Stefan Wilkanowicz is a journalist, editor, educator, and Catholic leader. He wrote for Poland’s longest running independent journal since World War II, the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, and served as editor-in-chief of the monthly Znak. He also was a prominent member of the Znak association of lay Catholics. During the anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual campaigns in March 1968, Znak was the only political organization to protest the human rights violations in the Polish Sejm. Under Wilkanowicz’s leadership, Znak was the first monthly to publish, in the 1980s, an entire issue dedicated to Polish-Jewish relations.
Bogdan Białek of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews at the Roman Indrzejczyk Award ceremony, photo: Jakub Kaczmarczyk/PAP
When the second of this year’s awardees, Bogdan Białek, first came to Kielce in 1978, the story of the1946 pogrom had been supressed and denied, both by the town’s residents and the communist regime. After 1989, Białek began planning a public event that would serve as an educational platform and foster healing and acceptance. To sustain the atmosphere of acknowledgment and remembrance brought about by 16 years of the Kielce March, Białek established the Jan Karski Society and Institute for Culture, Meetings and Dialogue. The Society is housed at Planty 7, formerly a house where anti-Jewish violence took place in 1946.
Wilkanowicz and Białek will collect their awards at a ceremony during the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków. The ceremony will take place 30th June 2017 at 6:00 PM, at the Temple Synagogue. It precedes the annual Concert of Remembrance for Jan Kulczyk, who received the Irena Sendler Award posthumously in 2015.
Sources: press materials, compiled by AGA, 14 Jun 2017