Shalom Warsaw

Ten years after the first exhibition of And I Can Still See Their Faces at the Zachęta Gallery, hundreds of photographs sent to the Shalom Foundation will open the third Warsaw Singer Festival, which is on September 5-11 in Warsaw.

The famous collection of old photos, which received an outstanding review in the New York Times back in 1996 and has been touring worldwide since then, will rekindle the city's atmosphere from before the Second World War.

"We feel the heirs of that immense Jewish culture and literature which went up in the flames of the crematoriums. Now we would like Warsaw to resemble the city [before the war], when a third of the population spoke Yiddish. Ul. Próżna and the vicinity of Plac Grzybowski are the last enclave of the Jewish district. Now we will have street signs in Yiddish here, shops, and a bakery. We will have Vorworts, a Jewish newspaper, coming out. Hundreds of small events and exhibitions will take place there," says Gołda Tencer, director of the festival and the Shalom Foundation.

The festival has also gathered a number of famous names from abroad including clarinet player Giora Feidman, Mike Burstyn with his play Comedian, Adrienne Cooper and Zalmen Mlotek from the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater from New York, which will perform Ghetto Tango, and Judy Bressler with Three Generations of Jewish Cabaret. Jazz celebrity Urszula Dudziak will sing Jewish standards and Adam Makowicz will perform a piano concert. The National Jewish Theater will prepare the premiere of The Dream of Goldfaden, and Szymon Szurmiej, the director of the theater, will host the closing gala concert, The Hits of Jewish Warsaw.

For further info: http://www.shalom.org.pl/