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(LLJ) JUDA1CA FOUNDATION WLLJ)) B- Krakow, 17. Meiselsa Street B-- Ü c/o 61-315 Kraköw, 12, Batorego Street, tel. (12) 33-70-58, fax (0-48-12) 34-45-93 Ü Bank Account: BPH S.A. IV O/Krak6w, 1, Pijarska Street. No 323415-711980-132-3 The Center for Jewish Culture in Kazimierz, Cracow UNESCO has a vcry exclusive list that includcs the monuments and places that are truly precious to the common heritage of mankind. Five are listed from Poland.* One of them is Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Cracow, designated in 1978. Founded by King Kazimierz (Casimir) the Great in 1335 as a separate town, in the course of the ages it became part of Cracow. Kazimierz, like much of Cracow, has many associations with the past, but its Claim to an eternal place in the Creative history of humanity rests on what the Jews did here. Through the centuries they formed a community and a culture whose brilliant achicvements could not be erased by tragedy, remaining in literature, in art, in music, in the religious and philosophical legacy of a pcople. It was in Kazimierz that the famous talmudic scholar and philosopher Rabbi Moses Isserles, known as Remuh, had his academy. Today his grave and his synagogue are places of pilgrimage. On the eve of World War 11 the Jews here numbered 70,000, 25% of Cracow’s population. Their lifc as a flourishing community ended in the Holocaust, but their memory remains in the hcarts of dcsccndcnts around the world, in the very stones and bricks of this place. The Center for Jewish Culture in Kazimierz, Cracow, is one result of the revival of intcrest in Jewish history and culture in Poland that began in the mid-1980’s. Cracow’s very lively annual Festival of Jewish Culture, already quite an international attraction after only three years, is another. And the Research Center on Jewish History and Culture in Poland, a department of Jagiellonian University established in 1986, helps to channcl and expand this growing interest through research, publications and education. • The others arc Cracow’s Old City, the ancicnt sah minc in Wieliczk, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, and the Bialowicza primcval forcst.
