If Poland is one giant Jewish graveyard, then Krakow is the gravestone

Text and Photos by Gedalia Guttentag

Amid Jewish Krakow’s faded glory, the fabled past seems deceptively close. With hundreds of years of Torah scholarship and piety in the background, you’d think it was just around the next corner

If Poland is one giant Jewish graveyard, then Krakow is the gravestone.

Walk around the Kazimierz district — known to Jews as Kuzhmir — and the cobblestones seem to echo with centuries of vibrant Jewish life. In the twilight reflecting gorgeously off the area’s old peach and pistachio-hued buildings, it’s easy to imagine a group of chassidim striding to daven. Listen hard, your mind tells you as you stand in the old fortress shul that dominates one end of the district, and you might hear the clink of coins rattling into the ornate tzedakah box still embedded in the wall. Step outside one of the restored Jewish shopfronts that surround the main square, and you might just see a boy emerge, clutching a warm challah for Shabbos.

But it’s all an illusion. Old Jewish Krakow feels like a movie set — and as I round a corner to discover a camera crew filming a scene with a bearded rabbi sitting at a restaurant table — I discover that sometimes, it quite literally is just that.

Amid the strange fascination with dead Jews that grips much of Eastern Europe, gentrification has turned Kuzhmir into a trendy restaurant district patronized by local and foreign tourists.

In parallel — moving with wonder through the land of their grandparents — are frum Jews from all over the world. They’ve come to see the Rema shul, Sarah Schenirer’s legendary Bais Yaakov, and the compact cemetery that is the final resting place of hundreds of years of Torah giants. They’ve come to experience “Kruka,” as Poland’s second city was known in Yiddish.

Except it’s no longer really Kruka. It’s a husk stripped of its kernel, a body without a soul. Its shuls are museums, or sites that charge a fine ransom in zloty just to daven Maariv.

In an area liberally adorned with graffiti, a few words sum up the pervasive sense of destruction. Stenciled on the side of one towering old shul is a plaintive cry in Yiddish, the epitaph to a vanished world: “Vi zennen di Yidden?”

Indeed, where are the Jews?