Professor Dr. Jozef A. Gicrowski, historian, organizer and Director of the Research Center, first formulatcd the idca of the Center for Jewish Culturc. The projccl gathcred many supporlcrs from Poland and abroad. Mark E. Talisman made a great effort to secure financial support, and the Polish-American Joint Commission gencrously undertook to Sponsor the project. The Center for Jewish Culturc’s main tasks are to help physically preserve the Jewish heritage and to make it more accessible to all. it will provide a continuous scrics of cultural events, run a library, prepare and distribute publications, promote rescarch on Kazimierz, support restoration efforts, and arrange heritage tour itineraries. It will individually help the descendents of Cracow’s Jcws to conncct to their past by assisting in gcncological searches. In short, the Center for Jewish Culture will do all it can to ensure that the cxpcricncc of Kazimierz is an cncountcr with the prcscnce of Jewish culture. Two principles are basic to the Center’s work. The first goes under the motlo L’dor v’dor, Hebrcw for “from gcncration to generation.” It means that we havc a duty to transmit the message of the Jewish heritage, which is so closely intertwined with the Polish heritage. The second is that the lesson of Auschwitz-Birkenau can be underslood only if we know about the richness of Jewish life before the Holocaust. We must chcrish the memory of what was lost, and must cclcbratc what survived. After an absence of thirty years, the Polish Jewish writer Jerzy Kosinski came to Kazimierz from America in 1988, direetly after visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. This is what he said of bis encounter with Kazimierz: □ 1 saw a place that was so alive, as alive as Cracow, because Kazimierz is a part of Cracow. □ For mc, Kazimierz is the most important address in history. O In Kazimierz we have an opportunity to look at Jewish history face to face, and to look deeper into ourselves. □ The 45-minute drive from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Kazimierz in Cracow is a very important and a symbolic distance. That distance should be remembered. □ It is the distance between the four years of the terrible darkness of the Holocaust and the many ccnturics during which there was an unimaginable eruplion of life in all its expressions and of culture in all its forms. —
