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Another meeting of stakeholders of the NeDiPa project, which took place on August 19 in Będzin, is behind us. As part of networking memory activists and exchanging experiences, we visited Karolina and Piotr Jakoweńko from the Brama Cukermana Foundation in Będzin and met with local stakeholders from Upper Silesia & Dąbrowa Basin.
The purpose of the meeting was to get acquainted with memory activists operating in Upper Silesia & Dąbrowa Basin and exchange experiences in working with memory, building cooperation, as well as presenting current project activities to organizations, individuals and initiatives operating locally in the field of memory and care of Jewish heritage.
The meeting began with a walk around the area of the Będzin ghetto. Representatives of the Cukerman’s Gate Foundation presented what they have managed to do for the heritage and memory of Jews in Będzin and the region since 2009: saving the Jewish house of prayer located in the so-called Cukerman’s Gate, where historical polychromes have been preserved, a presentation of a collection of previously unpublished photos of Żarki residents from 1937-42, taken by a local photographer Józef Bacior, and the renovation of a commemorative plaque from 1947 in the Będzin ghetto – in the place of a bunker of the Jews of the resistance movement.
We also visited the Upper Silesian Jews House of Remembrance (a branch of the Gliwice Museum) with a wonderful exhibition about Jews in Upper Silesia, located in a restored pre-burial house erected in the Jewish cemetery at the beginning of the 20th century. We took a walking tour of Bytom, discovering local architectural heritage, in particular by the architects of pre-war Wrocław (Breslau), the Ehrlich brothers.

At the final part of the day, current activities carried out as part of the NeDiPa project were discussed with stakeholders, next steps planned in the project were presented and ideas for innovative best practices in working with difficult heritage were exchanged.

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FestivALT – a 10-day festival of Jewish art, activism and education, is another event organized as part of the MultiMemo project by our project partner, the FestivAlt Association. It was great to be part of the rich FestivALT program, co-creating some of the events: “Community of (difficult) heritage?” – conversation, “Jew, dog and neighbor. A neighborhood walk and a practical introduction to Jewish law” Schwarz – a urban walk.
The program included 24 events: performances, discussions, urban walks, workshops, exhibitions, created by authors and artists from Central and Eastern Europe, America and Canada.

The festival was themed around the notion of intersectional memory with a particular focus on “doykait” – a Yiddish word that can be understood as “Hereness” or the “here and now”. It was an idea popularized during the interwar periods by the Bund (Jewish Socialist Party) and it was most commonly connected to the struggle for Jewish rights and cultural autonomy wherever Jews were living. For the Bund, this meant advocating for the strengthening of Central and Eastern European Jewry and firmly claiming their homeland in the Diaspora, rather than being separated out and relegated to Israel. For FestivALT we used the notion of “Doykait” as advocative lens for the contemporary intersectional Polish Jewish Identity.

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On June 18, 2023, another event was held as part of the MultiMemo project, organized by the partner organization Formy Wspólne, as part of the MultiMemo project: Multidirectional Memory: Remembering Social Justice, in which we had the honor to participate as partners.
The purpose of the event was to gather everyone – individuals, representatives of the administration and social organizations who contributed to the creation of the monument, as well as local residents – to start the next stage of cooperation and discussion on the future of the Memorial and plans for educational and cultural activities to maintain the memory of the archive and its creators – the Oneg Shabbat group.
The event began with joint work – tidying up the area around the monument, and then finishing the planting of the hedge – the last and so far unrealized element of commemoration, which recreated the basement where the archive was found. The second part of the event took place at the Muranów Station, where the creators of the project told about the history of its creation, followed by a discussion.

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On June 18, 2023, another event was organized by the partner organization Fundacja Documentacji Cmentarzy Żydowskich, as part of the MultiMemo project, in which we had the honor to participate as partners. This is the first event  “Memory poles. Strategies of rebuilding the identity of the Bródno Jewish Cemetery” opened a series of workshops for the local community around the Jewish Cemetery in Bródno.

The aim of the workshop is to restore the memory of the Bródno cemetery and to involve residents, activists, social organizations and local authorities in this process.

During the event, there was a walk of two large cemeteries on opposite banks of the Vistula River, whose stories are diametrically opposed. The cemetery in Bródno, almost completely destroyed by the post-war regime, was forgotten and deprived of any signs of a cemetery. Today, pioneering research and commemorative activities are carried out there. The second cemetery at Okopowa Street is constantly used by the local Jewish community, and at the same time it is visited by crowds of tourists and pilgrims.

During the tour, the directors of both cemeteries familiarized us with the history of these places. Comparing both cemeteries, we talked about how to restore the cultural character of the necropolis in Bródno.

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In May, a ceremony was held in Zamość to commemorate the burial place of the Jewish family of Mendel, Chajka and Niura in Zrąb, murdered by a German gendarme in their home.

The event was preceded by educational workshops, which began with the screening of the documentary film “Ukos Światła” directed by Wojciech Szumowski for young people from two classes of the Second High School in Zamość. After the film, there was a conversation with representatives of the Zapomniane Foundation: Agnieszka Nieradko-Pająk and Aleksander Schwarz about the film and the work on restoring the memory of the forgotten burial places of the Holocaust victims and the history of the forgotten burial place of the Holocaust victims of the Jewish family from the town of Zrąb.

On the second day, we conducted workshops in Zamość, during which, together with students from one class of the Secondary School in Zamość, we prepared a wooden marker in the shape of a matzevot, and then, using a portable laser, we burned an inscription on it along with the names of the victims written by the workshop participants.
After the workshops, we went with the youth to the burial place of a Jewish family in Zrąb, where the ceremony of marking this place with a wooden matzeva took place.

The workshops were carried out as part of the MultiMemo – Multidirectional Memory Project, implemented thanks to the support of the European Union as part of the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) program in partnership with FestivALT, Urban Memory Foundation, JCC Warsaw, Formy Wspólne Foundation, Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries , CEJI, JULIUS-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAT WURZBURG and Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg.
We would like to thank the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute and the donor Szlomo-Albam-Stiftung for co-financing the workshops in Zamość “Reference Points” – creating a wooden matzevot.

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On April 23, 2023, another event was held as part of the MultiMemo project, organized by the partner organization Formy Wspólne. The meeting concerned the cemetery in Bródno – the oldest Jewish necropolis in Warsaw, and the conceptual project of its renovation, namely the exhibition of about 40,000 matzevot, which are currently decaying in the heaps in the central part of the cemetery. The first part of the meeting was a walk around the cemetery and getting acquainted with the extraordinary and tragic history of this place, as well as with its actual state. Thanks to this, the participants could better understand the assumptions of the project presented by the architects of the Common Forms Foundation in the second part of the event at the Museum of Warsaw’s Praga

In addition to the residents, the event was attended by activists from the Forum for Dialogue foundation, researchers from the department of anthropology and cultural studies, engineers, architects, and representatives of the Jewish Community from Warsaw and Sweden.

It was the first event organized by the Formy Wspólne foundations as part of the MultiMemo: Multidirectional Memory: Remembering for Social Justice project, in which we had the honor to participate as partners.

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On April 18, 2023, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a ceremony was held to commemorate the victims of the ghetto and a little-known mass grave, which was discovered in the recent years (not far away from the two already known mass graves that have been already commemorated). On this day, six remembrance walks, focused on the war-time history of the cemetery and the Ghetto Fighters, were conducted for six different groups. The culminating moment was gathering around the third, unknown grave, marked by us with a simple wooden marker in the form of a matzevah (Jewish tombstone). The goal of the event was to celebrate the anniversary while restoring the memory of civilians who died and suffered in the Warsaw Ghetto and raise awareness about the third, previously unknown, mass grave where they rest, which is usually not visited during the anniversary celebrations.

The events were preceded by extensive field research and non-invasive archaeological research of the burial site (radar and surveying to determine the burial site).

The ceremony was attended by young people from Warsaw high schools and a group of twenty teachers and educators, as well as memory activists and heritage professionals, community leaders and Jewish Community authorities. The participation of the local community and schoolchildren in the process is an important element in restoring the memory of the Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw, their fate during the war, the history of the Ghetto Uprising and their burial sites. During the event, the participants got acquainted with the war-time history of people who were seeking shelter in the cemetery, the hideouts that were organized there by the war-time cemetery director (including one preserved to this day), memorial sites commemorating the Oneg Shabbat group operating in the Warsaw Ghetto, monument to the Ghetto Fighters and graves of some of them, as well as mass graves of Ghetto victims located in the cemetery.

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In March, a ceremony was held in Tomaszów Lubelski and Pawłówka to commemorate the burial place of three Jewish children: Rywka, Balka and Jankiel, murdered during the Holocaust and buried near their home in Pawłówka. The culmination of the educational workshops was the ceremony of marking this place with a wooden matzeva. The workshops and the ceremony were attended by students of the 1st High School in Tomaszów Lubelski and students of the Primary School in Michalów, school directors, representatives of local authorities, museum employees, several residents, teachers and a local choir. A prayer for the dead was sung in Hebrew and Psalm 23 was read by the student.
These were the first workshops carried out by the Zapomniane Foundation as part of the MultiMemo – Multidirectional Memory Project, implemented thanks to the support of the European Union under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) program in partnership with FestivALT, Urban Memory Foundation, JCC Warsaw, Fundacja Formy Wspólne, Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries, CEJI, JULIUS-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAT WURZBURG and Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg.

We would also like to thank the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute and the donor Szlomo-Albam-Stiftung for co-financing the workshops in Pawłówka “Reference Points” – creating a wooden matzevot.

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The first evaluation meeting of the “NeDiPa” project was held as a two-part event, consisting of an internal evaluation carried out among project partners and meetings with project partners and stakeholders.

As part of the event, the Typology of Difficult Heritage Sites was presented to the stakeholders. The document can be downloaded below.

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The first meeting as part of the MultiMemo project: Multidirectional Memory – Remembering for Social Justice financed from European funds is behind us.
At the meeting, which took place on February 19-20, 2023 in Warsaw, together with the partners of the consortium (eight organizations participating in the project) we presented the assumptions of the project to key stakeholders dealing with heritage and invited them to cooperate.

The main assumption of the MultiMemo project is to discuss and initiate various forms of active commemoration in public space in several European countries. While focusing on supporting and proposing a practice-based culture of remembrance, innovative collaborative strategies and a multidisciplinary, cross-cutting approach to building a heritage community, combining civic activism, academia, art and urbanism.

We started the event with walks around two Jewish cemeteries, Okopowa and Bródno, focused on the topic of approach to remembrance, the concept of green commemorations and various types of commemoration.

We are glad that, thanks to the support of the European Union, we will organize 47 events together with our partners over the next two years:
FestivALT, the Urban Memory Foundation, JCC Warsaw, the Formy Common Foundation, the Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries, CEJI, JULIUS-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAT WURZBURG and the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg.

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