Dancing in Wroclaw

...I shamelessly eavesdropped on one American Jewish family at a souvenir stall as they purchased mass-produced carved wooden figurines of Jewish musicians...

...The majority of them are Polish Catholics and are so enthusiastic that the festival has been dubbed a "Jewish Woodstock...

...I have Jewish roots seven-and-a-half generations back," he says...

...a sincere and authentic interest devoid to a considerable extent of any additional motives...

...I myself became involved with that initiative when I lived in Warsaw in the early 1980s as the correspondent for United Press International...

...We felt that the story of the rebirth of the Jews in this country, with this history, was the ultimate stab in the dead heart of Hitler," explains Friedland...

...All this, it concluded, reflected a "renaissance of...

...Those activities in the public forum have dwarfed the visibility of re-emerging Jewish communal life to the point where it is easy to confuse the vitality of the virtual Jewish world with the real rebirth...

...A rich and heady mixture of music, performance, lectures, workshops, exhibitions and other events, this was one of the first stops on the postwedding tour...

...The festival has been a catalyst for the gentrification and overall revival of Kazimierz as an upscale tourist enclave...

...The Jewish community in Wroclaw, and particularly the synagogue, had a powerful impact on the couple...

...and for the third year in a row the Israeli Embassy gave out awards to nonJewish Poles who had worked to preserve or promote Jewish culture...

...The revival is of special significance because this country, once Europe's Jewish heartland, remains infamous for its grass-roots anti-Semitism...

...Those efforts blossomed over the past decade largely through programs funded by foreign Jewish organizations such as the Lauder Foundation and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee...

...The festival was founded in 1988 by two young non-Jewish intellectuals as a means of paying homage to Poland's annihilated Jews...

...there were concerts of cantorial music and avant garde jazz held in the newly restored Tempel synagogue...

...Liberal intellectuals looked to prewar Poland, with its large Jewish and other minority populations, as a model...

...They felt that rediscovering, even recreating, Jewish culture was a rediscovery of their own culture and history, and a critical prerequisite for building a civil society...

...Stan plays the clarinet, can we get him the figure of a clarinet player...

...The synagogue itself, damaged during the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, was used as a stable...

...Academics began carrying out research on Jewish and other topics that had long been off-limits, and organizing courses on subjects that had been taboo...

...Festival events draw thousands of spectators...

...Crowded home to 65,000 Jews before the Holocaust, Kazimierz became a rundown slum after the War...

...Their representatives stepped in during the late 1980s to help returnees to Judaism find their faith, and to fill the local Jewish leadership vacuum left by both the Holocaust and the suppression of Jewish life during four decades of Communism...

...So are the parents of Edith Stein, the Jewish convert to Catholicism who was killed at Auschwitz and pronounced a saint by Pope John Paul II...

...In fact, when Friedland and Fissel themselves first came to Poland all they expected to see were death camps, devastated cemeteries, wrecked synagogues, and an elderly survivor or two...

...We came here as reporters, to learn about Jewish death in Poland," Friedland told the guests...

...She and Fissel, a photographer and producer/director at New Jersey's PBS station for 16 years, consciously chose to turn the occasion into a high-profile political statement...

...Then known as Breslau, it was home to some 30,000 Jews, the third largest Jewish community in Germany and a center of the Reform movement...

...My visit this summer on the postwedding tour was my first to Kazimierz in a couple of years...

...They feature klezmer music and Jewish (but not kosher) cuisine, and some of their signs are done in Hebrew-style letters...

...It began with the signing of the ketubah (the Jewish wedding contract) and ended with a party featuring klezmermusic, Israeli dancing and a kosher buffet prepared in the community's kitchen...

...The synagogue was used again for worship until 1974, when it was taken over by the Communist state in the wake of the regime's 1968 anti-Semitic campaign...

...The German population was displaced, and the empty town was settled by Polish and Jewish DPs from the east...

...Their decision to marry in Wroclaw was the result of what became, according to Friedland, an "interest-turned-obsession" with the postCommunist Jewish resurrection they encountered—and shortly afterward began to chronicle...

...Planned cuts in the Lauder Foundation budget, for instance, threaten the survival of some of the new institutions, such as the monthly Jewish magazine, Midrasz...

...The famous Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary was located across the street from the synagogue...

...Making the issue more complex is the fact that the revival has gone on alongside what I call the creation of a "virtual Jewish world" involving the non-Jewish Polish mainstream...

...Nearly 45 children will be enrolled next year in a Jewish school run by the New York-based Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, and community leaders are seeking a rabbi...

...The rebuilding of the synagogue is a metaphor for the rebuilding of personal, communal, religious, cultural, and political lives...

...JEWISH LIFE began to revive in Wroclaw with the collapse of Communism in 1989-90, as young people started to claim a Jewish identity amid new religious, social and political freedoms...

...The neoclassical edifice, built in 1829, was in ruins just four years ago...

...Nowhere, perhaps, is it harder to distinguish the two phenomena than at the annual Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow...

...Theirs was the first wedding at the synagogue in 36 years...

...The family I watched evidently felt no such uneasiness...

...Emulating the scores of Poles who have discovered Jewish roots and reclaimed Jewish identity over the past decade, he converted to Judaism...

...The couple met in 1995, while covering an educational trip led by then New Jersey Governor Tom Kean that consisted of two-and-a-half days in Poland and a week in Israel...

...Half of the Holocaust's 6 million Jewish victims lived in Poland, where the Nazis built Auschwitz, Treblinka and the other major death camps...

...The rekindling of Jewish communal life in Poland actually was sparked more than 20 years ago, when several dozen young Jews and non-Jews began teaching themselves about Jewish tradition and history in a semiclandestine study group known as the "Flying Jewish University...

...The revival process is still precarious, more an ongoing experiment than an assured success...

...In 1988 a government-sanctioned publication reported that over 170 "books on the Jewish question" had been legally published in Poland between 1980-86, and it went on to detail related conferences, ceremonies, exhibitions, performances, and broadcasts...

...Why Wroclaw...

...But it still encompasses seven synagogues that date back centuries, nearly a score of smaller former prayer houses, two Jewish cemeteries, marketplaces, dwellings, and other buildings...

...And Fissel, born a Christian, had a rebirth of his own...

...They exchanged vows on July 2 before a rabbi, under a traditional chupah (wedding canopy), in Wroclaw's partially reconstructed White Stork Synagogue...

...Instead of going on a honeymoon, they led them on a 10-day "tour of Jewish life" aimed at "understanding and sharing" the experience and encouraging financial support for the needs of "the new community, thirsty for knowledge about its Jewish heritage...

...Thus, more often than not, Jews living in the West or in Israel have tended to view Poland as essentially a vast Jewish cemetery...

...The near-capacity crowd included approximately half of Wroclaw's estimated 600 to 1,000 Jews, nearly 200 non-Jewish townspeople, and about 30 friends and family from the U.S...

...When we started coming to Poland, we felt the spirit of the 3 million dead Jewish souls and they brought us here, specifically here, to this synagogue and this Jewish community, at a time when the synagogue had no roof and no floor and there was little apparent hope for the future...

...In fact, they were eagerly making individual selections for relatives back home...

...Over the decades, the structure crumbled...

...one asked...

...Sometimes the two combine, or at least collide: One of the Yiddish singers at Friedland and Fissel's wedding reception, for example, looked like a Hasid— with beard, black hat and black clothing — and was taken for a religious Jew by some of the guests...

...But he was simply a non-Jewish Pole interested in Jewish culture...

...There was another, more subtle change, too: There seemed to be more Jews among the tourist crowds sunning themselves at café tables, attending festival events, buying souvenirs...

...a statement to the world that the Jewish people, wherever we may be, are alive and well...

...Ambitious plans foresee turning the synagogue and the adjacent rundown Jewish administrative buildings into a full-service Jewish community center, with a modern kosher kitchen, senior care center, medical rehabilitation center, ritual bath, activity rooms, and museum...

...During World War II, Wroclaw's Jews were herded into the synagogue's courtyard before being deported to Nazi death camps...

...Today it is a regular summer feature in a city whose Jewish population now numbers only about 200...

...Working together, the two fell in love...

...It will be a real, living Jewish center," said Kichler...

...Not too long ago, the rows and rows of these figurines, with their stereotypical sad eyes and big noses, distressed and even angered many Jews, who considered them anti-Semitic...

...The bulk of the festival events are held in Krakow's prewar Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, Central Europe's most important complex of Jewish historical monuments...

...Even Chabad Lubavitch, an American-based Hasidic organization that sends rabbis as emissaries to Jewish communities all over the world will not operate in Poland...

...It is also about a union bridging different Jewish communities, and it is about a union bridging different times in Jewish history...

...This has encompassed Jewish culture festivals, study programs, cafés, books, tourist routes, films, souvenirs, monument restorations, exhibits, and the like...

...Most remaining Polish Jews were forced to flee the country...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a correspondent for the NL who covers Eastern Europe...

...Friedland and Fissel used their wedding to transmit their enthusiasm for the Jewish resurgence in Poland to their guests from the United States and Israel...

...Indeed, it is a measure of the vulnerability of the community that estimates of how many Jews there are in Poland range from 5,000 to 30,000...

...Present, too, were representatives of local Catholic, Lutheran and Orthodox churches, as well as the U.S...

...many still continue to refuse to set foot in the country...

...After the War, Wroclaw became part of Poland as Polish borders were shifted westward...

...Ownership of the ruined synagogue was returned to the community in 1996, and thanks to a grant in excess of $ 1 million from a German foundation, it has a new roof and its ground floor has been restored, but its two balconies and the exterior still need reconstruction...

...Today the town's Jewish community is second only to Warsaw's...

...Its main square, Szeroka, is lined with cafés and restaurants whose quaint ambiance is designed to conjure up a literary image of prewar Jewish life...

...It marked a symbolic milestone in the life of the town's small Jewish community, which, along with other Jewish communities in East-Central Europe, has seen a steady if still fragile revival since the fall of Communism...

...A political reporter with the New Jersey Jewish News, Friedland knows what makes a good story...

...Michael Monson, Friedland and Fissel's rabbi in Montclair, New Jersey, who performed the ceremony, went even further...

...They were surprised to find small Jewish communities had begun emerging in Warsaw, Wroclaw and several other cities...

...I noticed several new Jewish-style hotels, cafés and restaurants...

...This is, he said, "a sacred moment in Jewish history...

...Kazimierz [is] a special place and a special space, a Jewish space, where the Jewish nation created its own culture for six centuries and gave a big contribution to Polish culture as well," festival director Janusz Makuch told me...

...This year there was a daily workshop on Hasidic singing...

...Their documentary film, Poland: Creating a New Jewish Heritage, was completed in 1997...

...The pair became immersed not only in recording but in championing the still fragile process...

...In the small marriage of two people lies an intangible, optimistic and enormous hope...

...Jerzy Kichler, the president of the Wroclaw Jewish community and head of the Union of Jewish Congregations in Poland, called the wedding "a kind of miracle...

...The phenomenon began to develop in the late 1970s...

...Now fledgling local lay leaders like Jerzy Kichler are struggling with a list of problems similar to those faced by Jewish communities worldwide: assimilation, funding shortfalls, battles over property restitution, factional conflicts between the Orthodox, Reform and secular, not to mention the young and old...

...Performers include top international klezmer bands, Israeli groups and Jewish liturgical performers...

...Before World War II, Wroclaw was part of Germany...

...Until quite recently few visited, except to pay homage at Holocaust sites or to trace family roots...

...The imposition of martial law in December 1981 only partially stifled this movement, since the regime's quest for political legitimacy forced some relaxation of official policy regarding Jewish issues...

...ALTHOUGH the number of self-identifying Jews in Poland has increased tremendously in the past decade, in the aggregate it is still very small and imprecise...

...We don't know," Friedland told the assembly at the close of the wedding ceremony...

...Today we are here to celebrate Jewish life...

...In addition, the fragility of communal structures can make internal conflicts—like a financial scandal last year in Gdansk, or a clash in Warsaw over the hiring of a local rabbi—seem exceptionally daunting or demoralizing...

...They appeared to be people whose primary reason for visiting was pleasure, rather than mourning or Holocaust remembrance...

...Consul from Krakow and the German Consul from Wroclaw— both of whom spoke after the ceremony...

...Letter from Poland Dancing in Wroclaw By Ruth Ellen Gruber Wroclaw Ellen Friedland heralded her forthcoming marriage here to Curt Fissel with a press release that declared: "Our wedding is about more than a personal union bridging different lives and families...

...After the success of Solidarity in 1980, new cultural and intellectual freedoms in Poland gave rise to a movement to "fill in the blanks" in Communist history books...

...and Israel...

...With my conversion I reconnected my Jewish soul to Judaism...

...Early German Social Democratic leader Ferdinand LaSalle is buried in one of the local Jewish cemeteries...

...Local television, radio and newspapers covered the event...