Jewish Festival About to Kick Off

Starting this weekend, Cracovians will hear a lot of klezmer music coming from Kazimierz, as well as spectacles and special exhibitions set up all around the district and in the synagogues. That's right, the Festival of Jewish Culture is almost here!

This year's highly anticipated Jewish Culture Festival is almost underway, and both organizers and fans of the festival are highly anticipating its start this Saturday. This year's edition is the 17th time the festival will take place, and is predicted to yet again attract thousands of visitors from all over Poland and abroad, including Israel. Honoured guests include leading artists, writers and poets, and filmmakers from around the globe. Some of the stars that will appear this year include concerts by actor and multi-lingual singer Theodore Bikel, as well as Sephardi cantor Alberto Mizrahi from the Anshei Emet synagogue in Chicago. Bikel and Mizrahi will perform a concert of duets in multiple languages. The final night of the festival on July 1st will feature a huge concert of klezmer music on Szeroka Street.

The majority of the festival will take place in the former Jewish district of Kazimierz, though a few special events and exhibitions are planned for the site of the former Jewish Ghetto in Podgorze, including an exhibition at the former Shindler Factory. The festival's events feature a week of concerts, art and photography exhibitions, lectures and conferences, cabaret nights, Hassidic dance workshops and dance recitals, poetry readings, Yiddish and Hebrew language workshops, Jewish cooking demonstrations, book promotions, synagogue tours, films and almost anything else that can be related to the Jewish experience. The events will be showcasing and celebrating the 900 year history of Jews in Poland. Sabbath services will also take place as Judaism as a religion is also explored. The goal of the festival is to not only remember the Jewish community that was devastated during the Second World War, but to grasp the rich cultural heritage of the Jewish community of the past and of the present - including Krakow's own Jewish heritage which still lives on.

The Jewish Culture Festival will be held from the this Saturday, the 23rd of June until the 1st of July. Tickets for the concerts and certain events are available from Cheder on ul. Jozefa 36, Monday through Friday from 10:00 am until 5:00 pm, Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 am until 2:00 pm. Tickets will be also available immediately before each event.