Next edition of “ABCs of Judaism and Jewish Culture”

On Sunday, October 13, starts the next edition of “ABCs of Judaism and Jewish Culture” program, organized by the Jan Karski Society. This year, there are numerous workshops available for the program’s participants.

The first workshop, held at the Zagajski family house of prayer, relocated to the district of Pakosz, will be conducted by Krzysztof Myśliński, an art historian and a head of the education section at the Kielce History Museum. A week later, at the Institute for the Culture of Encounter and Dialogue, which is the main venue of the program’s workshops, Krzysztof Bielawski, a researcher of Jewish cemeteries and founder of www.kirkuty.pl website, will talk about rich symbolism of mitzvahs. At the last weekend of October, a workshop will be conducted by Andrzej Białek, deputy-president of the Society, and Antoni Myśliwiec, an outstanding photographer from Kielce. They will share their experiences in searching for and taking photographs of the traces of the Kielce Jewish world. In the following months, the workshops will focus on learning to read Hebrew (a workshop conducted by Małgorzata Kordowicz, the first woman rabbi and an author of a Hebrew textbook and a prayer book for children), the cuisine of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews (Soszana Keller), studying works of Hasidic masters and singing nigunim (Symcha Keller, a well-known cantor and expert in Hassidic tradition) and the Holocaust and memory (Bogdan Białek, president of the Society actively engaged in the Polish-Jewish dialogue).

The educational program of ABCs of Judaism and Jewish Culture was initiated by the Society in 2018 and since then it has been very popular among the residents of Kielce and the Świętokrzyskie region. In the first two years, the program included mostly lectures delivered by the greatest Polish rabbis and experts in Judaism, introducing the essence of Jewish religion and identity. An advanced group concentrated on the study of Hasidic and Talmudic texts with rabbi Stanisław Wojciechowicz from the Warsaw Jewish Community and Symcha Keller. The workshops are organized in the building which witnessed the Kielce pogrom of July 1946.