With our next speaker, we return back to Poland, and right back to Kraków to speak of the man behind of one of our city’s most distinguishing annual events. Janusz Makuch is best known as a founder of the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków and has been its director for 25 years. Amongst many honors, he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta “for outstanding achievements in discovering, collecting and disseminating the truth about the Holocaust, and for his contribution to advancing the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”.
During his TEDxKraków Talk, Janusz will tell the story of the transformation that took place in a young Pole who discovered his personal Atlantis – the Jewish world – many years ago. This story entails entering a world of cultural pluralism, in which the most important trait is mutual respect for all differences, and in which it’s sometimes necessary to be a heretic marching against the tide of history, because there is no progress without heresy. In short, his own story.
As a fifteen-year-old, Janusz discovered that half of the pre-war population of his family home of Puławy had been Jewish. This fact took him by surprise and sparked his curiosity. He began to study the subject – the history of the Jews, their language, customs, Jewish philosophy – and the more he read and understood, the more he could not believe that such a great and splendid culture, which was once an integral part of many Polish towns and cities, had not even left a trace.
It was only a few years later that Janusz, then a young graduate of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, founded the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków together with Krzysztof Gierat. The first edition was held in 1988 in a small cinema and was the first attempt to bridge two cultures: Polish and Jewish. Even this small step took great courage. After all, in the eighties the word “Jew” was still considered derogatory, if it was considered at all.
Throughout its 25-year history, the Jewish Culture Festival has led to the rebirth of Jewish life in Kazimierz, and is now one of the biggest and most important festivals of its kind in the world. It features Jewish folk music and traditional Klezmer, synagogue and Hasidic music, as well as modern fusion experiments such as Hebrew jazz, rap, gospel and afro-beat, as well as film screenings, debates, workshops, multimedia and art exhibitions and performances by and centered around the Jewish community in Poland and abroad. Most significantly, it draws a largely non-Jewish, Polish audience that is able to witness the rebirth of Jewish culture in Krakow.