A Jewish culture festival held in a Polish city which was once a vibrant Jewish centre has brought mixed reactions from both locals and visitors.

Although many have welcomed the nine-day Krakow festival, some have seen it as a cynical marketing ploy making money from the Jewish history of the region.

Thousands of Poles and foreigners, Jews and non-Jews, rubbed shoulders in Krakow’s vibrant Kazimierz neighbourhood earlier this month, at the city’s fifteenth annual celebration of Jewish celebration culture.

Exhibits, films, dance workshops and other events celebrating Poland’s rich Jewish past reverberated around Kazimierz, just outside Krakow’s old city walls, for the event.

The festival was created in 1988 by Janusz Makuch, who like most Poles is a Roman Catholic, but who admits to having been deeply touched by Jewish culture.

"I wanted people to look deep inside themselves for their identity, just as I found myself through the Jewish culture," he told AFP.

Klezma Melodies

During the events the district’s synagogues, cafes, pubs and streets celebrated the richness of Jewish culture with concerts of sacred music and song.

"I wanted people to look deep inside themselves for their identity, just as I found myself through the Jewish culture" Janusz Makuch

Violinists and clarinettists got crowds tapping their feet to klezmer melodies, the traditional music of central Europe’s Ashkenazy Jews, and singers gave life to Yiddish tunes.

For the second year running, artist Marta Golab’s Jewish paper cuttings with Hebrew inscriptions, depicting the schtetl -- Jewish villages in central Europe -- were on show during the Jewish culture festival.

"My parents would often talk about their ties with their Jewish neighbours," she told AFP.

"I decided to learn more about their world and started by reading Isaac Bashevis Singer," a Polish Jewish writer and Nobel Literature prize winner whose works recount Jewish life in Poland.

KraKow’s Jewish Past

There has been a Jewish presence in the southern Polish city, once the royal capital, for some 700 years.

Kazimierz was founded specifically for Jews in the 1335 by King Casimir the Great, who gave Jews civil rights they did not have in many other countries in Europe, and guaranteed them a peaceful life.

But from a pre-war population of around 60,000, or about 25 percent of Krakow’s population, the Jewish community in the city was decimated by the Holocaust and numbered only around 5,900 in 1948.
After 30 years of communist rule, by 1978 the number had dwindled to a mere 600.

Today, Krakow’s Jewish community numbers some 120, almost belying the attempts made since the fall of communism in the 1980s to revive Kazimierz as a Jewish community.

But Szeroka Street, in the heart of Kazimierz, bustles with Jewish restaurants, cafes, galleries.

"We went to synagogue and the songs were extraordinary, the fervour unparalleled," said Beverly from Britain, who had come to Krakow with her two sisters, Maryline and Dolores, in search of their roots.

But not everyone was won over by the festival. "It’s a huge marketing operation which is making money off the backs of Jews," said Mark, a French national of Polish-Jewish origins.

"Once upon a time, we were accused of making money off the backs of the goyim (gentiles), now the tables have been turned," he said.