I study Jewish Studies at McGill, and I am particularly fascinated with the Yiddish language and with the Eastern European culture that spoke it. In fact, I am writing this report from an Airbnb in Warsaw, where I am currently participating in a Yiddish intensive program. Though this program is not a part of my internship, I would like to thank you—the Trustee of the Gary Leslie Ruby Estate who created the Fay Gilbert Ruby Arts Internship Award—for allowing me to participate in it. Without this award, I would not be in Europe, and there would be no such intensive program monetarily accessible to me anywhere else. Thank you.Â
In my application essay, I described how I grew up with tales of Poland: Poland as a home of holiness, miracles, death, and violence. This was my Jewish cultural memory of Poland; Poland was a place in the past tense. Someday, I hope to use my Jewish Studies degree to work in Jewish archives, libraries, and memory institutions. I hope to contribute to Jewish cultural memory and to augment it with what I have learned at McGill—and now, with what I have learned at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow. After all, Poland was the birthplace and home of Ashkenazi culture for 900 years; its role in our history—good and bad—should not be misconstrued or minimized.
The Galicia Jewish Museum’s primary exhibition, “Traces of Memory,” uses photographs taken from around Polish Galicia in order to educate visitors on the changing role and presence of Jewish communities in the region, before, during, and after the Holocaust. Located in the Jewish quarter of Krakow—an area of town littered with strange traces of former and current Jewish life—the Galicia Jewish Museum teaches visitors to identify the conspicuous absence of Jewish culture in places where Jewish communities had once thrived. In essence, it seeks to read Jewish culture back into the spaces Jews once inhabited, and to return a consciousness of Jewish life to the current residents of these spaces.
Working at the museum, I learned a great deal about how to teach and restore cultural memory. I observed many tours given by my colleagues and saw how they interacted with each group and met their level of knowledge. I also learned about modern Poland’s relationship to its history and to its modern Jewish community.
My responsibilities were extremely varied: writing Jewish trivia questions, cleaning a grave, researching and summarizing, finding free images, proofreading. One recurring and somewhat tedious task was scraping exhibit descriptions from the wall in order to prepare the museum for a new exhibition. My last week in Krakow was the Jewish Cultural Festival, which was hectic and stressful, but also wonderful and fun.
There was a lot of downtime between tasks, which was sometimes distressing. One challenge I encountered during my internship was that I often had to self-motivate or find tasks.
I spent much of the time with other interns—who came from Germany, Austria, Poland, the US, and Ukraine. We sat in the museum’s cafe, working on tasks with my laptop, waiting for a task to come in, or teaching each other. One intern taught me the basics of Polish, while I taught other interns to read in Yiddish. Many of the interns were not Jewish, and I would often teach them about Jewish culture.Â
Some of the most important aspects of my experience were only tangentially related to the internship itself. For example, I constantly explored the city with other interns. We visited Jewish cemeteries, Jewish sites and memorials; we saw historical monuments and cultural institutions. Krakow is a beautiful city with lots of great pierogi places, and I really fell in love with it. Another experience of personal importance to me was that I was able to visit the town in which my great-grandfather was born. I saw the overgrown and toppled hillside cemetery where my family is most-likely buried.
In Krakow, I was able to put face to the stories of Jewish history, and within it, my own family history. Poland will never again be an imaginary place, never again be an abstract. I can see where Jewish communities lived, and where they died, and where they are being reborn. This knowledge, this reality, is of vital importance to a scholar of Yiddish, of Jewish history, and of cultural memory.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I have had the time of my life, and I will never forget it.
