Unseen Soundwalks: Jewish Warsaw
The third season of Culture.pl’s Unseen Soundwalks celebrates Warsaw’s Jewish heritage. This time, the audiowalk will take listeners to eight of the capital’s most important addresses for Jewish culture before 1939.
The Jewish Warsaw series is the third season of Culture.pl’s Unseen Soundwalks, a geolocative show about the history of invisible places on the map of the Polish capital. The first season was based around locations where the Palace of Culture and Science now stands, while the second season, made with the Warsaw Rising Museum, was about the most important moments of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.Unseen Soundwalks: Jewish Warsaw takes listeners on an immersive trip back to Interwar Warsaw to experience the life and culture of Warsaw’s Jews, who made up one third of the city’s inhabitants.
The audiowalks take in both the secular and religious life of the city’s Jewish population before the war, with now-concealed addresses such as Tłomackie 7, the site of the Great Synagogue, and Ceglana 1, which housed the literary salon of Yitskhok Leybush Peretz (Isaac Leib Peretz), the father of modernist Yiddish literature.
Listeners can also find out about Haynt, the largest Yiddish-language daily newspaper at Chłodna 8, or get into experimental stage performance by visiting the Yung-Teater (Young Theatre) director Michał Weichert’s apartment on Długa 8a.
The series has been produced in both English and Yiddish, the everyday language of millions of Jews throughout Europe. Historical oversight on the series as well as its Yiddish version were made possible thanks to the expertise of Dr Karolina Szymaniak from the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław.
Unseen Soundwalks: Jewish Warsaw is available as a podcast on most popular audio platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts, but the full experience has been designed for the Echoes geolocative app, available on both iOS and Android, where all the episodes are designed to be listened to by visitors as they walk around Warsaw itself. The Yiddish version of the series will be available soon on all the same platforms.
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The Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street, Warsaw, photo: Jewish Historical Institute
Episode list
Długa 26 is one of the most renowned addresses of pre-war Jewish Warsaw. It housed the socialist Bund party headquarters from 1936 onwards, as well as the capital’s first school with Yiddish as the language of instruction. Other political organisations housed here included the Masada Zionist youth union.
The now non-existent Ceglana 1 is an address of almost mythical proportions in the history of Jewish culture thanks to Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, the father of modern Yiddish literature, who lived at this address.
Before World War II, the building on Leszno 2 housed the headquarters of the Union of Jewish Stage Artists (Yidisher Artistn Fareyn), founded in 1919 to support Jewish directors and actors and to defend their rights.
The building at Chłodna 8 housed the editorial offices of Haynt, the largest Yiddish daily of the Interwar period.
In Jewish cultural memory, 13 Tłomackie Street is the address of the worldwide embassy for Yiddish literature, the seat of the Fareyn fun Yidishe Literatn un Zhurnalistn (Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists). The address become a symbol of pre-war cultural life, its disputes and debates, as well as its ups and downs. It appears in almost every memoir about Interwar Jewish literary Warsaw.
Michał Weichert, a lawyer, but also an avant-garde director and theatre theoretician, lived at 8a Długa Street from the mid-1930s. A figure of many achievements in the history of Yiddish and Polish theatre, he founded the highly experimental Young Theatre (Yung-Teater).
Pasaż Simonsa (Simons Passage) owes its name to the German industrialist and the building’s owner Albert Simons. The building complex consisted of two sections. The first part was put into use in 1903, and construction as a whole was completed in 1906. The address was where the Jewish and Polish worlds met and intermingled.
The Great Synagogue was built between 1876 and 1878 according to a design by Leandro Marconi. Warsaw’s largest Jewish temple housed an impressive 2,200 seats, and was located on the border of the Jewish quarter. Sermons were preached there in Polish, and attended mainly by wealthy Jews assimilated into Polish culture. However, it was enough to take a few steps away from the temple to find yourself at the heart of the Yiddish-speaking centre of Warsaw.
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Postcard showing the corner of Nalewki and Długa, Warsaw, circa 1910-1919, photo: National Library Polona
Unseen Soundwalks: Jewish Warsaw was made by Free Range Productions for Culture.pl.
- Script writing & expert guidance: Karolina Szymaniak, PhD
- Audio Production, mixing & editing: John Beauchamp
- Sound design & audio editing: Bartosz Panek
- Production support: Jarosław Kociszewski
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