serves with a team of international experts on the management of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps as a World Heritage Site. Dr. Bergman is the author of numerous books and articles on Jewish heritage in Poland.

Konstanty Gebert is a Polish journalist and a Jewish activist, as well as one of the most notable war correspondents of various Polish newspapers. In 1978 he was one of the main organizers of the “ Jewish Flying University,” a secret institution of higher education where people studied various topics forbidden by the Communist government of Poland. In 1980 he joined the Solidarity movement and became a member of the "Solidarity of Education and Technics Workers" union.

In 1989 Konstanty was one of the journalists accredited at the Polish Round Table negotiations between Solidarity and the Communist Party. Since 1990 he has worked as a member of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews.

He publishes a weekly political column in Gazeta Wyborcza, one of the largest and most notable Polish daily newspapers. As a journalist of that newspaper, he served as a war correspondent during the War in Yugoslavia. In 1992 and 1993 he also served as an advisor to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, then Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations and its representative in former Yugoslavia.

Since 1997 he has worked as both journalist and publisher of Midrasz, a Polish-Jewish monthly magazine. This Fall semeseter 2007, Konstanty is a visiting professor in the Department of History of the University of California, Berkeley.

Anka Grupinska is the director of Centropa-Poland, an integral part of the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation, headquartered in Vienna. Centropa collects oral histories and family photographs documenting Jewish life before, during and after the Holocaust in Europe. It is building an invaluable archive and social history of prewar and postwar East Central European Jewish experience. Anka and her team work closely with the most prestigious museums in Warsaw and Krakow to assemble the material for public release when the interviews are complete in 2007. Their goal is to connect the world to these priceless stories of Jewish heritage through books, films, exhibitions and educational programs.

Anka is one of the best-known authorities on Jewish history and Holocaust studies in Poland. The author of five books on these subjects, Anka has served as cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv and was one of the founding publishers of Czas Kultury, a Polish literary periodical. Anka is also a freelance journalist for the weekly newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, which provided a fairly free voice for Catholics during the Communist era and today is considered the voice of liberal Catholics in Poland.

Janusz Makuch is the director of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, now the largest Jewish festival in Europe. At its inception in 1988, the Festival had a modest schedule but an enormous symbolic significance: the celebration of a culture that had been sentenced to oblivion in Communist Poland.

Gradually, the Festival has developed into an annual international event. It usually takes place in late June and early July and is a mega celebration of Jewish culture. Over 20,000 visitors from Poland, America, Israel and many other countries crowd into cooking classes, lectures, Yiddish poetry readings and art exhibits. In the evenings, klezmer musicians from all over the world perform on outdoor stages, filling the old Jewish quarter of Krakow with the sounds of Yiddish singing and impassioned music. All who participate agree that this is vibrant Jewish culture come to life, a rich and resonant pastiche to taste, marvel at and dance to.

In 1995, the organizers and friends of the Festival formed an Association with Janusz Makuch as its chairman. In September 2003, he received an honorary certificate from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in recognition of his services in the promotion of Poland abroad.

Daniela Malec, like many young Jews in Poland, was brought up in a family where Jewish issues were not talked about, where Jewish tradition was not taught. She started exploring her Jewish identity when she was at university in Krakow, but found that the community members were mostly Holocaust survivors. She felt that there were no other young Jews like her in Krakow.

But on a birthright trip to Israel, Daniela met other young Jews from Poland and Krakow. Determined to preserve and enlarge their newfound sense of belonging, three of them started Czulent, a group open to any young people with Jewish roots who had never been affiliated with any Jewish organization and were not involved in Jewish life.

Now a formal association, Czulent is an active and important part of the Krakow Jewish community, with 45 members working toward building and strengthening the Jewish community of the future. Daniela is not only the president of the association's board, but also runs a Jewish Students’ Club that works to educate and integrate the younger part of the Jewish community.

The activities of Czulent and the Club have helped invigorate the Krakow Jewish community by creating a new and vibrant sense of belonging for young people looking for a place to explore their Jewish identity.

Magdalena Matuszewska, a doctoral candidate in Hebrew Studies at Warsaw University, is the Warsaw Program Coordinator for the Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland, a philanthropic program of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture, in San Francisco.

Born in Warsaw, Magdalena is fluent in Polish, Hebrew, English, German and Yiddish. Her academic life encompasses the world of both scholar and educator. From teaching Hebrew to Polish kindergarteners to translating scholarly texts, Magdalena has followed her intense interests in Jewish history and culture, Judaica of Polish cities and towns, Jewish religious thought, art history, prewar architecture of Warsaw, and Christian-Jewish dialogue. Among her translated texts are those published in a 2006 anthology for the Center for Jewish Studies UMCS in Lublin, titled A Town of Various Dreams. In addition, for her master’s thesis, she translated selected epitaphs from the Jewish cemetery in Kazimierz Dolny, one of Poland’s most idyllic villages, located on the Vistula River.

Shana Penn is a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies, in Berkeley, and an Open Society Institute fellow. She directs the Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland, a philanthropic program of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture, in San Francisco. Her book, Solidarity's Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (University of Michigan Press, May 2005), was awarded Best Book in Slavic, East European and Eurasian Women’s Studies by the American Association of Women in Slavic Studies. It is the first book to reconstruct women's leadership role in rescuing the Solidarity movement during the 1980s martial law era and in building a free press in Poland. The Polish version, Podziemie Kobiet (“The Women’s Underground”), was published in 2003. Shana is currently at work on a new book exploring the revitalization of Jewish culture in Poland. Her essays and articles have appeared in Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, Journal of Women's History, Johns Hopkins SAIS Review, The Forward, Tikkun, and Lilith.

Yale J. Reisner founded the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation Genealogy Project at the Jewish Historical Institute in 1994.  This Warsaw-based project assists individuals from around the world in uncovering their Polish-Jewish roots and, in several instances, has brought about family reunions after decades of separation.  As the Polish social climate changes, increasing numbers of Poles are becoming aware of or taking an active interest in their Jewish background.  In helping these young Poles confirm their Jewish connections, the Project plays a key role in guiding these “lost Jews” back to the Jewish community and giving them and their offspring a Jewish future.

Yale lectures to groups visiting Poland and has addressed conferences and Jewish organizations in the U.S. and Canada, Eastern and Western Europe and Israel.  He serves as a consultant to a range of institutions in Poland, including the Jewish Historical Institute, Jewish communal organizations, Polish museums, media outlets and theatres, civil courts and government heritage agencies, as well as assisting rabbinates, the Jewish Agency and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office in assessing the Jewish background of Polish citizens abroad.

He helped organize the first European Judaica Archives Conference in Potsdam (1999) and has taken part in the archives panel at the “Future of Jewish Heritage in Europe” seminar in Prague (2004); he is now helping plan an upcoming Jewish archives conference.

Chris Schwarz is the founder and director of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland. For over 12 years, with the assistance of the Wingate Foundation, Chris photographically documented the physical remains of Jewish culture and civilization in Polish Galicia. 

The Museum opened in April 2004 and exists to pay tribute to those murdered during the Holocaust and to celebrate Jewish culture. The main exhibition, Traces of Memory — A Photographic Exhibition in Tribute to the Jews of Galicia, consists of 150 large-format color photographs depicting what remains today in Poland of the one-time great Jewish culture of Polish Galicia.

Chris first came to Poland in 1981 as a press photographer to cover the Solidarity movement, returning after the collapse of communism in 1991 to do articles for, among others, the Jewish Chronicle in London.  It was at this point that he first had the idea of documenting what has become known as Traces of Memory, and later started working with Professor Jonathan Webber, UNESCO Professor of Jewish and Interfaith Studies at the University of Birmingham, England.

Before coming to Poland to set up the Museum, Schwarz was the Chairman of the UK Jewish Film Festival and is on the Board of the Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies.

When asked about his Jewish background he replies, “I am Jewish enough for the camps, but not for the rabbis.”