The three-day Płock Jewish Days event, now in its 11th year, will be held by the local Museum of Masovian Jews from September 5 to 7, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
The festival will include an exhibition of art by Polish-Israeli painter Jakub Guterman, a native of Płock.
Guterman’s paintings and book illustrations will go on display on September 6, with the exhibition set to run until the end of November, according to organisers.
An illustration by Jakub Guterman. Image: Museum of Masovian Jews
Born in Płock in 1935, Guterman survived the local ghetto set up by the Nazi Germans during World War II, later also going through a German detention camp and living in various places in German-occupied Poland under an assumed name, the Museum of Masovian Jews said.
His father Symcha was a soldier in Poland’s underground Home Army. He was killed in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
Jakub Guterman and his mother, meanwhile, survived the war and left Płock for Israel in 1950, the PAP news agency reported.
Guterman went on to study literature and art and became a successful painter and illustrator.
Today he lives in Israel, but describes himself as “a product of two countries” and stresses his devotion to “the Polish landscape, culture, language and poetry,” the Museum of Masovian Jews said.
On September 5, the Płock Jewish Days festival will feature a meeting with the author and playwright Remigiusz Grzela, the artistic director of the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw.
Discussions will focus on Grzela’s latest book, Three Lives of Irena Gelblum, about a Jewish woman who fought in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, and was also a renowned poet and journalist, the PAP news agency reported.
The festival will conclude on September 7 with a concert of traditional Jewish songs in contemporary form by Andre Ochodlo & The Klezmer Company, according to organisers.
Andre Ochodlo, who heads the Atelier Theatre in the northern Polish city of Sopot, is an acclaimed performer of songs in Yiddish, having played concerts in many European countries, the United States, Canada and Israel, the Museum of Masovian Jews said.
The central Polish city of Płock was home to one of the country’s oldest Jewish communities. Jews had lived there for 700 years by the time World War II broke out, at which point they constituted some 30 percent of the local population, according to historians.
A few hundred local Jews are estimated to have survived the Holocaust.
Some of them returned to their native city after the war, but most left Poland in subsequent years, mainly for Israel and the United States, the PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, muzeumplock.eu