The “Granary of Culture Foundation” is inviting the public to Kazimierz Dolny nad Wisłą and Janowiec from 6 to 11 September 2022 for the tenth Pardes Festival – Encounters with Jewish Culture.

The rich calendar of the tenth anniversary festival is summing up many of the festival’s themes and motifs, while at the same time expanding the thematic spectrum to include new areas.

According to the organisers, the visitors will meet artists and eminent experts on local history, Jewish themes and multiculturalism in the cosy scenery of towns on the banks of the Vistula, with respect for nature and material heritage.

Festival guests will walk along Jewish traces in Kazimierz Dolny, visit a synagogue and learn about the history of Jewish cemeteries. One of the Kazimierz themed walks will recall the fate of Holocaust survivors and the Górecki family, awarded the Medal of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1996. During the Pardes Festival, event participants will get to know a microcosm of multicultural cities and towns in former Poland.

“We are taking festival guests on a journey to cities and towns once inhabited by famous rabbis, thinkers, social activists and charismatic artists, to a world which until the tragic September 1939 resounded with the Yiddish language” say the organizers of the Festival.

In collaboration with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, festival speakers will include, as every year, Piotr Kowalik, an eminent expert on Judaism, who will meet with festival audiences as part of the “Pardes means Garden” series and will talk about the practical and mystical significance of wine in Judaism.

An important theme of this year’s Pardes Festival is culinary. Tamara Sztyma, co-curator of the exhibition “From the Kitchen. Jewish Culinary Culture’ exhibition” will present the specificity of Ashkenazy and Sephardic Jewish cuisine, but above all she will try to determine what Jewish cuisine is today.

Adrian Andrzejewski