IAJGS 2018 in Warsaw, Part one

   

The Old Synagogue in Kazimierz - still active

This years' International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies' conference is being held, for the first time, in Central Europe, in Warsaw, Poland.  Poland was the heartland of what was, before the Holocaust, the largest concentration of Jews in the world.  Although I, unlike most Ashkenazi Jews, cannot trace my family to any lands that were ever part of historic Poland, since DNA has proved that all Ashkenazi Jews are related to all other Ashkenazi Jews, what I am learning about Poland at the conference and in my travels, is part of my family's story, too.
     We came to Poland ahead of the conference to have some time to explore.  We spent three days in Krakow, an early capitol of Poland.  Through good luck, the city was not destroyed in WWII so it has a beautiful old center with a huge main square containing beautiful old churches including one dating from the 10th century.  While there were Jews living in that area from about that time, they soon moved to a nearby city of Kazimierz, which, since it was just outside of the walls of old Krakow, soon was absorbed into that city.  Kazimierz was the center of Jewish life in Krakow up until the population was liquidated between 1939-1944.  Today it is the "hip" part of Krakow with cafes and clubs.  Jews have begun to return to Kazimierz, and there is a new Jewish Community Center and at least two congregations using the synagogue buildings that were used as storage or stables by the Nazis and so were not destroyed.  Other synagogue buildings have been repurposed as book shops or cafes but in a way that respects the remnants of decorations that reveal their earlier function.  The new Jewish population is not trying to recreate the past, but rather to establish a modern Jewish community as part of the Polish citizenry.  A short walk across the river from Kazimierz is Podgorze,

Segment of the ghetto wall - Podgorze

the site of the ghetto established by the Nazis.  It was much smaller than the ghetto in Warsaw (more in my next post).  Walking through it you can see remnants of the ghetto wall, built to look like a line of Jewish tombstones, the square from which the residents were loaded onto rail cars for shipment to a death camp, and two bright spots - the pharmacy of Tadeusz Pankiewicz a Polish Catholic who brought medicines and food to his shop inside the ghetto and hid ghetto Jews, and the factory of Oskar Schindler, made famous by the film Schindler's List, who saved 1200 of the about 4000 Krakow Jews who resurfaced after the war.