Warsaw -- Useful (Downloadable) Jewish Travel Brochure

Panel on Jewish shtetl life from an open-air exhibition in Warsaw, 2008. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

A very useful illustrated Jewish travel guide to Warsaw is available from the Warsaw tourism office. You can get the illustrated brochure at tourist offices there or download a PDF of it by clicking HERE. (The link takes you to the English/Polish edition -- there is also an edition in Spanish and Italian.)

The brochure, which features a picture of the Nozyk synagogue on its cover, was edited by Jan Jagielski of the Jewish Historical Institute -- one of most knowledgeable experts on Warsaw's Jewish history and heritage sites. Jan's an old friend. He was a pioneer in the documentation of Jewish heritage in Poland, and back 1990 he co-wrote a more detailed guide to Jewish Warsaw that I used extensively in my own work and travels.

The new brochure, published last summer, includes photographs and descriptions of 28 sites around the city and also includes links for Jewish organizations and information on Jewish cultural events.

Brightly colored, it is one of a series of new brochures on various aspects of Warsaw, all using the same general format.

More on Jewish Heritage in Poland

A new post on Sam Gruber's Jewish monuments blog reminds me that I forgot to point out in my previous post the first comprehensive inventory of Jewish heritage sites in Poland that Sam oversaw in the mid-1990s for the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad.

Jan Jagielski, who will be speaking on Jewish cemeteries at the conference next week in Zdunska Wola, and Lena Bergman, now director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, directed and coordinated that survey, which was carried out through visits by about 40 researchers to nearly 1200 sites around the country.

I first met Jan when I lived in Warsaw in the early 1980s -- I was the correspondent then for United Press International. I got to know him as part of the so-called "Jewish Flying University," a semi-clandestine group of young Jews and non-Jews who were trying to teach themselves everything they could about Jewish culture, religion, traditions and even memory: things that essentially were taboo during most of the Communist era.