The first edition of the Jewish Culture Festival Singer’s Warsaw took place in 2004 – on the 100th birthday of the Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. The event’s mission is to ‘recreate the pre-war ambience of the surroundings of Próżna Street and Grzybowski SquarePlatz and to reveal the forgotten world of Polish Jews’. The festival’s programme is filled with film screenings, drama performances, and Klezmer music concerts, with workshops dedicated to Jewish paper-cutting, ceramics and Hebrew calligraphy and with discussions and lectures. Singer’s Warsaw is visited by creators and guest from abroad. So far, these have included Nigel Kennedy, Benzion Miller, David Krakauer, and the New York-based band The Klezmatics. The Shalom Foundation, founded by Tencer in 1988, organises the festival. Its main goal is to ‘save the rich Yiddish cultural heritage from being forgotten’. The foundation runs a wide promotional and didactic activity, organizes workshops and seminars. One of the foundation’s biggest achievements so far was the And I Still See Their Faces – Photography of Polish Jews exhibition which was followed by a photography album. The project was based on over 9 thousand pictures sent in 1994 in response to Gołda Tencer’s open call. It was presented in over 49 cities worldwide – including Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Toronto, New York, Paris, London, and Barcelona.
The Shalom Foundation organises annual meetings in front of the commemorative plaque placed in Warsaw’s Gdański Station which commemorates the events of March 1968 and the eviction of Polish Jews by the authorities of the communist regime in Poland. The plaque, funded by the foundation, contains a quote by Henryk Grynberg: ‘Here they left behind more than they had’.
Tencer emphasises:
The Gdańsk Station plaque symbolises pain – the unquenchable pain of parting.
On the 50th anniversary of the events, the Jewish Theatre’s actors, together with dozens of other artists, performed in an open-air show titled Spakowani, Czyli Skrócona Historia O Tym, Kto Czego Nie Zabrał (Packed: a Shortened Story about the Things They Left Behind) directed by Agata Duda-Gracz. Another part of the important anniversary’s programme was a monodrama titled Ida Kamińska, written and directed by Tencer and starring Joanna Szczepkowska. In one of the interviews conducted at the time of the premiere, the artist said that she always had Ida Kamińska, the theatre’s patron, in her memory.
Ida Kamińska was a wonderful actor and a good human being. We met right after her departure from Poland. She laid the groundwork for the post-war Jewish culture in Poland. (…] She was a fascinating person, she directed and translated plays. She’s also the only Polish actress to be nominated for an Oscar.
Outside of the Theatre