By Culture.pl
The podcast currently has 26 episodes available.
The largest synagogue ever built in Poland.
The Great Synagogue was built between 1876 and 1878 according to a design by Leandro Marconi. Warsaw’s largest Jewish temple housed an impressive 2,200 seats.
The grand opening took place on 26th September 1878 and was attended by many guests, including the city authorities. The sermon, in Polish, was delivered by Isaac Cylkow, rabbi and translator of the Hebrew Bible into Polish.
The Great Synagogue was quickly recognised as one of the landmarks of the capital. It was the only synagogue that was marked on the general plans of Warsaw, alongside palaces, churches and other characteristic points of the city, and was recommended by tourist guides to the capital.
The synagogue was located on the border of the Jewish quarter. Sermons were preached there in Polish, and attended mainly by wealthy Jews who were assimilated into Polish culture.
However, it was enough to take a few steps away from the temple to find yourself at the heart of the Yiddish-speaking centre of Warsaw.
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
Further reading:
• Landscape with a Synagogue: The (Un-)Lost Tradition of Polish Synagogue Architecture // on Culture.pl
• Hebrew Works Differently: An Interview with Author & Translator Julia Fiedorczuk // on Culture.pl
• 10 Places You Will Never Visit in Warsaw // on Culture.pl
• Heaven’s Gates: Wooden Synagogues in the Territories of the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth // book profile on Culture.pl
• 9 Illustrious Synagogues You Can Visit in Poland // on Culture.pl
• 8 Remarkable Yiddish Books from Poland // on Culture.pl
• From ‘Last Sunday’ to ‘Last Shabbos’: Poland’s Legendary Jewish Tangos// on Culture.pl • The Lost World of Yiddish Films in Poland // on Culture.pl
• The Rise & Fall of Polish Song // on Culture.pl
An address where the Jewish and Polish worlds met and intermingled.
Pasaż Simonsa (Simons’ Passage) owes its name to the German industrialist and building’s owner Albert Simons. The building complex consisted of two sections. The first part started being used in 1903, and construction as a whole was completed in 1906.
The first building was in the shape of an arc that ran from Długa 50 to Nalewki 2. It was a grandiose five-storey edifice with a large number of windows, which was very modern for its time. The second one, built deep into Nalewki Street, was given the address Nalewki 2a.
Today, this place is part of Krasiński Garden, which was enlarged after the war. Number 2a was, as the writer Moshe Zonshayn put it, ‘a Jewish kingdom’, as it was here that many Jewish political (but also cultural and sporting) organisations found their headquarters at various times.
From the beginning, the Pasaż building served a variety of functions; it was a shopping mall, an office building and a hotel. There were also numerous shops offering a wide range of goods and services.
The building was located in the heart of Jewish Warsaw, where one of its most important and best known thoroughfares and its symbol, Nalewki Street, began (today a section of the former Nalewki is called Stare Nalewki).
Among the Jewish organisations that operated at this address, it is worth mentioning the sports clubs: the Zionist Makabi and the socialist Morgnsztern. They not only had their offices here, but also gyms for various sporting sections. The Warsaw branches of both clubs had more than a thousand members by the end of the 1930s.
The future hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Michał Klepfisz, father of the contemporary American-Jewish poet Irena Klepfisz, was active in Morgnsztern as a student.
The building was destroyed as early as September 1939 and was located outside the ghetto walls. During the Warsaw Uprising, an insurgent redoubt was located in the building at 2a Nalewki Street. On 31st August 1944, the building was bombed and around 300 people died under the rubble. After the war, the ruins were demolished.
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
• Be Strong and Brave: Jews, Sport, Warsaw // book profile on Culture.pl
• On Their Own Terms: The Warsaw Ghetto & Its Heroic Uprising // on Culture.pl
• Unseen Soundwalks: Warsaw Rising ‘44 // the previous season of this audiowalk
• 8 Remarkable Yiddish Books from Poland // on Culture.pl
• From ‘Last Sunday’ to ‘Last Shabbos’: Poland’s Legendary Jewish Tangos// on Culture.pl
• The Lost World of Yiddish Films in Poland // on Culture.pl
• The Rise & Fall of Polish Song // on Culture.pl
One of the most important locations in Yiddish theatre.
Michał Weichert, a lawyer, but also an avant-garde director and theatre theoretician, lived at 8a Długa Street from the mid-1930s. A figure of great merit for the history of Yiddish and Polish theatre, he founded the Young Theatre (Yung-Teater).
Originally hailing from Galicia, the Polish territory partitioned by Austria-Hungary, Weichert settled in Warsaw only in 1918, as a mature man of 28. He came to the capital after a stay in Berlin, where he studied under the supervision of the famous director Max Reinhardt, a theatre reformer.
In Warsaw, he had an intensive career as a publisher and director, as well as a pedagogue. From the early 1920s, Weichert organised experimental acting studios in the capital, the first Jewish acting schools of their kind. Their graduates formed the core of the Yung-Teater in 1932, which Weichert was director of until 1939.
One of the seats of the Yung-Teater was located nearby, at 19 Długa Street, almost opposite 26 Długa Street, another building that is part of this series of Unseen. LINK TO 01-Dluga-26
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
Further reading:
• Jewish Theatre in Poland: Fragments of an Illustrious History // on Culture.pl
• Jung Jidysz // bio on Culture.pl
• Where is Poland? // a multimedia guide about the era 1795-1918 when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned by three neighbouring empires
• 8 Remarkable Yiddish Books from Poland // on Culture.pl
• From ‘Last Sunday’ to ‘Last Shabbos’: Poland’s Legendary Jewish Tangos// on Culture.pl
• The Lost World of Yiddish Films in Poland // on Culture.pl
• The Rise & Fall of Polish Song // on Culture.pl
The worldwide embassy for Yiddish literature.
In the Jewish cultural memory, 13 Tłomackie Street is the address of the worldwide embassy for Yiddish literature, a kind of British Council or Goethe Institute, as well as the Ministry of Diasporic Culture and the Cultural Parliament in one.
This ‘global address’, as the journalist Jecheskiel Najman called it, became a symbol of pre-war cultural life, its disputes and debates, as well as its ups and downs. It appears in almost every memoir about pre-war Jewish literary Warsaw.
Among others, the Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote a series of articles about the place. Of course, they did not mention the address itself, but the institution that operated here: Fareyn fun Yidishe Literatn un Zhurnalistn, or the Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists.
The union was founded in 1916 and initially had no headquarters. In June 1918, it moved to 11 Tłomackie Street, and then a few months later from October 1918 until May 1938, it functioned at the legendary address of 13 Tłomackie Street.
In 1927, Tłomackie 13 became the headquarters of the Warsaw section of the Jewish PEN-Club, an international organisation of writers, which continues to operate to this day.
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
Further reading:
• Jung Jidysz // bio on Culture.pl
• Isaac Bashevis Singer // bio on Culture.pl
• Sholem Asch // bio on Culture.pl
• 8 Remarkable Yiddish Books from Poland // on Culture.pl
• The Unlikely Revival & Sudden End of Yiddish Literature in Poland // on Culture.pl
• From ‘Last Sunday’ to ‘Last Shabbos’: Poland’s Legendary Jewish Tangos// on Culture.pl
• The Lost World of Yiddish Films in Poland // on Culture.pl
• The Rise & Fall of Polish Song // on Culture.pl
The editorial offices of Haynt, the largest Yiddish daily newspaper of the Interwar period.
The first issue of the Zionist Haynt daily was published on 22nd January 1908, while the last issue came out on 22nd September 1939, shortly before the capitulation of Warsaw.
Around 300 issues were published annually from Sunday to Friday, both in Warsaw as well as in other local versions. All of them were edited for 31 years from the same place – the editorial office on Chłodna Street.
The creators of Haynt focused on their mass readership. In order to keep them reading, they not only offered fresh vividly-edited information, but the most famous names of the time. By 1911, the magazine had gained so much popularity that its circulation reached 100,000 copies.
Despite the economic and socio-political difficulties of the 1930s, the editorial office functioned until the capital was occupied by the Nazi Germans. The magazine’s archives were destroyed around that time and the printing equipment was confiscated and taken to Germany.
The building itself survived the war, although it was burnt down. It was demolished in 1947.
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
Further reading:
• 8 Remarkable Yiddish Books from Poland // on Culture.pl
• Lost World: Polish Jews – Photographs from 1918-1939 // book profile on Culture.pl
• The Most Unusual Jewish Publication of Interwar Poland // on Culture.pl
• From ‘Last Sunday’ to ‘Last Shabbos’: Poland’s Legendary Jewish Tangos// on Culture.pl
• The Lost World of Yiddish Films in Poland // on Culture.pl
• The Rise & Fall of Polish Song // on Culture.pl
Where the elites of the Interwar Jewish stage spent time together.
Before World War II, the building on Leszno 2 housed the headquarters of the Union of Jewish Stage Artists (Yidisher Artistn Fareyn). It was founded in 1919 to support Jewish directors and actors and to defend their rights.
On the face of the building was a clock created by the watchmaker Epstein. All the residents of the neighbourhood adjusted their timepieces to the clock, which worked perfectly until the bombing of Warsaw in 1939.
The address also housed a number of cinemas as well as the luxurious Bar Central, run by the renowned restaurateur Izaak Gertner.
Gertner’s restaurant was closed down at the beginning of 1940. In its place, a year later, the Sztuka Café was established – the largest and most famous café in the Warsaw Ghetto.
It was a venue available to a small group of wealthy and polonised elites. The cream of Polish-Jewish entertainment performed at the Sztuka, including Andrzej Włast, Władysław Szpilman, Pola Braun, Wiera Gran and Marysia Ajzensztadt, a young artist dubbed the ‘nightingale of the ghetto’.
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
Further reading:
• Artists of the Warsaw Ghetto // on Culture.pl
• ‘Tango Milonga’: The Remarkable Journey of a Polish Interwar Hit // the story of Andrzej Włast’s most influential song, on Culture.pl
• Władysław Szpilman // bio on Culture.pl
• Wiera Gran // bio on Culture.pl
• Marysia Ajzensztadt // bio on Culture.pl
• 8 Remarkable Yiddish Books from Poland // on Culture.pl
• From ‘Last Sunday’ to ‘Last Shabbos’: Poland’s Legendary Jewish Tangos// on Culture.pl
• The Lost World of Yiddish Films in Poland // on Culture.pl
• The Rise & Fall of Polish Song // on Culture.pl
The home of Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, the father of modern Yiddish literature.
The now non-existent Ceglana 1 is an address of almost mythical proportions in the history of Jewish culture thanks to Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, the father of modern Yiddish literature, who lived at this address.
The Peretz House on Ceglana Street became a real cultural institution. Publishers, musicians, artists, theatre types, locals and visitors ‘from all four corners of the world’, as Peretz’s close friend, Gershon Lewin, used to say. He claimed that ‘being in Warsaw and not visiting Peretz was like being in Rome and not seeing the Pope’.
Shabbat gatherings at Peretz’s house in Ceglana Street have gone down in Jewish cultural history as the stuff of legend.
Peretz was born in 1852 in Zamość. He was a lawyer by profession and ran a private practice in his hometown. In 1887, for political reasons, he lost his licence granted by the tsarist authorities for supporting the Polish national cause as well as socialism.
He made his Yiddish debut in 1888 (he had previously published in Hebrew), and this date marks a milestone in the history of Yiddish literature.
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
Further reading:
• Yitskhok Leybush Peretz // bio on Culture.pl
• Greetings from Zamość: A Literary Guide to the ‘Perfect’ City // on Culture.pl
• 8 Remarkable Yiddish Books from Poland // on Culture.pl
• From ‘Last Sunday’ to ‘Last Shabbos’: Poland’s Legendary Jewish Tangos// on Culture.pl
• The Lost World of Yiddish Films in Poland // on Culture.pl
• The Rise & Fall of Polish Song // on Culture.pl
One of the most renowned addresses of pre-war Jewish Warsaw.
Długa 26 housed the socialist Bund party headquarters from 1936 onwards, as well as the capital’s first school with Yiddish as the language of instruction. Other political organisations based here included the Masada Zionist youth union.
Alter Kacyzne had his professional photography studio in one of the three courtyards the building had before the war. Born in Vilnius, he came to Warsaw in 1910. Kacyzne was a writer, journalist and publisher, as well as co-author of the screenplay for The Dybbuk, perhaps the best-known and most celebrated film in Yiddish produced in Interwar Poland.
However, he was probably best-known for being a much sought-after photographer. Apart from taking snapshots of Warsaw’s bohemian scene, he also documented the everyday life and the poverty of Jewish shtetls in Interwar Poland and beyond, sending his photos to New York to be published in ‘The Forward’, or ‘Forverts’, the long-running Yiddish newspaper.
Israel Joshua Singer, the older brother of writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, also worked at Kacyzne’s workshop for while, and they co-founded a literary journal together which was published up until 1939.
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
Further reading:
• Sto Lat, ‘Dybbuk’! Celebrating & Commemorating the Classic Yiddish Play – Online // on Culture.pl
• Possession: 100 Years of ‘The Dybbuk’ // on Culture.pl
• Alter Kacyzne // bio on Wikipedia.org
• Isaac Bashevis Singer // bio on Culture.pl
• 8 Remarkable Yiddish Books from Poland // on Culture.pl
• From ‘Last Sunday’ to ‘Last Shabbos’: Poland’s Legendary Jewish Tangos// on Culture.pl
• The Lost World of Yiddish Films in Poland // on Culture.pl
• The Rise & Fall of Polish Song // on Culture.pl
It was in this vicinity that one of the most daring operations of the Home Army resistance took place – the assassination of the SS commander and head of police for the Warsaw district, Franz Kutschera.
In the autumn of 1943, SS-Brigadeführer Franz Kutschera was transferred to Warsaw with the aim of pacifying Polish resistance to the Nazi occupation.
As soon as he took up his post, the number of street arrests and public executions grew rapidly, and Kutschera was soon nicknamed the “Butcher of Warsaw”. As a result, he also became a wanted target by the Polish underground, which started to track him with the intention of gunning him down.
After a failed attempt on Kutschera’s life in the final days of January 1944, another attempt was made in the early hours of the 1st of February. This time, the plan worked… Kutschera’s limousine was ambushed and he was shot by a gunshot to the head.
The next day, in retaliation for the killing, the Nazis rounded up and shot 100 Poles near the site, while a further 200 were killed in what was left of the Jewish Ghetto. The people of Warsaw were also told they would have to pay a fine… to the tune of 100 million złoty.
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
The Church of St. Stanisław serves as just one reminder of the brutal massacre of the civilian population of the Wola district, in line with Hitler’s orders to raze Warsaw to the ground and destroy the city completely…
Following the outbreak of the Uprising, Germans stationed in Warsaw started to indiscriminately kill Poles living in the city, both insurgents as well as civilians.
However, it is in the western district of Wola where the most brutal atrocities occurred. In an effort to use terror tactics against the Poles, around 50,000 civilians were killed within a week.
The church was one of the first transit camps. Civilian prisoners were rounded up here as early as the 2nd of August, but it wasn’t until the 5th, after the storming of the Home Army of the Gęsiówka prison, that the local population was rounded up inside the church for initial selection by the Nazis.
Conditions in the church were dire – there was no water or food, and illness spread like wildfire. Around 400 prisoners, including three priests, were shot outside the church and burned.
How to listen:
Unseen is available as a downloadable podcast, although it is best experienced through the Echoes geolocative storytelling app available for iOS and Android. After loading the app, search for soundwalks in Warsaw and you’ll find Unseen.
The podcast currently has 26 episodes available.