The Jewish Culture Festival

The Jewish Cultural Festival is quickly approaching! This year it will run from 26 June to 4 July. Artists from Europe, Israel and the USA will show the sometimes surprising face of Jewish art and allow all participants to experience it personally. For a week synagogues, pubs, galleries, schools and squares in Kazimierz will display Jewish culture at its best.

This will be the 20th edition of this unusual Festival. The first was held in 1988 and consisted of an informal Festival accompanying an academic session dedicated to the meeting of Polish and Jewish cultures. Since then, the Festival has taken place annually and is one of the biggest events of this type in the world. For a week, the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz becomes a place for encounters with Jewish culture. There are venues for concerts of klezmer and Hasidic music, synagogue singing, films, performances, lectures. Various workshops give people the opportunity to learn Hasidic dances, techniques of traditional Jewish paper-cutting, Hebrew calligraphy and the secrets of Jewish cuisine.



Thousands of people from around the world come to Krakow each year to attend the Festival's over one hundred events which range from concerts to lectures and performances and many other cultural occasions. These culminate in the final outdoor concert, Shalom on Szeroka, which draws huge crowds of guests, Krakow residents, Jews, non-Jews, fans of the Festival and passers-by.

The Jewish Cultural Festival Website in English