'My personal Atlantis' - Haaretz

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Mon., August 27, 2007 Elul 13, 5767

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'My personal Atlantis'

By Goel Pinto

Janusz Makuch is visibly moved when he talks about the opening show he is planning for next year's Festival of Jewish Culture, to be held in Krakow. He fantasizes and gesticulates like a performer acting out a play, and his English is peppered with Yiddish and Hebrew words. He repeats the phrase "with God's help" in a thick Polish accent and with a frequency typical of traditional Jewish Israelis.

For next year's festival, he envisions two enormous stages: One in Jerusalem on a slope adjoining the Old City walls, and another in the central square in Kazimierz, Krakow's old Jewish quarter. Giant screens will facilitate communication between both stages. The evening will open with the sounds of three cantors and a choir in Jerusalem singing to Krakow. Singers and cantors in Poland will respond.

"The entire evening will be a message to the world," he says. "The whole world will be able to view the dialogue, the bridge that will open between Poland and Israel, between Jew and non-Jew. It's a crazy concept, I know, but I will do it."

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Makuch left Israel a week ago after a comprehensive, three-week tour of the country, during which he searched for engaging cultural figures who could participate in the festival he directs. Next year's Jewish Culture Festival is especially important to him: Israel will celebrate its 60th anniversary and the festival will celebrate its 20th.

Makuch plays tapes of past festivals, showing 15,000 Polish participants standing in the Krakow square for eight continuous hours, from 6 P.M. to 2 A.M. They cheer, dance and sing to performances by the Israeli group Habreira Hativit, Israeli singer Hava Alberstein and ultra-Orthodox, American cantor Benzion Miller. The program of the most recent festival, held last June, lists 200 events, most of them musical in nature, but also including film screenings, lectures and tours.

"In my opinion, the seminars and lectures are the most important feature of the festival," he says. "Imagine a week-long workshop in an ancient synagogue in which two Jewish women from Warsaw teach 50 Polish children and their Catholic, Polish mothers about Passover, Rosh Hashanah and even Shavuot. As far as I am concerned, that is the goal: To teach children to maintain an open approach to the world in general and the Jewish world in particular in the hope that they will become pluralistic citizens when they grow up."

When asked about the relations between Jews and non-Jews in Poland, he says, "There is anti-Semitism everywhere and certainly in Poland as well. But Poland is actually more schizophrenic. On the one hand, there is blatant anti-Semitism while on the other, Poland makes more films, holds more festivals, and publishes more books with Jewish subjects than anywhere else in Europe. There is a sense that Poles are slowly but surely changing their minds - especially the younger generation. As they discover Polish history, they understand the enormous influence of Jewish culture and Jews on Poland. Personally, I am fully aware of the place in which I was born, 47 years ago, and I know exactly what took place here. By this, I don't only relate to death - the human tragedy and the distant memory - but mainly to the rich culture the Jews left behind."

Makuch successfully mounts the largest Jewish culture festival in Europe on a shoestring budget of $800,000, half of which comes from the Polish government and half from private donations. He describes himself as "a beggar who takes money from anyone willing to give it."

When Makuch speaks of "we," the Jews, as opposed to "them," the non-Jews, and employs the Hebrew word for soul, neshama, to express his real connection to Jewish culture, one might mistakenly assume that he is Jewish. But he comes from a Catholic family and is married to a Catholic who serves as the chief editor of a major publishing house in Poland.

"I do not do all this because of a sense of guilt," he clarifies. "I know of no Nazi past within my own family. My mother was born in Lublin and my father was born in a village I know nothing about. He fought alongside the Germans in the war but he never talked about it. I once asked him if he killed anyone in the war, and he answered, 'Yes. Apparently, yes.' And that's all. I am making a gesture on behalf of people without whom Central European history would not exist."

Makuch's first encounter with a Jew took place at the city library in his hometown when he was 14 years old. He met an elderly man who asked him, "Do you know that half the people in our city were Jews?" Makuch says, "I immediately began to interrogate him. Now I know that, at that moment, I began to discover my personal Atlantis."

Although he admits that he does not fully understand the source of his search for that lost continent, he began to meet with other young Poles with Jewish and non-Jewish roots. "We met at the university and began to learn Hebrew and Yiddish. I even attended synagogue every Friday and Saturday." While that may come as a surprise, it is even more surprising to note that he still attends synagogue on Jewish holidays, and "not only the important ones," but "even Purim."

"It's a bit strange, I know," he confesses with a smile and a shrug. "Judaism has become central to my life. I never asked why. The reason is not important to me. What is important to me is to be a part of it."

At one point, he even seriously considered converting. Only after a lengthy conversation with his friend, Benzion Miller, who explained that everyone must stay loyal to the religion of his birth and that one need not convert to feel a connection to the Jewish people, did Makuch abandon the idea.

His connection to Judaism led him and his friends, who were active in underground organizations before the fall of the Soviet bloc, to organize the first Festival of Jewish Culture in 1988. "It took place in a theater auditorium with only 100 seats. I didn't sleep a wink the night before because I was so afraid that nobody would come," he recalls. "But to our surprise, the auditorium was packed, and some people even came wearing skullcaps. It was hard to imagine that, one year before the fall of Communism, people would wear skullcaps on their heads and declare, 'We are Jews. We are not afraid. We are proud of it.'"

After the fall of the Communist regime, Makuch contacted a German journalist, who became the festivals' artistic director, and invited non-Jewish, German artists to perform in the festival. The New York Times wrote, "Just look what's happening in Krakow - Germans are teaching Poles about Jewish culture."

"That article hurt me, but, thank God, I understood that the Jewish journalist who wrote it was right," Makuch says. "How do I, in Poland, dare establish a festival that glorifies Jewish cultural history and invite non-Jewish artists?

"Then I understood that I have to change my way of thinking. Fortunately, I understood that I have to use my own neshama to do good things. But - make no mistake about it - I don't want to change the world, only myself. Rabbi Nachman [of Breslov] said if you want to change the world you must begin with yourself."

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