The Sky Lounge is situated on 26th Floor of Grand Paragon Hotel, Century Garden - Johor Bahru. The company I attached with was held the Annual Dinner in the lounge on January 2010. That gave me a chance to explore the Highest Lounge in Johor Bahru for the moment!
The entrance of Sky Lounge, Grand Paragon Hotel
The dinner started about 7pm on that day, before that...some of my colleagues already enjoy their ice cold beer in the lounge. Alcohol is serve mostly for the local or foreign company when they celebrates their Annual Dinner. Even the Wine and Liquor were serve in the house, but I'm only enjoyed the Tiger Cold Beer...:)
The beer serve in 'Tower', during the 'Happy Hour', the charges is MYR108.00 and MYR128 after 'Happy Hour'.
And the foods served on that night was pretty delicious, they had Local food, Japanese food and International food...
The foods for the night :-
The local food and fruits
I Love the Japan Sashimi on the left!
I had this Roast Lamb a lot! My favorite! :)
There were Only 3 Lovely Ladies (waitress) serve the party in such a big Lounge on the Top of the Hotel...They did it well!
The Lovely waitress of Sky Lounge
Beside the foods and drinks, there was a Nice Red Piano display on the left of the stage. The performer play some nice song during the performance...
The RED Piano in the lounge
Another advantage of the lounge is...you can take the Johor Bahru city photo from the open air balcony! Because of the height of the Hotel, the vision is from Johor bahru City till Singapore. That was nice! I will share in my next post.
As usual, our colleagues and guests arrived about 8pm. Everyone were enjoy their food very much! Following with performer on the stage and lastly...the lucky draw. The First price was a 32" Sharp LCD TV! But I didn't get it...:)
I was attracted by the lighting in the lounge while others were busy with their foods....
There was a Cigar Bar at the right side of the lounge, if you are cigar lover, you will definitely love the environment!
Overall, we were satisfied with the services provided and also the foods. The dinner party end about 12 midnight and left some colleagues and guests chit-chatting until 3am in the morning! (I'm one of them...)
I'll be back again, not for the alcohol but for the spectacular night view of Johor Bahru!
Grand Paragon Hotel4*(N1 28.867 E103 45.700) is one of the famous hotel at Johor Bahru at the moment. It's located at the junction of Jalan Harimau and Jalan Seladang of Century Garden (Taman Abad), Johor Bahru.
We stayed here for one night on the day our company having the Annual Dinner at the Sky Lounge(26th Floor) of Grand Paragon Hotel. The room rate we had was a special discount! I only paid MYR160.00 for a room with 2 Queen bed. That was really reasonable because the published rate on their website is MYR230.00 for Standard room and MYR250.00 for Deluxe room.
The 2 Queen Bed room was spacious and so do the bathroom!
The bathroom of the room at Grand Paragon Hotel, JB.
We checked-in about 1pm, and have plenty of time to explore around the hotel area....
The main entrance. The staircase at the end is towards the Japanese Restaurant at M Floor.
The lobby area is spacious!
You will fall asleep if you relax on the sofa, because the Air-Conditional was cold...
Nice Lightning!
Japanese Restaurant at M Floor
After the Ground and M Floor, we continue to 11th Floor, the swimming pool...
The swimming pool of Grand Paragon Hotel
The swimming pool is kind of special which located outdoor and in the shape of half circle. It's not the Olympics size but it's comfort enough...
I woke up late in the next morning and I missed the breakfast! But my wife and my daughter were enjoyed the delicious breakfast very much! Overall, we are satisfied with the 4 stars Hotel and the staffs are very friendly! It's worth to have a comfort stay at Grand Paragon Hotel, Johor Bahru.
Rated :4.8/5
GRAND PARAGON HOTEL
18, Jalan Harimau, Century Garden, 80250, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia. Tel : +607-268 5222 Fax : +607-268 5333 Email : info@grandparagonhotel.com.my
There was an overflow crowd at the Budapest International Book Festival for the official launch of Zsidó emlékhelyek Közép- és Kelet-Európában -- the Hungarian edition of "Jewish Heritage Travel." It was really great to see so many people -- and I was gratified that most of them were people I didn't know!
We had some technical problems setting up the projector, which delayed the start of the event -- my photo-illustrated talk about Jewish heritage sites around the region. And also, the book's editor at Geographia press, who was supposed to moderate the event, wasn't there -- he got stuck in New York because of the volcanic ash cloud.....
Still, it went off well, and the audience I'm sure would have stayed much longer than the allotted hour....
I'm told that even though the book is not yet in most stores, there is a lot of buzz about it, and the publishers are thinking about having a few more events, which would run longer and enable more discussion with the audience.
This interest was certainly demonstrated today -- the book is a handsome, hardback edition and costs the equivalent of $20 a copy -- there were lots of sales during my book signing: one man bought four copies! And I'm told there will be articles and reviews in the press here.
I want to thank all involved for taking on the project and bringing out this edition!
Me with the book's translator, Laszlo Benke, after the signing
After watching coverage of the volcano in Iceland over the weekend, yesterday I was confronted with a miniature natural disaster of my own in the form of a hailstorm of epic proportions! After an overall beautiful, sunny, late-summers day in Buenos Aires, the sky all of a sudden darkened and lightning started flashing overhead with fast-increasing intensity. After a while it started to rain lightly, soon more and more water was falling from the sky - and then the hail began. For about 15 minutes our house was pummeled by rock-hard balls of ice the size of tennis balls.
I was working in our attic office/playroom, where my desk is located just under a large sky-window. Karin asked our daughters if they wanted to go downstairs with her to watch the garden as the rain was beginning to fall. After some minutes I decided to get a drink and so I followed them downstairs. That was a lucky decision.
I arrived downstairs at 8.15, just when the serious hail started to come down. We were standing on our back porch, under a tiled roof as the first icy bombs came down, hammering into the grass and turning the pool into a wild spectacle. Trees in our garden were rapidly “shaven”, as thousands of ice balls bombarded them, ripping off leaves, branches and taking out the occasional bird on their way down. We quickly ran back into the safety of the house and I started to close the blinds on the most exposed windows.
Each room I ran into echoed with the thuds of ice slamming into the windows, and each time I feared that one would come straight through. By the time I was done most of the hail had subsided and was replaced by a torrential rain that seemed like a huge bucket of murky water was being poured out over our neighborhood. At some point we could hardly see our garden anymore, covered as it was in white icy rubble with massive curtains of water sweeping before our eyes. Then I remembered the attic…
I ran upstairs to find my desk covered in glass, ice and water. Somehow most of the window had managed to miss it and my laptop and auxiliary screens were still functioning. I stood there, frantically looking from left to right, not knowing exactly what to do first, it was as if a giant tap had been turned on directly above what used to be my work space - water was pouring everywhere. And then, all of a sudden, the rain stopped, and at the same moment the entire neighborhood went pitch black.
I managed to find a flashlight and went back down to Karin and the kids. They had had a great time watching the storm and had no clue what had happened. We put the children to bed and went upstairs where we cleared the area of glass and actually managed to salvage most of the equipment. We found some flattened cardboard boxes and a couple of planks and went about with hammer and nails.
Later Karin reminded me it might be a good idea to see if the “vigilante” (the private security guys you see guarding street corners in cities across Latin America) had survived the storm. So I went outside and made my way through a thick carpet of leaves and tree-branches, looking at the cars as I passed; windows shattered and round dents in roofs, hoods and hatches. Our security guy was fine and did not need water or cigarettes, so after chatting to him and our neighbor about insurance policies and how both our dogs had taken this weird natural event, I went back inside. It remained dry for the rest of the night and this morning the sun came out and another sunny day started as if nothing had happened…
The garden, however, told another story, with branches lying all over the place like a jungle floor and the grass dotted with potholes. Power stayed out until midday and with it internet, phone lines and the comforts of working from home. We had enough to do however, especially when we saw what else had happened in those 15 minutes. Roughly 60% of the tiles on our roof had been shattered and our garden furniture was smashed to smithereens. Another window of hardened wire-glass in our garage was hit in three places and had opened up like paper. There were large holes where the ice went straight through and glass shattered all over the cars, which luckily otherwise remained intact. We spent most of the day collecting glass and rubble and it was then that I realized how extremely dependent on all those modern-day comforts I have become.
Still we have been lucky, very lucky in fact. Buenos Aires is not usually prone to serious natural upheavals, apart from a tropical rainstorm every now and then. Other parts of the world are not so well off. Natural disasters are happening more and more often and in many cases have tremendous effects on the world economy, as recently the Financial Times described in an article about the volcanic eruption in Iceland, of which I hereby copy the intro (reply to this post and ask me for an official forward and I will try to send you the entire article!):
“(April 16th 2010) Volcanic disruption
Pandemic flu, blizzards, volcanic eruptions: Mother Nature seems resolved to hurl grit (or fine ash) into the turbine blades of economic recovery. Disruption to international air traffic caused by a rather different Icelandic blow-up from the one 18 months ago is already the most serious since 9/11, and may outstrip it. A Sydney-based consultant, the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, forecasts that if the disturbance extends even three more days, it could affect 1m passengers, and cost airlines $1bn in lost revenues. Yet as with other recent natural phenomena, the overall economic impact may ultimately prove insignificant…”
Of course then there is the human aspect of these occurrences, not only for the people directly involved in them, but also for those that know, are related to, or have simply met them at some point. As my formerly Asia-bound colleague Beth says:
“…the tsunami that hit Sri-Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia was a disaster on a huge scale, but what struck me about it was the world response. It was the height of the Christmas season and most everyone I know knew someone who was there, heard first hand stories of the day, or had been there themselves in the past. News wasn’t just on the TV, it had happened to someone you knew, millions of first-hand stories were transmitted by word of mouth on a global scale.
I have many great memories of Thailand beach holidays, and essential to these memories are the people I met while I was there – the guys who cracked open fresh coconuts for me on the beach, the father and son who took us out in their fishing boat, the girls making seashell necklaces and running along the beach to sell them – all of these people’s faces came back to me when I heard the news, and I wondered how they were and what they lost. I think that this was the same for everyone, and that this is the reason why the world showed such solidarity. It wasn’t something just effecting international airlines and multi-national hotel chains, it was the guy who made you fresh mango juice on the beach in Ha Tien. Yes, it was all going on far away in a distant land, but it was something we could all relate to on a human scale.”
This is one of the positive effects of globalization and ever-increasing world travel, we have, and should have, an increased understanding, empathy and solidarity with our world neighbors. Tourism and travel bring great responsibility on many levels, be it related to preservation of natural habitats and heritage or simple material transactions that keep local economies moving. The way in which the world has developed means that many, many people in many countries rely almost entirely on tourism for their livelihood – if this is suddenly cut off, for example by a natural disaster, what happens to them?
In our globalized world everyone is connected, and so in turn everything that happens and how we respond has repercussions all around the world. The big volcanic dust cloud recently grounding flights across Europe, has all sorts of myriad effects on people around the world, from the plantation worker in Jamaica to the hotel cleaner in Egypt. As soon as the dust settles the world will be up and flying again, but the effects will continue to be felt, if not by you, by someone else in some distant land that you may one day travel to. This volcano reminds me of all the other disasters in recent years, of Chile, Haiti, New Orleans, Thailand, Sri Lanka… the list goes on. And it reminds me that the privileges and pleasures of travel go hand in hand with a responsibility to the people and the places that we travel to.
Our 15 minute hailstorm was an ever so small taste of the destruction that nature can wreak, and it made me realize just how small we really are, and how futile and vulnerable most of the security-net is that we try to pull up around ourselves. Without that net, how long would we hold? Because without all the 21st century shields we reinforce ourselves and our lives with, we are pretty much useless when it comes to surviving in raw natural circumstances. I had to think about “The Road” and wondered what would happen if we had a hailstorm like yesterday’s, but for, say 1 month. …Note to self, must remember to buy batteries and enough freeze-dried food for at least 4 weeks tomorrow!
…signing off now, just got my internet, home computer network, flat screen TV and media PC working again; and it’s time for some channel surfing with a chilled beer, an ordered in pizza, the pleasant hum of the air conditioning and the already fading notion of a different reality, and how it almost bit me…
Today is the book launch for the Hungarian language edition of Jewish Heritage Travel at the Budapest International Book Festival..... I'm interested in seeing who turns up for my presentation.
Yesterday I attended the opening -- hundreds filled the venue's main theater to hear a "conversation" with Amos Oz, and then see Oz receive the festival's Grand Prize from Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky.
Israel is the "country of honor" for the festival -- somehow my book (which doesn't touch Israel) is on the program as part of that!
The TKK Seafood Restaurant was not so crowded during our visit on the Saturday night. This time we found a table at the outdoor area where good atmosphere and cool sea breeze...beside that, we enjoyed the night view of Johor Straits...
The waitress was responsive and took our food order in less than five minutes. My wife did the order and the foods are served in 10 minutes...everything was so Express!
All the seafood were just average...it was different from the last time we visited this restaurant! Maybe the Chefs are different. The total damage was MYR140.00 for 4 adults and 1 child (included drinks). The price was reasonable especially with the good environment of the restaurant.
Cheng Hoon Teng Temple(N2 11.850 E102 14.814) And Kling Mosque(N2 11.806 E102 14.848) are located at the Goldsmith Street (Jalan Tukang Emas aka Jalan Tokong) of Malacca town.
These are the First Place Of Worship for the two religious in Malaysia, and of course they are the oldest too! You can read more about their histories below...
History of Cheng Hoon Teng Temple : "Built in 1645 by Kapitan Lee Wei King with building materials imported from China, Cheng Hoon Teng served as the main place of worship for the local Hoklo (Hokkien) community. The main hall was built by Kapitan Chan Ki Lock in 1704 and was rebuilt in 1801 by Kapitan China Chua Su Cheong, who contributed to the aesthetic and magnificent structural additions of the building. In 1962, then abbot Seck Kim Seng ordained Houn Jiyu-Kennett, a Zen nun from England and the future founder of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, at this temple. In 2003, Cheng Hoon Teng was awarded a UNESCO award for outstanding architectural restoration." Source from Wiki.
Cheng Hoon Teng Temple at Malacca
"The richly decorated Cheng Hoon Teng temple covers an area of 4,600 m2. Featuring a magnificent main gate along Jalan Tokong, the Cheng Hoon Teng temple consists of a complex of several prayer halls, with a large main prayer hall dedicated to the goddess of mercy, Kuan Yin. Additional smaller prayer quarters were added later. One of these is dedicated to the Taoist gods of wealth, longevity and propagation, while another houses ancestral tablets." Source from Wiki.
Entrance to Main prayer hall
The building was built without a single 'nail' or 'screw'. That's one of the masterpiece! There are many tourist visit this temple everyday, sometimes it can be really crowded...
Below are some photos of the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple...
The roof decoration of the temple
Candles
Dragon on the main door is common on Chinese Temple
I spend about an hour walking around and continue visit the next place of worship - Kling Mosque. The distance between this temple and mosque is only 120 meter.
"The Masjid Kampong Kling, built in 1748, is one of the oldest mosques in Malaysia."
"A courtyard behind the mosque contains a fountain-like pool for ablutions that is raised a few steps above ground level and circumambulated by a similarly raised and covered walkway. The commanding minaret was built entirely of masonry in contrast to the accompanying timber mosque. Likened to a Chinese pagoda or stupa form, this type of minaret has become characteristic of Malacca. Renaissance embellishments include the use of engaged columns as well as the arched windows and piping that traces them. Minarets are not traditional to Malay Islamic architecture, though they have become increasingly more prevalent and are useful in demarcating the mosque in dense urban areas. In 1868 the mosque and its minaret were enclosed by a high wall to protect it from the street."
"Chinese ceramic tiles were imported to adorn the roof, the floor and the lower walls of the mosque. Furthermore, decorative motifs such as those applied to the doors and windows and ornamentation such as the curved eaves terminating in sculptural finials on the roof are attributed to an Oriental influence, as is the rooftop ornament, or mastaka. Built during the Dutch occupation that followed the period of Portuguese rule, European touches reveal themselves in the mosque in such elements as rendered plaster on the internal masonry walls." Source from here.
I found the special of this mosque was the Pagoda at the right. According to some history articles, it was due to Dutch architecture. I was not enter the mosque because I saw many tourists looking at the mosque from outside and seems like not allow to entering the mosque. So I just snap a few photos of the building.
Even though I've never used the term "virtual Judaism," that's what the Jewish Quarterly in London titled my article that ran in December. It deals with festivals and other cultural developments, mainly in Poland. Read the full article at the web site by clicking HERE (you have to register, but registration is free).
Virtual Judaism
December 21, 2009b by Ruth Ellen Gruber
Representation is a moving target. Jewish culture is undergoing such changes that to pin it down to one representation is an illusion. Prof. Jonathan Webber, 1999
I’m a Jewish vegetarian atheist. Jonathan Ornstein, director, Jewish Community Center, Krakow, Poland, 2009
In the mid-1990s I began exploring a phenomenon that I described as ‘filling the Jewish space’ in Europe. Along with the efforts to revive Jewish communal life and reclaim and reassert Jewish identity in post-Holocaust, post-communist countries, I observed what I called a ‘Virtual Jewishness,’ or a ‘Virtual Jewish World,’ peopled by ‘Virtual Jews’ who create, perform, enact or engage with Jewish culture from an outsider perspective, often in the absence of local Jewish populations.
I wrote about non-Jewish klezmer bands, and Jewish museums and Jewish culture festivals organized by non-Jews for a primarily non-Jewish public. And I also described university Jewish studies programmes whose students were mostly Gentile, as well as the commercial exploitation of Jewish heritage, including the promotion of Jewish-themed tourism to synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and other sites of Jewish heritage where few if any Jews live today.
Although I discussed the ‘virtually Jewish’ phenomenon in a general European context, some of the most visible (and to some observers most troubling) manifestations were — and still are — observed in Poland, the historic heartland of Jewish life in Europe, where, as the scholar Jonathan Webber once noted, ‘the remarkable characteristic of anything to do with Jews…is its intensity.’
A project undertaken by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) provided a vivid statistical illustration of this. Between May 2000 and April 2001, it attempted to ‘map’ Jewish cultural activities in four European countries with small Jewish communities. The countries chosen — Poland, Sweden, Italy and Belgium — have a total Jewish population of well under 100,000 and had very different Jewish histories both before World War II and during and after the Shoah.
‘The results are simply astonishing, and as yet we have no idea what to make of them,’ Webber, who was an academic consultant on the project, reported in July 2001 at a conference in Budapest on Jewish identities in the post-communist era. ‘There is clearly no correlation between the considerable size of this cultural production and the percentage of Jews in a given total population of a particular country.’ It is almost, he added, as if ‘once one starts to have public Jewish culture, it simply continues to generate further events.’ Indeed, out of the four countries surveyed, Poland, with its tiny Jewish population (depending on how one defines ‘Jew,’ estimates vary from 3,000 to 20,000 or more in a total population of about 40 million), was by far the Jewish cultural champion, with 196 individual events and fully seven Jewish cultural festivals, including the annual Festival of Jewish culture in Krakow — the ‘largest and most important event’ recorded in the JPR survey.
The Festival — founded in 1988 by two young, non-Jewish intellectuals for a primarily non-Jewish public — takes place in Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter of Krakow, and nowhere, perhaps, has become more symbolic of the ‘virtually Jewish’ trends and the questions they raise than here.Centered on the most extensive surviving complex of Jewish built heritage in east-central Europe — synagogues, cemeteries, homes, marketplaces and other buildings and monuments, Kazimierz since the early 1990s has grown, and, indeed, been molded, into one of the major centers of Jewish tourism in Europe.
The post-communist development has seen the restoration of several synagogues and has brought new life and new business to what had long languished as the archetypical ‘Jewish ghost town.’ Even 15 years ago, much of Jewish Kazimierz was a derelict slum. At the same time this development has made the district one of the most prominent symbols of what has been called the marketing or ‘commodification’ of Jewish culture. The new Jewish-style cafes, boutiques, souvenir kitsch and constantly roving tour groups create an environment that has caused (and still causes) a deep sense of unease among some visitors, particularly as Krakow is only an hour’s drive from Auschwitz and often serves as a focal point for visits to the notorious death camp.
Writing about Kazimierz in 2006, for example, in a review of Jan T. Gross’s 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, the American journalist Ruth Franklin scorned what she termed the ‘much ballyhooed renaissance of Jewish culture in Poland, complete with sold-out klezmer festivals and a popular brand of spirits called “Kosher Vodka.” She wrote: ‘Half a dozen Jewish-themed hotels welcome visitors to Kazimierz, with names like “Alef” and “Ester” and “Klezmer Hois”; the “Eden” sports mezuzahs on every door and advertises ‘the only mikveh bath in Poland,’ as if it were a Jacuzzi.’ She goes on, ‘This grim carnival of Holocaust tourism and Western capital is neither a sign nor a symptom of a greater change in Polish society. It is evidence only of the Polish national schizophrenia on the subject of Jews. It is lovely to restore old buildings and to cherish a culture that has perished. But the celebration of the Jews of Poland cannot substitute for a genuine confrontation with the manner of their disappearance: when, where and by whom. There is no indication that the consumers of ‘Kosher Vodka’ are interested in engaging in such a reckoning any time soon.’
While it is hard to disagree with Franklin’s assertions, there is a bigger picture which she ignores. Poland does, indeed, have a certain schizophrenia towards its Jewish past but this schizophrenia has been demonstrated in loud and even lacerating public nationwide debates which is infinitely better, and ultimately more healthy, thatn the absolute denial and silence that existed until the 1980s.
‘When I began working in Poland in 1990, it was almost completely taboo to tell your friends that you are Jewish,’ Poland’s American-born chief rabbi Michael Schudrich told me recently. ‘Today, it is just a normal thing to say to almost anybody here in Poland. What was taboo only 20 years ago, is today a curiosity or interesting or [indicates] respect — and for some [it is] of no consequence at all.’ Likewise, in July 2006, Michael Steinlauf, an American academic expert on Yiddish culture and Polish-Jewish relations and the author of the book Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997), told me that to him, during the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, the Kazimierz district’s main square, Szeroka street, formed a symbolic ‘headquarters of the Diaspora’ thanks to the numerous cultural events and the many international Jewish artists, performers and fans who attended. I was speaking to him after he had enjoyed Friday night dinner with friends and family at one of the Szeroka street restaurants — a newly opened ‘mainstream’ restaurant, not one of the Jewish-style cafes. ‘We had a table for 11 and lit the candles,’ he told me. ‘The couple from the next table came over saying “Shalom Aleichem”. I’ve never done this anywhere else. It’s never been as easy to be a Jew than on Szeroka street the night before [the Festival’s outdoor final concert there].’
Krakow is home to several institutions promoting education on Jewish subjects. These include the Jewish studies centre at Jagiellonian University, founded in 1986, as well as the Jewish Culture Centre, established in 1993, as well as the Galicia Jewish Museum, founded by the late British photographer Chris Schwarz in 2004. The Jewish Culture Festival recently opened its own permanent culture and education centre called Cheder. These institutions, which offer varied programs of lectures, classes, concerts and workshops, are generally run by non-Jews to serve the general public, including tourists. But all benefit from the input of Jewish scholars and Jewish religious and cultural figures.
The number of Jews in Krakow remains tiny — somewhere between 200 and 400 depending on whom you talk to. But the Jewish community has raised its own profile in recent years, in part thanks to the formation of a Jewish youth group, Czulent, in 2004 and also to the opening in 2008 of a modern Jewish Community Centre. (Mainly funded by World Jewish Relief and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the JCC project had a somewhat high profile from the outset. It came about, remarkably, at the urging of Prince Charles, who had visited Krakow in 2002 and was moved by the plight of the poor and aging Jews of the city. Charles himself returned to Krakow last year for its inauguration; wearing a kippah he helped affix a mezuzah to the door.)
The JCC director, Jonathan Ornstein, is a 39-year-old New Yorker who made aliyah and then moved to Krakow about seven years ago to teach Hebrew at the Jagiellonian University. Ornstein contradicts the stereotype of the traditional Jew as portrayed in the old paintings and photographs that fill books, decorate the local Jewish-style cafes or are caricatured in the wooden figurines for sale in souvenir shops and craft markets. Knowledgeable but iconoclastic, and an avowed ‘Jewish vegetarian atheist,’ he took part in an ‘atheist pride’ march in Krakow this year, carrying a sign reading ‘Thank God I’m an atheist.’ Not only that, he created a Facebook group called ‘I want the Beastie Boys to play the XX Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow.’ Recently, I noted to Ornstein that that is increasingly little direct memory anymore in Poland of a time when the country was home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. For the student-age crowd that attends Jewish Culture Festival events or hangs out in the music pubs that have made Kazimierz the scene of trendy night life, what goes on today is what ‘Jewish’ means. Few of them can even remember a time before the Festival existed or before the district was a Jewish tourist attraction, with all the attendant commercialization. He agreed. Kazimierz, Ornstein said, was to his mind not the ‘former’ but the ‘present’ Jewish quarter of Krakow.
‘Nobody alive today has a good memory of Kazimierz when it was better than it is now,’ he said. ‘There was the war, and then after the war it was derelict for decades. Now, it’s the hippest place in the city. The whole ‘former’ thing is based on history, not living memory.’ The success of the Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow helped spark other Jewish festivals of various types around the country. In 2000, the JPR Mapping project identified seven of them. Today, the number is much greater: in 2009, I counted more than 20, including at least two Jewish film festivals. Some were one-day affairs, others spanned a weekend or longer. Some took place in towns with small Jewish communities, such as Wroclaw, Poznan and Gdansk. Others took place where no Jews live today. These included the sixth edition of a festival dedicated to the Yiddish author Shalom Asch, scheduled for early December in the central town of Kutno, the third edition of an annual Jewish culture festival in the village of Checiny, a Jewish theatre festival in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, the annual Jewish culture festival in Chmielnik, a Jewish culture festival in Bialystok, another in Szczekonciny, another in Przysucha, and so on. Festivals celebrating a diversity of cultures and religions, including Judaism, took place in Lodz, Wlodowa and Szczebrzeszyn.
‘I often joke that now the mayor of every small town feels obliged to make excuses [if] he/she has no Jewish Festival in his/her town,’ Anna Dodziuk, a psychotherapist who is also a Jewish activist and editor, told me. ‘To put it short: it is politically correct now to explore the Jewish history of the local communities, to commemorate Jews of a shtetl who perished in Holocaust, to celebrate somehow Jewish culture. So more and more Jews start to feel secure enough to be openly Jewish (or to be visible).’ In fact, some of the festivals had religious observance at their heart. One of these was a Shabbaton weekend held in October in Kielce. Most of Kielce’s 25,000 pre-war Jewish were killed in Treblinka, but the town is far better known for what happened after the war; it is infamous for the July 1946 pogrom that killed 42 Jews, an attack that formed the basis of Jan T. Gross’s book Fear.
The event brought prayers to the synagogue for the first time since the Holocaust — the building has been used as an archive for nearly 60 years. It also included lectures, workshops, exhibitions, concerts and film screenings. It was the latest in a series of Shabbaton programs in long-disused synagogues in Poland organized by Michael Traison, an observant Jewish America lawyer who has an office in Warsaw and has spent much of his time in Poland over the past 15 years.
Jews and Catholics took part in the event. ‘For the first time in my life I could celebrate the beginning of the Shabbat,’ a Catholic man wrote on the Shabbaton web site. ‘I could feel myself what I already knew theoretically, namely — what the Shabbat means for Jews who treat their faith seriously. Boi kala is also a challenge or a question on how I, a Christian man, treat my “shabbat” — Sunday. Thanks to Jews’ testimony of how they treat their holy day, I treat my one more seriously.’ The biggest Jewish Culture Festival outside Krakow was the sixth edition of the annual ‘Singer’s Warsaw’ festival in the Polish capital at the beginning of September. Singer’s Warsaw is sponsored by the secular Jewish Shalom organization. Shalom was founded in 1988 and is headed by the Yiddish singer Golda Tencer, now in her 60s, who for years was the star of Warsaw’s State Yiddish Theatre — her husband, Szymon Szurmiej, has been head of the Theatre since 1969.
The Shalom Foundation has sponsored events such as highschool essay competitions on Jewish topics, concerts, art exhibits, Jewish film festivals, a Jewish song competition, and the like. Outside of Poland, however, it is best known for the remarkable 1996 exhibition and book And I Still See Their Faces.This was a collection of more than 450 photographs of Polish Jews, ranging from formal studio portraits to faded snapshots of everyday life. They were culled from photographs sent in — mainly by non-Jewish Poles — from all over Poland. The number of photos sent in, about 8,000, more or less equals the number of self-identifying Jews living in Poland today.
The exhibit showed the broadest cross-section possible of Jews in pre-war Poland, orthodox and secular; assimilated and traditional. As such it turned somatic and other stereotypes (including that of Jews as victims) on their head. In the pictures, wrote Tencer in an introduction to the book, ‘the light falls on faces still free of terror and fear. We can see on them quiet reflection, the joy of family life, a smile that manifests belief in a friendly world.’
Paradoxically, much of this sensitivity is trumped by theatricality in the way that the Singer Festival is mounted.
The Festival’s stated aim, according to its web- site is ‘to reconstruct the prewar atmosphere here in order to present the annihilated world of the Polish Jews.’ Unlike in Krakow, where the entire Kazimierz district remains largest intact, almost all of downtown Warsaw, including the Jewish quarter and wartime Ghetto, was destroyed during the Second World War. The Singer festival takes place in and around one-block-long Prozna street, one of the only streets in Warsaw’s historic downtown Jewish district to have survived. During the festival, the dilapidated street is turned into a sort of stage, with old photographs of Polish Jews affixed to windows or hung from wires attached to the buildings. I admit that I haven’t attended the Singer Festival, but — from afar — the costumed, Renaissance Faire-style ‘performing the Jew’ that is described on the festival’s web site (and shown in posted pictures) makes me rather more uneasy than do many of the other manifestations of public Jewish culture:
Along Próžna Street we create Jewish cafés, quaint shops and workshops. We construct an old bookstore and a newspaper office in which [Isaac Bashevis] Singer worked in New York before the war. Each year we make a wine bar and a bakery. Everyone can come inside, and have a look at collected odds and ends in use at the beginning of the twentieth-century. There are lots of souvenirs to be bought from street vendors and many home-made tidbits to be tasted. Many characteristic figures appear in the streets during the festival: Hasidics, merchants, painters, shoemakers, tailors, printers, blacksmiths, barrel organ players, entertainers, florists. All of them contributed to making Warsaw uniquely colorful. During the festival, just as in the past, one can hear klezmer music, chants from synagogues, as well as well-known traditional Jewish songs, in the heart of the Polish capital. The past reality is revived by many exhibitions and plays, artists’ installations, scientific sessions, and meetings with writers and Jewish artists. Yiddish culture returns through prewar films, song and dance workshops, paper cutting, ceramics as well as Hebrew calligraphy, lectures and discussion groups.
My use of the term ‘Virtual’ deliberately played on the cyberspace concept of virtual worlds and virtual communities exiting on the Internet. Even back then, these included many, many Jewish websites. ‘People can enter, move around and engage in cyberspace virtual worlds without physically leaving their desks or quitting their “real world” identities,’ I wrote in my 2002 book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe:
Online, however, they can assume other identities, play other roles and be, or act as if they are, whoever they want. Like virtual worlds on the Internet, the various aspects of ‘Virtual Jewry’ are linked together and overlapping. One can approach them either passively, as a mere consumer, or ‘interactively,’ in a participatory manner, through, for example, performance and interpretation. They may be enriched by input from contemporary Jewish communal, intellectual, institutional, or religious sources, or they may be self-contained within totally non-Jewish contexts.
Virtually Jewish came out several years before the advent of social networking sites such as Facebook, and also well before what has been called a ‘Virtual Diaspora’ took root in the online world known as Second Life, where a ‘virtual synagogue’, Temple Beth Israel, was established there in 2006. One year later, reported 2Life Magazine, Second Life’s Jewish community was ‘more diverse in age, religious affiliation and […] geographical origin than any community could be in the real world, and it also includes many religious seekers who use Second Life as a tool to explore their own roots, many of them with little to no Jewish educational background.’
Second Life Judaism, it said, was ‘a unique intercultural dialogue within various streams of Judaism, within various Diasporas and Israel, within various age groups and with Jews and non-Jews. Judaism in Second Life is a mélange of different identities, in which age, origin, gender, and even religious affiliation are unimportant. It is an experiment with an uncertain outcome, but with obvious potential for new and creative ways to explore culture, heritage and identity.’
The ‘virtual diaspora’ in Second Life is symptomatic of an even broader Jewish presence in cyberspace which has grown exponentially in the past decade and which now includes many websites, blogs and Facebook groups that originate in Poland — among Jews and ‘virtual Jews’ alike. Among the most impressive and inclusive of these is the so-called ‘Virtual Shtetl,’ a web portal set up by the huge new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is under construction in Warsaw. Its aim is to be both an information portal as well as a sort of Jewish social networking site.
‘The “Virtual Shtetl” is a museum without barriers, a consequent extension of the real Museum,’ the website says. ‘Its main objective is to provide a unique social forum for everyone interested in Polish-Jewish life.’ The website includes constantly expanding databases of historic and contemporary photographs and archival information about specific towns all around Poland, as well as blog-like, frequently updated news items and announcements of Jewish interest related to Poland. In October alone there were more than 60 items posted. ‘Currently, our portal is a source of information but, in the future, it will also include an interactive system by which Internet users will interact with each other,’ the site says, in phrases that echo my own description of interaction in the flesh and blood ‘virtual Jewish world.’
The Virtual Shtetl, it says, ‘will create a link between Polish-Jewish history and the contemporary, multi-cultural world.’
These ‘virtual’ links will enhance links that already exist, creating a sort of clearing house for many activities that already take place. Indeed, the past decade already the Krakow Jewish Festival has included a ceremony at which the Israeli ambassador honors non-Jewish Poles who preserve, conserve and promote Jewish culture and memory.
It is all part of a process of ‘normalisation’ Dodziuk said. ‘I’m sure it has its influence on a Jewish perception of the situation in Poland.’ For local populations in many places, she said, ‘These pre-war Jewish inhabitants have become “our people,” part of our local tradition.’ Earlier this year, she added, on a trip with an Israel friend through eastern and southeastern Poland, she met many people in small towns who now considered the Jewish history of these one-times shtetls part and parcel of their own local past and personal memories. ‘It is,’ she said, ‘obviously much more and much deeper than political correctness.’
