Forward -- Krakow's Jewish Cafes

This was originally published on July 14, 2011 in the "Jew and the Carrot" blog of The Forward.

Steve Weintraub reacts to the decor of the Ariel

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Krakow’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, is famous (or notorious, depending on how you look at it) for its Jewish-themed tourist infrastructure. Its “Jewish” cafes present a nostalgic literary image of prewar Jewish life — some with taste and sensitivity, others in a disturbingly kitschy manner.

At least a dozen (and maybe more) cafes, restaurants, hotels and other establishments, which are mainly geared toward tourists, make reference to Kazimierz’s Jewish character. In general, furnishings and decor evoke a certain Old World shtetl chic with dark wood, old books, candlesticks, lace doilies, mismatched old furniture, and old (or faux-old) paintings of genre scenes and portraits of rabbis. They spell “Jewish” locally in the same way that dragons and red lanterns spell “Chinese” and that checkered table cloths with Chianti flasks signified “Italian” culture.

These venues use Jewish themes or make reference to Kazimierz’s prewar Jewish history in their name or signs, which are sometimes written in Hebrew-style letters. Their menus feature items like gefilte fish, chicken soup, stuffed goose neck and kreplach, as well as dishes described as “Jewish-style,” or with names such as “Rabbi’s Salad,” “Yankiel the Innkeeper of Berdytchov’s Soup” or “Maurycy the Tailor’s Slices of Beef.”

The trend started nearly 20 years ago, with the beginning of the touristic development of Kazimierz. The area encompasses Central Europe’s most important — and intact — complex of Jewish heritage sites, but at the time it was a rundown slum, and the first Jewish-style cafes were welcomed oases. They were often conceived as an homage to the vanished past. Since then, the district has evolved into one of Europe’s premier Jewish tourist attractions, home to the huge annual Festival of Jewish Culture, several Jewish institutions and even an active Jewish community center. An upscale kosher restaurant, The Olive Tree, opened in the area recently, serving sleek (and quite tasty) kosher dining, with an emphasis on Mediterranean cuisine.

Nowadays, visitors are still sometimes shocked by the extent of the kitsch (Szeroka Street, the main square in Jewish Kazimierz and the hub of Jewish tourism, souvenir stalls and Jewish-themed venues, is sometimes referred to as “Jewrassic Park”). But the Jewish-themed cafes are actually now in the minority — Kazimierz has become a major district of youth-oriented nightlife and music, with scores of pubs, clubs and cafes, and eateries of all sorts.

This year, during the festival, I enlisted two festival participants — Chicago-based dancer Steve Weintraub and Berlin-based trumpeter Paul Brody — to join me on a couple of “café crawls” to rate half a dozen of the most prominent Jewish-themed establishments in the district, from the ones that are over the top, to the ones that are a nice place to hang out.

Klezmer Hois

A meeting place for local and visiting Jewish intellectuals and artists, K-H is run by Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat, who also operate a Jewish publishing house and bookstore. Both have Jewish roots. The Ornats’ first Jewish themed café, opened in 1992, was the first in Kazimierz, and their take on style, décor and menu has influenced many other cafes in the district and in other cities. Its front room is an intimate cafe/restaurant, but it also has larger dining rooms. Up flights of creaky stairs is a hotel with old-fashioned furnishings. In the shady garden, you can enjoy one of the best breakfasts in town — home-baked rolls, sour cherry jam, cheeses, fruit, eggs and hummus. Szeroka 6

Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz

The highly theatrical concept has always caused me to cringe a bit. The exterior of the café/restaurant is mocked up to look like a row of pre-war shops, with weathered-looking shop signs fronting the street like Benjamin Holcer’s Carpentry Shop and Chajim Cohen’s General Store. Big signs explain that the restaurant “takes us down memory lane to that bygone time.” The interior resembles an overstocked antique or curio shop crowded with items relating to the false-front shops, but it is surprisingly pleasant, achieving a sort of warm, fuzzy coziness. The menu is small but the duck with cherries comes recommended. Szeroka 1

Noah’s Ark (Arka Noego)

Noah’s Ark, one of the best known Jewish cafés, opened in 1995 and was long located in a historic building with vaulted ceilings on Szeroka. It recently moved and it may be unfair to judge it yet on its new incarnation — the lace tablecloths and candlesticks are in place, live klezmer bands play at night and the restaurant is full — but everything is still so new that it’s rather soulless. Its menu still offers dishes with names like “Cheese Soup of Jealous Sarah” and “Veal in Garlic Sauce for the Klezmers.” Corner of Izaaka and Kupa streets

Cheder

This pleasant little café is an offshoot of the Festival of Jewish Culture. It has a low-key atmosphere, a library of Jewish books, and it serves exotic teas and coffees, kosher wine, and Israeli snacks such as pita, cheeses, olives and sun-dried tomatoes. Cheder aims to serve as an informal Jewish cultural center and hosts book presentations, readings, concerts and other events often keyed to contemporary Jewish culture. Jozefa 36

Sara

Sara used to be a forbiddingly stark, modern café in the Jewish Culture Center located in a renovated prayer house at the edge of Plac Nowy. It has undergone redecoration to make it much more cozy, but it still eschews nostalgic kitsch. Its roof garden has a terrific view of Plac Nowy and Kazimierz rooftops, in what may be the most secluded and secret spot in the district. At the center for Jewish culture, Meisels 17

Ariel

Ariel was the first Jewish-style venue to open — back in 1992 when it was run by Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat (now the owners of Klezmer Hois). Today, it is the most blatantly commercial of them all. It is a rambling establishment, catering to groups. Its facade sports a huge menorah flanked by lions and dominates Szeroka. While the outdoor seating is pleasant enough, the dozens of paintings of rabbis and other Jewish imagery that decorate its interior strike me as prime examples off-the-shelf “Jewish.” Its little shop selling carved figurines of Jews and even refrigerator magnets of Jewish heads with stereotype profiles makes me particularly uncomfortable. There’s a large menu, but the rugelach we ordered were too stale to eat. Szeroka 18

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-jew-and-the-carrot/139814/#ixzz1VZgrzLiH

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Never Better in Krakow?

Visitors in the Izaak synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, on the revival of Jewish spirit in Krakow. I also posted about the Night of the Synagogues on my Jewish Heritage blog -- with lots more pictures.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

June 15, 2011

KRAKOW, Poland (JTA) -- Jews in Krakow have a new slogan -- "Never Better."

The catchphrase is deliberately provocative, a blatant rejoinder to "Never Again," the slogan long associated with Holocaust memory and the fight against anti-Semitic prejudice.

It may be counterintuitive, acknowledges Jonathan Ornstein, the American-born director of Krakow's Jewish community center who helped come up with the slogan.

But it's aimed at rebranding Jewish Poland, or at least Jewish Krakow, shaking up conventional perceptions and radically shifting the focus of how the Jewish experience here is viewed.

"Because the Holocaust isn't subtle, then the rebranding, as a way to get people to understand the situation here now, also can't be subtle," Ornstein explained.

Only a few hundred Jews live in Krakow, but the community has been rebuilding in the past two decades, particularly since the JCC opened three years ago.

"When we say 'Never Better,' it's not in terms of numbers, or the amount of things in Jewish life, or the synagogues that are functioning and all that," Ornstein said.

However, he went on, "in terms of the way the Jewish community interacts with the non-Jewish community and the direction that things are going, I think that there's never been a more optimistic time to be Jewish in Krakow than there is now."

I spoke with Ornstein on a Sunday in June, the morning after an unprecedented event that in a way had been a public affirmation of the new Jewish spirit he described.

Organized by the JCC, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Krakow Jewish communal organization, it was called 7@Night -- Seven at Night or the Night of the Synagogues.

Night of the Living synagogues may have been a better description.

From 10:30 p.m. until 2 a.m., all seven of the historic synagogues in Krakow's old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, were open to the public.

It was part festival, part celebration and part didactic exercise. The aim was to foster Jewish pride, but also to educate non-Jewish Poles about contemporary Jewish life and culture.

An astonishing 5,000 or more people turned out, a constant flow of people that trooped from one synagogue to the next and patiently braved long, slow lines and bottlenecks at doorways. Almost all were young Cracovians.

Each synagogue hosted an exhibit, concert, talk or other activity that was produced by Jews and highlighted Jewish life and culture as lived today in Poland, Israel and elsewhere.

Events ranged from talks by Krakow Rabbi Boaz Pash on "the ABCs of Judaism" to a live concert by an Israeli rock band to a DJ sampling new Jewish music from a console set up on the bimah of the gothic Old Synagogue, now a Jewish museum, to a panel discussion about the role of women in Judaism.

All the events were free -- and all were full.

"It far, far exceeded our expectations," said Ornstein.

I've never seen anything quite like it, even though I've followed the development of Kazimierz for more than 20 years -- from the time when it was an empty, rundown slum to its position now as one of the liveliest spots in the city.

I've witnessed -- and chronicled -- the development of Jewish-themed tourism, retail, entertainment and educational infrastructure in Krakow, including the Jewish Culture Festival that draws thousands of people each summer. And I've written extensively about the interest of non-Jews in Jewish culture.

But Seven at Night was something different. For one thing, nostalgia seemed to play no role. And also, unlike many of the Jewish events and attractions in Kazimierz, this one was organized and promoted by Jews themselves.

It was their show, kicking off with a public Havdalah ceremony celebrated by Rabbi Pash that saw hundreds of people singing and dancing in the JCC courtyard.

"Never Better" was a prominent theme.

Most explicitly, it was the title of a multimedia presentation that ran throughout the night, projected on the vaulted ceiling of the 16th century High Synagogue, which today is used as an exhibition hall. The presentation featured interviews with local Jews young and old, religious and secular, all expressing a confidence in their identity and future.

It's still anybody's guess whether or not demographic realities will enable the long-term survival of a Jewish community in Krakow. But Ornstein said that may not be the point.

A key message of the current activism, he said, was to help frame the context of Polish Jewish history and hammer home that however small their numbers, Jews in Poland are not a separate, exotic entity but part and parcel of 21st century Polish society.

"The powerful message is that Judaism isn't just an idea, it's not just something that belongs to the Polish past, but there are Jews living here," Ornstein said. "We're trying to say that you can be a Jewish Pole, not just a Jew in Poland, to turn 'Jew' into an adjective instead of a noun."

I hope he's right.

Krakow, Festival and Schindler's Factory Museum (in IHT/NYtimes web site)

I was in the Krakow for the Festival of Jewish culture, where I go every year -- the best party I know, with dozens and dozens of friends among the musicians, artists, teachers, talkers and fans who attend. I have a game: see how far I can walk without running in to someone I know, sitting down, drinking something (coffee, beer, vodka, even water....) This year, I also gave talks to a couple of visiting groups -- one from the Taube Foundation and one from GTU, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

This festival was the 20th edition of the event -- I have attended most of them.

I also was able to visit -- and write about -- the newly opened Schindler's Factory museum. Here's a link to my article that appears in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times web site

Photos (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Visitors in the Schindler’s office section of the museum. The desk was used by Schindler’s receptionist.

New Museum Tells Krakow's Stories of World War II

 By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER  (Published: July 15, 2010)

KRAKOW — In the mid-1990s, I took a “Schindler’s List” tour of sites made famous by Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning movie, which recounts how the German businessman Oskar Schindler saved the lives of 1,100 Jews by employing them at his enamelware factory in Krakow during World War II.

 

In the Schindler’s factory museum, one section of the floor is paved with swastikas that people walk on — symbolically trampling the Nazi symbol underfoot.

A guide wearing acid-green sunglasses led us in the footsteps of both Schindler and Mr. Spielberg, on a route that mixed celluloid and reality, Hollywood and the Holocaust. “This,” he said more than once, “existed in reality AND in the film.”

One of the places that existed in both was Schindler’s former Emalia factory, in a grim industrial area of the city. At the time it still operated, but as an electronic components plant. Some of the scenes from “Schindler’s List” had been shot there, and in the wake of the film’s success the staff had placed a small monument to Schindler in the courtyard.

On June 11, the factory’s sprawling administration building opened as Krakow’s newest museum, an ambitious, multimedia evocation of Krakow’s experience under Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945. Three years in the making, Schindler’s Museum (4 Lipowa Street, www.mhk.pl) cost €3.7 million, or about $4.7 million.
The new museum uses Schindler’s famous story as a springboard to recount a broader narrative that encompasses oppression and resilience, heroism and deceit.

“The history we see here is a reminder that there is an alternative to inaction, a reminder that when we learn of crimes that cry out against our conscience we cannot stand by in quiet revulsion, hoping the world will fix itself,” said the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who toured the museum during an official visit to Krakow July 3.

Formally a branch of Krakow’s Historical Museum, Schindler’s Factory is “a museum of the occupation that shows what the wartime experience was like in Krakow and shows the context of all the stories — of Jews in Krakow, of Oskar Schindler, of Cracovians, of the German occupiers,” said Edyta Gawron, a historian who was part of the team that developed the museum concept.
“Such a museum was needed,” she said. “People visit Auschwitz, but they have no idea of what life was like here in Krakow.”

[...]

Read full article here

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Farewell to a Pintele Yid

Here is my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, a farewell to my old friend Henryk Halkowski, who died in Krakow on New Year's Day.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

BUDAPEST (JTA) -- The Yiddish expression "dos pintele Yid" is often translated as "the Jewish spark" -- an indestructible core of Jewishness that lurks deep within even unknowing or alienated Jews, ready to spring back to life at any unexpected moment.

The Forward's language maven, Philologos, once devoted a column to the term, describing it as an almost mystical notion.

"It posits that all Jews, even if they are unaware of it or have been raised so un-Jewishly that they do not know they are Jewish, have within them a Jewish essence that can be activated under certain circumstances," Philologos wrote.

Henryk Halkowski, who died suddenly on New Year's Day in his native Krakow, Poland, may have been one of the least mystical people I ever knew, but in many ways he embodied this concept.

A writer, translator and local historian, Henryk was like a pintele Yid for an entire city -- a city whose Jewish population of more than 65,000 had been all but wiped out in the Shoah. A city where only some 200 or so Jews live today.

To my mind, Henryk was one of the most noteworthy personalities in the new Jewish reality that has emerged in Poland since the Iron Curtain came down nearly 20 years ago.

"He was a guardian of Krakow's Jewish legacy," said Joachim Russek, director of the city's Center for Jewish Culture.

Born in 1951 into the echoing vacuum of post-Holocaust Poland, Henryk was haunted by the ghosts of Krakow's Holocaust dead and the generations of Krakow Jews who went before them.

He, in turn, haunted Jewish Krakow, learning its secrets and becoming so intimately attached that he seemed to have real, psychological difficulty leaving the city even for a few days.

"He was a character," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a leader in Poland's Jewish revival and the American Jewish Committee representative in Warsaw. "He was so Cracovian -- a Krakow curiosity."

With his encyclopedic knowledge of Krakow's Jewish history, culture, legend and lore, Henryk became a touchstone for me and other Jewish foreigners who began trickling in to Krakow in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"For many of us, Henryk Halkowski was one of our first significant encounters with Krakow, and for all the years thereafter he remained a fixture of its character as much as any other person or institution," said Michael Traison, an American lawyer who has worked for years in Poland and sponsored many projects aimed at preserving Jewish heritage and fostering Jewish revival.

A stocky figure with thick glasses and a gray-flecked beard, Henryk was a familiar figure in Krakow's Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, where he roamed the streets with a restless energy.

"Wherever one walked in Kazimierz, regardless of the time of day or night, you couldn't help but run into him, then have a drink, then have a meal," recalled the klezmer musician and filmmaker Yale Strom, who met Halkowski in 1984 and featured him in several of his documentaries.

I first met Halkowski in the early 1990s.

Back then Kazimierz was a slum, a dilapidated ghost town that still showed the scars of Nazi mass murder and communist oppression.

Henryk, as head of a Jewish club, had formed the nucleus of a group of younger Jews who had attempted to revive Yiddish culture in the 1980s.

He recalled to me how foreign Jews often seemed uncomfortable meeting younger Jews in Poland -- how they couldn't understand their desire, or need, to remain.

"American Jews have a stereotype about Polish Jews who stayed here," he told me. "It's as if we are seen as 'traitors' to the nation."

In the years since then, Kazimierz has grown into a lively tourist center, with Jewish-style cafes, renovated synagogues, kitschy souvenirs and constantly milling tour groups.

The district has a resident rabbi and a Chabad center, and there is a plethora of Jewish cultural and educational institutions -- even a local Jewish publishing house, which has brought out Henryk's own books.

Henryk was an acute observer of the transformation, even as he became one of its protagonists.

"Disheveled and in disarray, he never disappointed as he cynically critiqued the absurdity of the Disneyland display of Jewish heritage and tragedy," Traison said.

"Orally and through his writings, he offered a sincere and unique insight into Cracovian culture and specifically that special Kazimierz life created since the fall of communism.

"Henryk remained and remains a genuine part of that milieu," he said. "And if one word is needed to describe him that is it: genuine."

In 1997 I took a picture of Henryk, a wry grin on his face, as he posed a trifle awkwardly at a Krakow souvenir stall selling T-shirts and carved wooden figures of Jews.

"Shall I tell you my obsession?" he asked me once, as he tucked into a bowl of chicken soup and kreplach at one of Kazimierz's trendy new Jewish-style restaurants.

"What we need in Kazimierz is some sort of institution that presents Jewish life as it really was here. What an apartment was like, for example; what a cheder was like, what a workshop was like. How the people here really lived. Something to inject a bit of reality into the gentrification."

Henryk was buried in Krakow's Jewish cemetery. Some 300 people braved the snow and bitter cold to pay their last respects. Rabbis and cafe keepers alike mourned at the graveside.

I could not make the trip to attend. But I remembered what Henryk had told me years ago, during one of our earliest conversations.

"Kazimierz," he said, "can be a place where meaning can be materialized."

That still holds true. But it simply won't be the same without him.

Read Full Story on JTA