Opening Meeting: Love-the Alchemy of Reconciliation - Monday, June 29, 2009
Posted Jul 2, 04:45 PM by Ellie Shapiro
Festival Director Ellie Shapiro is currently at the 19th Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow, Poland and then goes on to Lublin and Ukraine with the 2008 JMF Ark Project. She is periodically sending back reports to share with friends of the Jewish Music Festival. Read on!.
Today the Festival begins in earnest. I first go to an Open Meeting titled: Love-the Alchemy of Reconciliation. Run by two psychologists, this workshop has been an integral part of the Festival for nine years. It provides a space for people to process their feelings about Jewish culture in Poland, an emotional topic, to say the least.
The group of about twenty is mostly women; almost half seem to be in their twenties. Three seem old enough to have been through the war. The first person I connect to is an older man from Israel I had met my first time, in 2003. Only now, do I discover that he actually grew up in Kazimiersz. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like for him to experience the Festival. He clearly gets an enormous amount from both the workshop, where he is one of the yearly regulars, as well as the Festival. He tells me that the school in which the workshop is taking place was a secular one for Jews and Poles before the war.
The two leaders introduce the session as an open space where people can come step by step towards each other; embracing life histories and especially painful experiences of the Holocaust or Jewish diaspora. The tone is very Jewish renewal, influenced by Rabbi David Cooper (not the California one).
We go around the room, passing a purple stone from one to another. Most participants are Polish or of Polish or Polish/Jewish background.. Reasons for coming to the Festival, and/or workshop include curiosity about Jewish culture, and wanting to resolve tension around the Polish/Jewish issue. One woman is attracted by the theme of reconciliation because of literature she read at school. Another admires the Jewish nation for its ability to survive despite destruction. Still another is looking for her own roots; she thinks perhaps she’s Jewish because everything Jewish, she “feels in her heart.” An older survivor originally from Krakow, keeps coming back to the Festival because he feels something is missing in his life. A middle aged Polish woman who now lives in Germany kept hearing there about how anti-Semitic Poland was; she felt the stereotype wasn’t fair wanted to begin to look at the topic. Another woman, born “a long time ago in Krakow” waits all year to return to these meetings.
Yulik, the man I met several years ago, recounts how the first time he attended this meeting, it was so emotional he had to leave. He has since become a core member. A young man from a small town in Silesia, whose grandparents were saved as children, said they taught him to love and respect Poland and its people, regardless of their faith and religion.
The therapist closes the session by raising the question: how is it possible to be open to people after the Holocaust? How is trust possible after genocide?
-Ellie Shapiro, Jewish Music Festival Director
3rd Day in Krakow - Sunday, June 28, 2009 The Ark Project - Live in Lublin, Poland