Feb 13, 2025 | Business, Culture Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers We cannot do what we do without your support A restaurant in the Polish town of Pabianice has been named as the best Neapolitan pizzeria in the world by an Italian association devoted to the famous dish from Naples The True Neapolitan Pizza Association (Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana AVPN) each year names one pizzeria as the best in the world following assessment by expert pizza makers from the association itself which counts around 1,100 restaurants as members This year’s contest was won by Zielona Górka which is run by husband-and-wife team Jędrzej Lewandowski and Lilianna Lewandwoska It is only the second time a restaurant outside Naples itself has won the award (after Leggera Pizza Napoletana in São Paulo “I never expected such a distinction in my life,” Lewandowski told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) “It is huge publicity for the restaurant that I run with my wife but also for Pabianice and the entire country.” decided to switch careers and open a restaurant in Pabianice a town of around 65,000 inhabitants located near Łódź but over time they focused mainly on pizza with Lewandowski spending two years in his garage perfecting his pizza-making skills A pizzeria in Poland has been ranked among the 100 best in the world for the first time Zielona Górka, run by a husband-and-wife team in the town of Pabianice, was also rated the 20th best pizzeria in Europe https://t.co/irsT1RkB3c — Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 20, 2024 Zielona Górka was last year named among the 50 best pizzerias in Europe and the 100 best in the world in a ranking by 50 Top Pizza an Italy-based organisation that makes anonymous tasting visits to pizzerias “Our success in the ranking has given us recognition we have guests from all over Poland and abroad,” Lewandowski told PAP Poland is developing a growing reputation as a culinary destination. The number of restaurants in the country to hold a prestigious Michelin star doubled last year in the latest version of the guide Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications , , Karol Nawrocki even suggested that the state security services were involved in creating the scandal , , The 1,200 square metre national symbol was unfurled on the beach in Międzyzdroje , , The proportion of Poles saying the US has a positive influence on the world has also fallen to its lowest recorded level Apr 30, 2025 | , , , That response will include “large Polish and NATO exercises in Poland” Apr 29, 2025 | , , , Those employed in Poland work on average the third-longest hours in the European Union Apr 28, 2025 | , , , , Westinghouse and Bechtel were first chosen in 2022 as partners on the 192 billion zloty ($51 billion) project please consider helping us to continue and expand it [email protected] Copyright © 2025 Notes From Poland | Design jurko studio | Code by 2sides.pl Senior Research Fellow at the Global Europe Centre ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Weronika Strzyżyńska is currently studying journalism at Goldsmiths as a Scott Trust Bursary recipient She  has written on issues immigration and Brexit for New Statesman and Prospect Agnieszka Wądołowska is managing editor of Notes from Poland She has previously worked for Gazeta.pl and Tokfm.pl and contributed to Gazeta Wyborcza ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland and assistant professor of history at the Pedagogical University of Krakow The Independent and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Stanley Bill is the founder and editor-at-large of Notes from Poland.He is also Senior Lecturer in Polish Studies and Director of the Polish Studies Programme at the University of Cambridge Stanley has spent more than ten years living in Poland He founded Notes from Poland in 2014 as a blog dedicated to personal impressions cultural analysis and political commentary He is committed to the promotion of deeper knowledge and understanding of Poland He is the Chair of the Board of the Notes from Poland Foundation ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Professor of European Studies at Oxford University ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Professor at the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Executive Director of Taube Family Foundation ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Science ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR including 1,100 pizza makers from around 50 countries the voting process took place from November 22 through December 5 ever expected to be given such an award,” Jędrzej Lewandowski told the Polish news media but also a great boost for Pabianice and the area.” The AVPN award is just the latest honor for Zielona Górka over the past year The restaurant also made 50 Top Pizza’s list of Europe’s best pizzerias for 2024 97 in 50 Top Pizza’s ranking of the best on the planet.“Success in the world’s rankings has made us a household name,” Lewandowski said “We get clients from all over Poland and from abroad Recently we had an American customer from New York He lived in Krakow but came to Pabianice on the train twice to eat our pizza That is why I feel such great responsibility for what we do.” Pizza News Featured Learn how to describe the purpose of the image (opens in a new tab) Leave empty if the image is purely decorative Sep 20, 2024 | Business, Culture, Society A pizzeria in the Polish town of Pabianice has been ranked among the 100 best pizza places in the world has previously featured among Europe’s 50 best But now it has for the first time broken into the annual global ranking compiled by 50 Top Pizza It has rated Zielona Górka – which is run by husband-and-wife team Jędrzej Lewandowski and Lilianna Lewandwoska (pictured above) and specialises in Neapolitan-style pizza – the 97th best pizzeria in the world and 20th best in Europe and a welcoming atmosphere are the hallmarks of this must-visit venue,” wrote 50 Top Pizza in its description of the restaurant decided to switch careers and open a restaurant Lewandowski learned the art of pizza making at the True Neapolitan Pizza Association (AVPN) and the restaurant holds an AVPN licence confirming that its methods are in line with tradition After being named this month among the world’s 100 best Lewandowski told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that he and his wife “did not even dream of being among such giants” Zielona Górka was the only pizzeria in Poland to make it into either the global or European ranking this year The number one spot in the world was taken by Una Pizza Napoletana but fourth spot was taken by The Pizza Bar On 38th in Tokyo The Zielona Górka menu features nearly 40 types of pizza including a wide selection of vegetarian and vegan options The pizzas at the restaurant cost between 40 and 60 zloty (€9.35 to €14) each Gazeta Wyborcza notes that the restaurant has created a buzz in Poland with customers sometimes travelling dozens of kilometres to eat there Pabianice is a town of around 65,000 inhabitants located near Łódź Poland is developing a growing reputation as a culinary destination. The number of restaurants in the country to hold a prestigious Michelin star doubled this year in the latest version of the guide Three further restaurants in Poland have been awarded the prestigious Michelin star They include Gdańsk's first Michelin-starred restaurant as well as one in a village overlooking the Tatra mountains https://t.co/tHqzzuMAUE — Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) June 21, 2024 Main image credit: Marcin Stepien / Agencja Wyborcza.pl Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist [email protected] admitted he was unaware of the anonymous evaluation process and was surprised by the result the pizzeria ranked 20th among the best Neapolitan pizzerias in Europe The top spot in the ranking went to Una Pizza Napoletana from New York with Italian pizzerias Diego Vitagliano and I Masanielli – Francesco Martucci taking the second place The top ten also included pizzerias from Japan, Spain, and England, according to the Polish state news agency PAP Lewandowski emphasized that achieving 97th place among global giants is a significant accomplishment and a great surprise He described the awards ceremony in Naples as a unique event attended by representatives from the world's best pizzerias Pizzeria Zielona Górka was evaluated anonymously by judges who travel the world Lewandowski noted that each award is an opportunity for learning and observing pizza masters He stressed that success is the result of passion and honesty in making pizza and that the 97th place is just the beginning of their journey Marie Midler Gross created this Life Tributes page to make it easy to share your memories Made with love by funeralOne Jun 18, 2024 | Law, Politics, Society A hospital has been fined for refusing to provide a legal abortion in the first such case since the government recently introduced a requirement for publicly funded medical centres to offer such procedures Health minister Izabela Leszczyna announced on Monday that the Pabianice Medical Centre was fined 550,000 zloty (€126,300) She revealed that audit proceedings regarding two other medical facilities are also in the “final stages” and that they are also likely to be penalised Na Pabianickie Centrum Medyczne nałożono 550 tys. złotych kary za odmowę legalnej aborcji – przekazała ministra zdrowia Izabela Leszczyna. Placówka nie zgadza się z karą i w wydanym oświadczeniu zapowiada, że będzie walczyć.https://t.co/HgNnGM6Jiz — tvn24 (@tvn24) June 18, 2024 Poland has one of Europe’s strictest abortion laws with pregnancy only allowed to be terminated in two cases: if it threatens the mother’s life or health or if it is the result of a criminal act (such as rape) only 161 legal abortions took place in the country Yet even in cases where termination of pregnancy is legally permitted, women can face the additional hurdle of the so-called “conscience clause” that allows doctors to refuse to perform an abortion if it contradicts their beliefs Poland’s new government that took office in December has pledged to liberalise the abortion law. But progress on that front has been slow due to disagreements between members of the ruling coalition which ranges from the left to centre right Parliament has voted for bills aimed at ending Poland's near-total abortion ban to proceed to for further legislative work However, they still face a number of hurdles, including differences within the ruling coalition over how far to liberalise the law https://t.co/IIcMnvk0jZ — Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) April 12, 2024 last month the health ministry issued a regulation stipulating that healthcare providers who receive public funds for providing obstetrics and gynaecology are obliged to offer abortions Hospitals that fail to do so can be fined up to 2% of the value of their contract with the National Health Fund (NFZ) the body that finances public healthcare in Poland the NFZ can terminate its contract with the hospital the NFZ does not carry out general checks on whether hospitals offer abortions as required it does carry out inspections at facilities that have been subject to a complaint from a patient regarding failure to offer legally required procedures the first such inspection was concluded on 13 June and resulted in the fine being issued against the Pabianice Medical Centre Prosecutors investigating the death of a pregnant woman that sparked protests against Poland’s near-total abortion ban have concluded it was unrelated to the abortion law She died in hospital after doctors waited for her foetus to die before removing it.https://t.co/jq7cwZsM0Q — Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) November 16, 2023 the management of that facility has refuted the claim that they failed to offer legal abortions The hospital says it will appeal against the fine and will take legal action against the NFZ itself “We perform abortions in our hospital,” its director The doctor refused her an abortion because she did not present a set of documents confirming the prerequisites for a legal procedure.” the hospital reiterated that it “did not deny the patient the right to an abortion it only indicated that it was necessary for the patient to submit the final diagnostic results” Its spokeswoman also told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that “none of the doctors of the gynaecological and obstetrics department of the hospital used at that time or currently apply the so-called conscience clause” Szpital odmówił aborcji i dostał karę. Teraz chce pozwać NFZ#PAPInformacjehttps://t.co/axXmSOGej2 — PAP (@PAPinformacje) June 18, 2024 another of the hospitals under scrutiny for refusing abortions is the Institute of the Polish Mother’s Health Centre in Łódź told the newspaper that the issue related to “complaints by two patients [who] did not have the documentation indicating the need for the procedure Main image credit: Jakub Wlodek / Agencja Wyborcza.pl [email protected] Our weekly email is chockful of interesting and relevant insights into Jewish history Reaching into your ancestral history in order to refine your present identity My mother’s death brought to life a disturbing realization Although she will always be the precious woman I call “Mommy,” I never really knew her I spoke about how she survived the Lodz Ghetto But I lacked a sense of who my mother was as a person – her dreams I carried the same longing about my father With parents who spoke little about their painful pasts I had resigned myself to a constant undercurrent of disconnection In the deafening quiet that followed shivah I felt a growing hunger to connect to my parents and to their families I contacted anyone who had known my parents prior to and after the Holocaust I searched the Israeli online directory and phoned anyone who had the same last names as my parents my father’s uncle fled Europe with his wife and seven daughters; the eldest had an infant My excited phone call to Judy led to many other finds I entered a wondrous new world of names and faces e-mailed and Skyped cousins I never knew existed a short month ago traveling back and forth through generations I’ve joined the growing population of those hooked on genealogy Most genealogy addicts start out curious about their family history As they find the missing pieces to their ancestry puzzle With the plethora of genealogy web sites offering data going back hundreds of years family researchers can conduct their detective work without having to leave the house But what’s really pulling them back in time professor of sociology at Rutgers University and author of Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy individuals who are busy reconstructing their family’s past are not merely keeping track of their ancestral history; they’re refining their identity an original member of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) and author of From Generation to Generation: How to Trace Your Jewish Genealogy and Family History (first published in 1980) “I didn’t only want to know my ancestors’ names; I wanted to know who they were,” says Kurzweil He not only discovered hundreds of relatives Fourteen out of the twenty-one people in the photo were murdered during the Holocaust Like much of the youth in the late sixties Kurzweil aligned himself with the “counterculture,” the Beatles and Eastern religions and surprised his audience when he urged the college students to look into their Judaism He knew there had to be more to his heritage than what he had learned in Hebrew school “I wanted to learn why my ancestors died for this,” he says he entered the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York City Public Library the Polish shtetl where his father was raised about which he had heard dozens of captivating stories growing up His initial search brought up genealogical gold in the form of a Memorial Book of Dobromil (Memorial books or Yizkor books recollect Jewish communities from Eastern Europe and were typically created after the Holocaust by societies of immigrants from the same town narratives and lists of Holocaust victims.) Kurzweil’s doubts about finding a face he would recognize while perusing the book shattered as he sat stunned staring at a group shot of Dobromil businessmen taken in 1925 Avraham Abisch; the ancestor he had been named for stared back at him “I looked at his eyes and saw mine,” says Kurzweil “‘You have a past,’ [the photo] said and you can discover it if you want.’ The discovery opened up the door to a search that has taken me many years and that He contacted every family member he knew; he made phone calls paid visits – all the while asking questions He sent out questionnaires with return envelopes He scoured phone directories as well as census and immigration records After seven years of grueling detective work he had built a substantial family tree including great-great-great-grandparents with close to 500 of their descendants ”My search for information about my family history was really Kurzweil found himself steadily drawn into the world of his ancestors “I felt as if I was living in a different place and time,” he says Newspapers interested him less than the historical accounts of Galicia He collected old photographs of his ancestors in the shtetl Behind many of the people posing in photographs When he learned that these books were the Talmud The feeling only intensified while researching his mother’s family history A childhood memory relayed by his mother’s Slovakian cousin forever transformed how Kurzweil would see himself ‘This is no way for the einekel (grandchild) of the Stropkover Rebbe to act!’” Kurzweil asked him who this rebbe was “I only know they said it every time.” was his mother’s great-great-grandfather and a descendant of the Shelah HaKadosh (Rabbi Yeshaya Horowitz) the revered sixteenth-century scholar of kabbalah going to public schools and knowing more about Buddha than the Torah,” says Kurzweil “I didn’t know it when I began my research my search for information about my family history was really I’m venturing into the lives of the family I never knew; with each photo and story told I’ve come to appreciate my ancestors’ daily struggles with poverty anti-Semitism and the lure of assimilation I find myself longing to let each of them know how deeply I care Postcard sent from Hersh (Hersz) Yosef Jakubowicz while searching for his son Michoel (Mulush) My sisters and I have begun emptying out our parents’ home I’ve requested to keep an old postcard that my father had held onto until his death It was written by his father sometime in the early 1940s in the midst of rising Nazi terror when he had lost contact with his son my father fled east from the Polish town of Sieradz The night before the Germans planned to execute him he scaled a wall and ran toward Soviet-occupied Poland The Russians arrested him and sent him to a Siberian labor camp My grandfather’s postcard was a desperate plea to help find his son Not long after sending it to an acquaintance I asked one of my recently discovered cousins to translate my zaide’s German words on the postcard I beg you to make inquiries concerning my son Mulush Jakubowicz as to where he is and when you find him tell him to write to me I ask you again to employ all possible means because it is weighing on us very much as we have had no mail from him for the last six months write to me his [address??] as we live not far away My heart broke for my zaide; I wish I could have comforted him I am keeping the Torah that he held onto so tightly Faces of past relatives lay before me on my desk I stare at the photo of my great-great-bubby It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her face sons and daughters cast off their Jewish observance I wonder if my alte bubby knows I’ve made my way back to her and to the life she cherished The Talmud states that the departed are aware of what happens in this world my newfound second cousin in Jerusalem tells me I’m now speaking regularly to their great- and great-great eineklach (grandchildren) in America and I hear there may be some in Wales and Berlin too a “shanah tovah” for the first time in our lives It’s hard to describe the excitement one feels when uncovering family One genealogy enthusiast likens sharing one’s findings with friends to showing family movies – “it’s of limited interest to others.” Another posits that there are two kinds of people in the world: “those who love genealogy and those who could care less.” Kurzweil says that although over the years his children humored his obsession they’ve also learned to respect and appreciate his search “If a teacher mentioned the Shelah HaKadosh guess who[m] we talked about today?’ They feel a connection and great pride.” Before the advent of high technology and the mass data-basing of public records tracing one’s ancestry took a lot more time says the Internet has revolutionized how one goes about conducting family research “What used to take a trip to Bayonne is now available in minutes on your computer.” In 1995 the International Review of Jewish Genealogy and author of an array of books and guides on the subject took advantage of online databases to research his mother’s side of the family He now has over 1,750 relatives on his family tree JewishGen boasts more than 20 million records and provides a myriad of resources and tools to assist those researching their Jewish ancestry thousands are accessing family histories on Internet databases every day One of the most popular of these databases is JewishGen a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York Starting out in 1987 as an online bulletin board a place for people to network and share their research findings JewishGen has grown to more than 700 volunteers throughout the world who actively contribute to its growing number of databases JewishGen offers its services free of charge stating that its mission is solely to encourage the preservation of Jewish heritage “There’s a huge interest in what we do,” says Avraham Groll director of business operations for JewishGen it is a hobby that has turned into something more meaningful it’s a way of preserving the memory of those killed We believe this is something people should be able to access.” as individuals on several continents research their roots together exchanging information about towns and surnames online As my mother reunites with the family she missed for a lifetime I’m continuing to learn about the lives that led to mine I feel them rooting for me; I’ve restored the broken link to Torah I too am grateful – my newly discovered ancestors have given me a spiritual anchor A longer version of this article originally appeared in Jewish Action Winter 2014 Bayla Sheva Brenner is senior writer in the OU Communications and Marketing Department Thank you for signing up for the aish.com free newsletter The first is when he was born and the second is the day United States troops liberated him and thousands of other Jewish people during what's known as the Dachau Death March on May 1 The Nazis came to his hometown when he was about 10 While he has vivid memories about the Nazi tanks and vehicles rolling into town comprehend what was about to befall on his family "My parents had a better inclination of what could happen," Adler says they wouldn't share it with the kids so as not to instill fear I can understand that now being a parent and a grandparent." Adler and his family were forced into a ghetto in Pabianice They lived in tight quarters and were fed very little food why [being] Jewish put me in such a situation as the ghetto," Adler says about being singled out for his faith the remaining members of Adler's family went to the Lodz Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland That would be the last time he saw his sisters a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp He was the sole member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust and came to the United States as a war orphan in 1946 Adler says his relationship with Judaism has become more cultural than religious "I'm very proud of my Jewish heritage," Adler says I'm not what you would consider very religious What I believe is that God created man and man created evil We are responsible for how we treat or mistreat each other." spoke with Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner Highlights from the conversation are below On being greeted by Jewish prisoners when he arrived at Auschwitz: "Their job was primarily to take away whatever meager belongings one brought along with them 'When you march -- meaning for the selection process -- look strong if you want to live You just arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and selection camp.' That's how we found out where we had arrived." On how he kept going despite "hopeless situations": "The barbed wire [fences] surrounding Auschwitz-Birkenau had electricity So when people found out what happened to their loved ones who went to the left and were killed in the gas chambers they [killed themselves] You would find bodies hanging from those barbed wires daily Even though you found yourself in a hopeless and helpless situation one thing the Nazis couldn't take away from you was what was in your mind even after I was separated from my father and was sent to the Dachau camp 'You have to go on and be strong if you want to see your loved ones again.' You had to have something positive in your mind to keep you going I didn't know at the time they all perished in the Holocaust." On the march from Dachau concentration camp: "We marched during daylight hours and at night we would sleep in the woods But they would take prisoners to the other side of the woods [The prisoners] were given shovels to dig a big ditch they were ordered to line up around the perimeter of the ditch and they were shot to death." What he remembers about the day he was liberated: tanks and trucks arrived and when they saw us and stopped -- we didn't know who they were I had never seen an American military vehicle One of the officers got on the hood of a jeep with a bullhorn You are all free.' I wouldn't have made it one more day .. When a CPR News staffer greeter Adler in the lobby with "Hi Jack," Adler responded "Don't say 'hi-jack' at the airport." Adler says humor has been his greatest coping mechanism: We had ugly names for them as they marched us to and from work on a daily basis and watched us doing work Colorado Postcards are snapshots of our colorful state in sound. They give brief insights into our people and places, our flora and fauna, and our past and present, from every corner of Colorado. Listen now. © 2025 Colorado Public Radio. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy. Michoel Jakubowicz photographed at his bar mitzvah in Sieradz From left to right: The bar mitzvah boy’s mother for whom the author is named; the bar mitzvah boy; sister Chaya Sarah; brother David Leibish (standing); Chaya Sarah’s husband Gabriel Henechowicz; younger sister Ita Miriam and father Everyone except Michoel and David was murdered by the Nazis My mother’s death brought to life a disturbing realization Although she will always be the precious woman I call “Mommy,” I never really knew her But I lacked a sense of who my mother was as a person—her dreams my father’s uncle fled Europe with his wife and seven daughters; the eldest had an infant I’ve joined the growing population of those hooked on genealogy But what’s really pulling them back in time individuals who are busy reconstructing their family’s past are not merely keeping track of their ancestral history; they’re refining their identity Chaim Shaul (Saul) Kurzweil is sitting on the ground second from right.Photo courtesy of Arthur Kurzweil Kurzweil aligned himself with the “counterculture,” the Beatles and Eastern religions “I wanted to learn why my ancestors died for this,” he says narratives and lists of Holocaust victims.) Kurzweil’s doubts about finding a face he would recognize while perusing the book shattered as he sat stunned “I looked at his eyes and saw mine,” says Kurzweil and you can discover it if you want.’ The discovery opened up the door to a search that has taken me many years and that the entire experience of Jewish history is paid visits—all the while asking questions “I felt as if I was living in a different place and time,” he says The feeling only intensified while researching his mother’s family history A childhood memory relayed by his mother’s Slovakian cousin forever transformed how Kurzweil would see himself ‘This is no way for the einekel of the Stropkover Rebbe to act!’” Kurzweil asked him who this rebbe was going to public schools and knowing more about Buddha than the Torah,” says Kurzweil “I didn’t know it when I began my research the search for one’s ancestors offers a gratifying sense of connection and validation that we can’t experience with our living relatives who are secular Learning about the challenges of assimilation in our families’ pasts also drives home how our return to Torah impacts Jewish history and the Jewish future Sieradz survivors in a DP camp in Landsberg Note the memorial plaque in the background dedicated to those murdered in the Polish town of Sieradz David Leibish Jakubowicz; his younger brother Michoel the author’s mother.Photos courtesy of Bayla Sheva Brenner Silver familiarized herself with public archives and records finding clues to her great-grandparents’ countries of residence via their American descendants’ death and draft board records “There was something very comforting to me in connecting to my roots,” says Silver “I found little bits and pieces that led me to people in the family I never knew I don’t have a big close family; they became my family every little bit [of family] I discover is like a gem.” At the next family reunion in 1997 at a hotel in Skokie Silver asked relative after relative if he or she knew where her great-grandparents were buried Her cousin Jack handed her a piece of paper; it included the name of the cemetery the words “Shavel-Yanover” and her great-grandfather’s grave number She shared her find with the Orthodox rabbi with whom she spent that Shabbat who told her that Shavel and Yanover are names of Lithuanian towns He offered to take her to the cemetery the following day she stood before her great-grandfather’s gravestone in the Shavel-Yanover section of the cemetery and recited Tehillim “We felt like we had a foot in another world.” Michael Salzbank’s interest in mining his family’s history began while sitting shivah for his mother His journey to the past gleaned valuable life lessons from an ancestor he barely knew Rummaging through old files and papers in his parents’ attic unearthed a treasure trove of genealogical information left behind by his maternal grandfather newspaper clippings and a handwritten timeline of Freiman’s life “He clearly wrote and saved all of this for this moment in time,” says Salzbank “when a descendant would come and want to learn about his ancestry.” Salzbank found a letter dated 1919 that his grandfather had written to his relatives shortly after he arrived in the US from Russia strongly urging them to keep in close touch with cousins and to help one another He sifted through self-published newsletters from the 1940s From yellowed newspaper clippings he read about his grandfather’s fight to help his son who had contracted polio His grandfather gave up his profession in order to learn physiotherapy and opened up clinics to help others affected by the disease Salzbank’s grandfather not only saved every letter he received dates of family yahrtzeits and locations of burial sites were written on scrap paper The information-laden suitcase started him on his journey to creating a family tree that has grown to 2,800 names He’s fulfilling his grandfather’s wish to keep in close touch with family even if it means keeping them alive in memory My sisters and I have begun emptying out our parents’ home I’ve requested to keep an old postcard that my father had held onto until his death My grandfather’s postcard was a desperate plea to help find his son I asked one of my recently discovered cousins to translate my zaide’s German words on the postcard “I didn’t know it when I began my research The gemara in Masechet Berachot states that the departed are aware of what happens in this world I’m now speaking regularly to their great- and great-great eineklach (grandchildren) in America a “shanah tovah” for the first time in our lives It’s hard to describe the excitement one feels when uncovering family Salzbank likens sharing one’s findings with friends to showing family movies—“it’s of limited interest to others.” Silver posits that there are two kinds of people in the world: “those who love genealogy and those who could care less.” Kurzweil says that although over the years his children humored his obsession they’ve also learned to respect and appreciate his search “If a teacher mentioned the Shelah HaKadosh guess who[m] we talked about today?’ They feel a connection and great pride.” Experienced tour guide and Yeshiva University Alumnus Yitzchak Schwartz walks students through the footsteps of their grandparents in the inspection halls of Ellis Island as part of YU’s Family Discovery Club’s first event The Family Discovery Club is a club for students at YU interested in researching their personal family histories is now available in minutes on your computer.” In 1995 took advantage of online databases to research his mother’s side of the family a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York “There’s a huge interest in what we do,” says Avraham Groll it’s a way of preserving the memory of those killed We believe this is something people should be able to access.” Some join JewishGen’s Special Interest Groups (SIG) has grown to over eighty societies worldwide Many devotees get to meet face-to-face at the Annual International Conference on Jewish Geneology coordinated by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) an umbrella organization launched in the 1980s featured over a hundred concurrent lectures and welcomed close to 1,400 participants who has been to all but two throughout his long genealogical career Some are actually turning genealogy into a profession Sarina Roffe is a member of Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish community and the owner of Sephardic Genealogical Journeys which specializes in helping members of her community research their family history Currently working on a book about Rabbi Jacob S chief rabbi of the Syrian Sephardic community in Brooklyn Roffe was able to trace his ancestry back twenty generations to before the Spanish Inquisition You try to put all the pieces back to form a complete picture,” says Roffe has spoken at Jewish genealogical conferences and writes extensively on Sephardic lineage We go to a shivah [house] and the first thing they do is ask When was that person born?’ I just pull out the family tree and all the information is there Knowing where you come from is one of the most important things.” When questioning the validity of his grandfather’s assertion that they were descendants of Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev a revered Chassidic leader in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland why don’t you go find the proof?” Lewis was off and running exchanged e-mails with others researching the same family names and towns and read Arthur Kurzweil’s book on genealogy four times including research that “strongly suggests a family connection to the Berditchever Rebbe,” he found a cousin who traced his family back to the 1700s in Latvia he’s still smitten with genealogical research and wants to share the excitement “I realized that the entire experience of Jewish history is This is as personal as it gets,” says Lewis who launched the club with Moshe Wasserman “the only other person at YU who is just as obsessed with Jewish family history as I am.” Thus far which includes students from Stern College for Women has held well-attended events geared to teach students how to research one’s family history The group visited Ellis Island and initiated a “Preserve a Shul Day” on the Lower East Side where members photographed memorial plaques in the long-standing shuls for JewishGen.org to transcribe and feature as a search option “You have to know who your family is,” says Lewis who is still very active in his own search “Students see people denying the Holocaust and wondering about the role of Israel in the world They’re realizing that they don’t really know about their Jewish past.” When speaking to YU’s Family Discovery Club at its inaugural event this past March mashgiach ruchani in Yeshiva University’s Irving I emphasized that knowing where one comes from is actually a mitzvah in the Torah understand the years of generation after generation Ask your father and he will relate it to you and your elders and they will tell you” (32:7) The Ramban on Parashat Va’etchanan says our link to Hashem Himself is through the awe-inspiring chain that goes back to Har Sinai As long as we preserve that chain and understand our place in it I’m continuing to learn about the lives that led to mine I feel them rooting for me; I’ve restored the broken link to Torah I too am grateful—my newly discovered ancestors have given me a spiritual anchor Jack Adler never talked about his childhood.  Jack had a thick Polish accent. But so did most of his friends — all of whom had forged new lives for themselves just north of Chicago in the small suburb of Skokie they were just my parents' friends," Eli said "I knew there was something called the Holocaust and I knew the reason that I didn't have any grandparents or aunts or uncles on (my dad's) side was because of the Holocaust," he added "But that's as deep as he went into explaining it."  Now 89 years old and living in Denver "Surviving Skokie," Jack now travels with his son to discuss his childhood in Poland the rise of antisemitism in the 1930s and the danger it still poses today.  "Surviving Skokie," which came out in 2015, will be playing at The Lyric in Fort Collins at 6:30 p.m. Monday A special Q&A with Eli and Jack Adler will follow the showing goes into his father's experiences during the Holocaust the life he later created in America and the antisemitism that followed him here Skokie — where Eli and his sister were raised — was small.  It was also home to a large Jewish population including many Holocaust survivors like Eli's father the small Chicago suburb became the center of a legal battle by American Nazis who wanted to host a march through the village's streets Eli was grown and the family had left Illinois He recalls bringing it up to his father later in life after Jack had started talking more about his experiences in the Holocaust More: These World War II veterans are finally opening up about their lives at war when Nazi soldiers rode into Pabianice and changed everything he'd been unaware of Adolf Hitler's rise to power Within hours of the Nazis occupying Pabianice notices were posted throughout the city.  could no longer step outside of their homes without Star of David patches on their clothing Jewish children could no longer attend public schools Jewish houses of worship — including the synagogue the Adlers frequented every Friday Pabianice's Jewish residents were pushed into a ghetto forced to stay within its confines and obey a strict curfew.  grandfather and older brother died of disease His grandmother would later be sent off to the Chełmno extermination camp Pesca and Ester — were moved to another Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Łódź.  They would stay there for two years until one day the four were "packed like sardines into a can" in cattle rail cars they had no idea where they were being taken.  Jack recalls being greeted by Nazi officers.  His sisters were separated from them shortly after Jack and Cemach would be shuffled between Germany's Dachau concentration camp and one of its subsidiaries As the war drew to a close in the spring of 1945 and the Nazi party started clearing out its concentration camps, Jack — then at Dachau — was forced to walk in a "death march" toward the Austrian border.  More: 'Unfortunately, I remember': Holocaust survivors recall pain of family separation Prisoners were forced to march all day and sleep in the woods at night Some groups in the march were ordered to dig their own graves before they were shot and pushed in.  just like the rumble of machinery he'd heard when Nazis in trucks and Jeeps occupied his hometown six years earlier tanks and Jeeps coming toward he and the other prisoners one of the soldiers inside crawled on top of a Jeep grabbed a bullhorn and spoke into it.  "I wouldn't have made it one more day," Jack said.  he found out through a Red Cross survey that he was the only survivor from his family His father had died in Kaufering just two weeks before the war ended.  had been killed in one of Auschwitz's gas chambers had been taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she Jack was sent to America and placed in a foster home in Chicago got his high school diploma and graduated college.  He got married and had two children — Eli lives in San Francisco and Paula is in Denver. He has four grandchildren and one great-grandchild Jack said he didn't tell his kids much about the Holocaust because he didn't want to scare them when they could truly comprehend the atrocities.  "I didn't want to instill fear or anger or hatred," he said.  After Eli read an article about a Holocaust museum being opened in Skokie in 2009 he started thinking more seriously about telling his father's story through a documentary With a background as a cameraman — "an Emmy award-winning cameraman!" his father boasted but he is" — Eli started compiling interviews for the film.  Eli was able to wheedle Jack into a visit to Pabianice — something he'd never shown any interest in before but to actually be where the stories began was profound," Eli said.  Eli and Jack have shown "Surviving Skokie" around the world and spoken about its significance to various groups One showing that sticks out in Eli's mind happened in Charlottesville after a May 2017 "Unite the Right" rally that brought white supremacists marching through the college town "It's a university town and many of the students who came to see ("Surviving Skokie") had no idea what happened in Skokie," Eli said "They were astonished that something that happened 40 years earlier in Skokie was happening again in Charlottesville." "It seems to me like the story is more relevant today than when I set out to make it," Eli added of the current political climate and a rise of antisemitic messages across the country More: CSU president Tony Frank condemns 'Nazi' propaganda on campus "What happened to the Jews during the Holocaust is just one aspect of the story," Eli said.  "It's really about intolerance and hate, regardless of the group of people who are the target," he added "I want people to walk away from this film realizing that we have to be respectful of our fellow human beings Do unto others like you'd like others to do unto you," he said VW Sell More EVs, Yet Makes a Lot Less Money Ram Reveals Revamped, Stylish Sub-$50K 1500 Express In rural Poland, an unidentified motorist celebrated Easter by launching a third-generation Suzuki Swift off a roundabout and into a building owned by a church The jump was captured by a security camera Polish news site Remiza published the 20-second video on its official Twitter account The resolution is on par with what you'd expect from a security camera four-door Swift approaching the roundabout way too fast about eight seconds into the clip The driver seemingly tried to make an evasive maneuver He went straight where the road didn't We’re unable to load this content right now View directly on 𝕏 which was luckily sloped rather than perpendicular to the road and it pelted the Suzuki into the air at an angle we thought was only possible in Grand Theft Auto allowing the local fire department to calculate he got about 23 feet off the ground and flew for 209 feet until he hit a building that's part of a church It was sturdy enough to end his impromptu flight Suzuki didn't design the Swift to fly so its landing was about as rough as it sounds First responders used the Jaws of Life to cut open the hatchback and extract the 41-year-old driver Remiza wrote police officers said the man smelled like alcohol though the results of his breathalyzer test haven't been published cut-up Swift was hauled away to the nearest junkyard Video ID:c419839c-0a9c-3482-8d89-19fc0dd78857 LLC and respective content providers on this website Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website the Jackson School of Geosciences inducted 5 geoscience legends into its Hall of Distinction at a ceremony at the new AT&T Conference Center on the university campus While many of the 16 previous recipients made their mark in industry four of this year’s recipients achieved distinction teaching at the university The inductees include a scientist who trained Apollo astronauts and a geologist known for shaking up the biology world with theories on fossil nannobacteria Three of the new members received the honor posthumously He obtained all three of his degrees from Pennsylvania State College From 1953-1988 he taught sedimentary geology at The University of Texas at Austin He has won two national teaching awards and two medals for his work in sedimentary petrology the Geological Society of America’s highest honor He developed a widely adopted classification system for carbonate rocks based on the types of particles present and the types and proportions of the matrix and/or cement holding them together Folk first become interested in the role of bacteria in forming materials and in 1990 discovered the first mineralized nannobacteria This evidence was later used by some NASA scientists to interpret features in a Martian meteorite as being biological in origin an evaluation that remains controversial to this day Folk is currently professor emeritus in the Jackson School Muehlberger is a structural geologist who received his bachelor’s master’s and doctoral degrees from the California Institute of Technology He has conducted field investigations all over the world and published the definitive Tectonic Map of North America for which he received the 1998 Best Paper Award from the Structure/Tectonic Division of the Geological Society of America During his tenure as professor and chairman of UT Austin’s Department of Geological Sciences Muehlberger supervised more than 80 master’s and doctoral students He has also served as principal investigator of the Field Geology team for the Apollo 16 and 17 moon landings His team was involved in landing site selection and analysis and post-mission data analysis and debriefing He continued this work with NASA on the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions and presently teaches geology to Space Shuttle astronauts he has received the Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the public service medal from NASA as well as the Houston Oil and Minerals Corporation Faculty Excellence Award Muehlberger is currently professor emeritus in the Jackson School Washington and became one of the world’s leading experts on glassy objects known as tektites in geology at the University of Wisconsin in 1930 where he worked for the American Petroleum Institute in Austin and the U.S Geological Survey before joining the Bureau of Economic Geology in 1935 Barnes’s prolific work encompassed Paleozoic stratigraphy He put together the monumental Geologic Atlas of Texas which took a quarter of a century to compile Barnes was the first to recognize that tektites which were originally thought to be pieces of meteorites were in fact terrestrial in origin and were generated during meteorite impacts with the Earth he was named Distinguished Texas Scientist of the Year by the Texas Academy of Science He received the Barringer Medal from the Meteoritical Society in Vienna in 1989 He also received the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Public Service Award in 1993 Barnes remained professionally active and was known as the oldest University of Texas at Austin faculty member and oldest employee of the state of Texas until his death at 94 She graduated from the University of Texas in 1916 with degrees in German Her graduate work included a master’s program and research at the university as well as further studies in the Northeast and Midwest Kniker’s professional career began in 1920 She established Texaco’s first paleontology laboratory She spent about twenty years in Patagonia developing an oil field for Gulf Oil gaining international recognition for her work remaining active as a consultant and writer Her estate financed 39 bells for the university’s carillon A renowned paleontologist and geologist at a time when few women entered these fields Kniker left a scientific legacy and carved a path for professional women throughout the world Stenzel was born in the small Polish textile town of Pabianice on he entered Schlesische Friedrich Wilhelms Universitat at Breslau where he majored in paleontology and geology and minored in physics and mathematics He was granted his doctorate in geology with high honors in 1922 he joined the Bureau of Economic Geology where he subsequently became a professor in 1948 he joined the University of Houston as chairman of its geology department he resumed studies of Lower Cenozoic stratigraphy with Shell Development Company A few of Stenzel’s 92 published works are on petrology but more are on the paleontology and stratigraphy of the Lower Tertiary of the Gulf Coast His contributions published by the Bureau are nearly all classics where he died after a long illness on September 5 For more information about the Jackson School contact J.B. Bird at jbird@jsg.utexas.edu The work of Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) is to be found here and there in the museums of her native land her adoptive home of France seems to have forgotten her since the exhibition devoted to her by art critic Pierre Restany on her death in 1973 Centre Pompidou once again returns to her drawings hosting an exceptional exhibition bringing together close to one hundred works on paper the Jewish Szapocznikow family was shut up in the ghettos of Pabianice and then Lodz before being interned in Auschwitz and subsequently Bergen-Belsen Alina worked in the camp as a nurse alongside her mother where she learned sculpture with Josef Wagner she decided to go to Paris and its School of Fine Arts to continue her studies Her return to Poland in 1951 marks the start of her official career and significant commissions After having represented Poland at the Venice Biennial in 1962 Alina Szapocznikow once again left her native land for France It was in Paris that her work was to blossom fully including polyurethane foam and polyester resin she dismembered the human body – her own – and it was to become her subject of choice Alina Szapocznikow contracted breast cancer she went through a period of intense creative activity made using moulds of body parts and random items dates from this period The proper catalogue of her work runs to 620 drawings Some are sketch drawings for a particular sculpture Characterised by what Pierre Restany refers to as “disembodiment of form,” her most productive period dates from her years in Paris before illness struck (1963-1968) during which she produced her very best drawings A final sequence (1969-1973) sees the appearance of colour in a more dreamlike world The exhibition begins with drawings from her early career before moving on to focus on her years in Paris The organic and sculptural forms and technical experiments from this period gave rise to outstanding works of graphic art The exhibition gives pride of place to Centre Pompidou’s new acquisitions – more especially These works have entered the museum’s collection through the generosity of the Society of Friends of the National Museum of Modern Art The work of Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) is to be found here and there in the museums of her native land After the invasion of Poland by the Nazis Du dessin à la sculpture : Présentation de l'expos.. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Lorraine Urbanski Martinelle of Worcester; two stepsons Maciej Ciesielski of Dudley and Jakub Ciesielski and his wife Jolanta of Pabianice and his two grandsons Adam and Piotr; a sister a son of Marian and Brygida (Wypych) Urbanski He graduated from a technical-vocational high school in Krakow and served in the Polish Army as a corporal He immigrated to the United States in 1974 support and loyalty over the years will always be cherished and remembered His grandsons will miss him dearly and fondly recall how they used to play together Urbanski was a professional tool and die maker at Essilor-Gentex Optics Corp finding what he did to be more of an art than just a regular job He did not miss a day of work in over 20 years He always had a smile on his face and had a positive attitude about many things Marian enjoyed spending his Saturdays with his daughter and Roger Dad and daughter would often go shopping together followed by coffee at McDonald's or a chili and salad at Wendy's he could often be found at the Charlton Flea Market where he would find antiques and the many German beer steins he collected over the years He also liked to go the Smart Plaza in Dudley to pick up his Polish newspapers and food and chat with friends His daughter will always remember their long conversations – in person and on the phone – about current events and he is intensely missed by his only child focused worker with an impeccably strong work ethic – was eagerly looking forward to soon retiring to his house in the mountains of Zawoja where he and his devoted sister Bozena would walk together along trails basking in the peace that the Babia Gora mountainous region brought him since he was a young soldier in the Polish Army "Kaziu" is already missed by his sister and her family who visited his family in Poland every year was most recently "home" in October 2013 to attend his godson Robert's wedding from the Sitkowski & Malboeuf Funeral Home Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon The best of New York straight to your inbox We help you navigate a myriad of possibilities Sign up for our newsletter for the best of the city By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news Sign up for our email to enjoy New York without spending a thing (as well as some options when you’re feeling flush) By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. New York for the second time, Una Pizza Napoletana the Lower East Side spot by Anthony Mangieri was crowned the best pizzeria in the world by 50 Top Pizza an online guide that focuses on the top pizza parlors across the world and releases an annual ranking annually The destination at 175 Orchard Street first earned the title in 2022, when it actually shared it with I Masanielli from Caserta, Italy. The next year, in 2023, the parlor landed in the number two spots—but it has found its way back up again in 2024 Mangieri clearly knows what he is doing: he opened Una Pizza Napoletana in New Jersey in 1996 and relocated the business to Manhattan in 2004 a move that led to many restaurant reviews and a rise in popularity Interestingly enough, according to the pizzeria's official website Mangieri then decided to relocate once more "where the third iteration of Una Pizza Napoletana continued to enthrall critics and pizza lovers alike." Una Pizza Napoletana debuted on the Lower East Side once more and the location is the only iteration of Mangieri's project across all of America three other NYC spots appear on the list: Ribalta We can't say we disagree with any of those entries.  check out the top 100 ranking of best pizzeria in the world in 2024 according to 50 Top Pizza: I Masanielli - Francesco Martucci – Caserta Tony's Pizza Napoletana – San Francisco Leggera Pizza Napoletana – São Paulo I Masanielli - Sasà Martucci – Caserta Fiata by Salvatore Fiata – Hong Kong Cambia-Menti di Ciccio Vitiello – Caserta Ken’s Artisan Pizza – Portland BOB Alchimia a Spicchi – Montepaone Lido Dante's Pizzeria Napoletana – Auckland Franko’s Pizza & Bar – Zagreb San Martino - Pizza & Bolle – Rome Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! tiktokfacebooktwitteryoutubeAbout us Contact us The centre has 8,200 sqm – 6,800 sqm of retail space and 1,400 sqm of warehouse space includes a car park for 240 vehicles and is fully accessible to the disabled CA Immo exits non-core market Serbia with the sale of the 19,600 sqm office building Sava Business Center in Belgrade Both the sales price and the buyer are subject to confidentiality As the PBSA sector finally takes off in Poland it is now increasingly attracting international operators and investors Eurobuild CEE spoke to Xior's investment manager about why it has such confidence in the Polish market Residential developer Develia has signed a preliminary agreement to acquire all the shares in Bouygues Immobilier Polska the Polish subsidiary of Bouygues Immobilier ESA logistika has leased 15,000 sqm in Prologis Park Piotrków GLP has completed the development of its Wrocław V Logistics Centre and has received a BREEAM rating of Outstanding Panattoni has secured EUR 40 mln in financing from BNP Paribas for the development of Panattoni Park Sosnowiec IV Newgate Investment (NGI) and Redkom Development are developing a large retail park in Bydgoszcz Deutsche Hypo – NORD/LB Real Estate Finance has provided a five-year green loan to Olivia Seven for the refinancing of the Olivia Prime A office building in Gdańsk-Oliwa communications and security company Motorola Solutions has signed a five-year lease renewal 18,000 sqm at the Green Office complex in Kraków’s Podgórze district Falling interest rates and easing monetary policy across the eurozone and CEEi are boosting investor confidence in the region’s commercial real estate market reveals Colliers in its ‘Beyond Real Estate | Economy’ report Panattoni is to build the Panattoni Park Mainz Süd in Erbes-Büdesheim bei Alzey Axi Immo has presented its latest report “Warsaw Office Market – Q1 2025 The market opened in 2025 on a steady footing with a notable increase in leasing activity and a modest decline in vacancy landlords continue to focus on upgrading existing assets and prioritizing quality over quantity Convenience store chain Żabka has officially opened a new logistics centre in Kąty Wrocławskie The first stage of the development will serve 1,500 stores in the Wrocław area Romanian Post has leased over 5,000 sqm of logistics space in CTPark Bucharest to serve as its temporary regional courier and logistics hub for Bucharest JLL has announced the sale and leaseback of two properties by a manufacturing company in a deal worth over PLN 1 bln Warehouse developer CTP is adding 2,000 sqm to its Clubco coworking development in Brno pbb Deutsche Pfandbriefbank has extended an investment facility to PineBridge Benson Elliot for the Diuna Office Park in Warsaw The hotel market in Bucharest continued its recovery in 2024 while the ADR has finally surpassed the milestone of EUR 100 Torus has announced its All.inn students’ residence concept that is soon to appear on ul BIG Poland has acquired the Multishop Suwałki retail park comprising 13,000 sqm of retail space The company now owns nine fully commercialized retail parks in Poland Slate Asset Management has sold three OBI retail stores to the Lindner Group from Germany Cushman & Wakefield has conducted a survey the findings of which are presented in the report From Shopping to Experiences: A Customer’s View on Shopping Centres and Retail Parks Cushman & Wakefield notes that despite evolving shopping trends both retail formats continue to hold strong appeal Multi Poland has taken on the management of the Galeria Przymorze shopping centre in Gdańsk The store offers lifestyle and sporting clothing and is to open this spring According to the "Quo Vadis E-commerce" report released by Cushman & Wakefield the online commerce continues to be a growth driver for the industrial & logistics real estate sector generating significant opportunities for developers and investors the investor behind the Projekt Góraszka shopping and entertainment complex in Wiązowna on Warsaw’s eastern outskirts has obtained a building permit for a mixed-use development Poznan-based company Scallier is opening another facility under the Funshop Park brand in Romania According to the latest report “At a Glance: Modern Retail Market in Poland Q4 2024” from BNP Paribas Real Estate Poland Poland’s retail market experienced record growth in 2024 Cushman &Wakefield has summarised the situation on the Polish retail market Over half a mln sqm of new retail space came on stream last year marking the highest new supply level in Poland since 2015 This robust development activity occurred amid rising demand from new retailers and improving consumer sentiment which boosted retail sales A new retail park with a total area of 24,000 sqm is set to be developed in Otwock under the name Świderek The investment will be led by Redkom Development Empik has opened a flagship store in the revitalised former Cepelia pavilion in the centre of Warsaw the modernist building has regained its former glory and once again impresses with its original appearance and modern interior Trei Real Estate Poland has opened its 40th Vendo Park The investment was created in Wrocław and has 5,000 sqm Vendo Park Wrocław is the first facility under this banner in the capital of Lower Silesia The retail park was built on a plot of approx An 800 sqm Biedronka grocery store is to open on the ground floor of the Moje Bielany residential complex which is being developed by CeMat A/S at ul Wólczyńska 121 in Warsaw’s Bielany district Spring has very much sprung and everywhere is bathed in the first warm sunshine of the year I have in the back of my mind the terrifying fo .. The Polish warehouse market has finally stabilised after the post-pandemic boom but new challenges and opportunities are on the horizon for the sector UBM Development has been given the go-ahead for the first wooden office building in Poland: Timber Park in Poleczki Business Park in Warsaw The office market in Warsaw is currently experiencing a period of stability in terms of supply and take-up Recent data on overall tenant activity indicates that clients in the cap .. Receive all the latest information from the world of real estate by e-mail the construction of the Aura residential building designed by Robert Konieczny's office KWK Promes According to a report by research company Spectis “Construction companies in Poland 2025-2030” the total revenues of the 300 leading construction gro .. The Globalworth Foundation has provided the authorities in Bucharest with office space for a Covid vaccination centre Panattoni BTS and Commercecon together support the establishment of the second Centaurus Foundation centre in Poland to help horses and other animals intends to focus on operations in other reg .. Six class A office buildings in the PRO Portfolio which is jointly owned by PineBridge Benson Elliot and Sharow Capital have been granted BREEAM In-U .. Who won this year's 14th edition of the Eurobuild Awards The jury and guests gathered at the Double Tree by Hilton hotel in Warsaw chose this year's .. Enjoy the last set of recordings with comments straight from this year's MIPIM we asked experts from our home country for their input will take place on 9-10 April 2025 at the Norblin Factory Event Hall in W .. we invite you to hot episode of the "Eye to eye" podcast The UN Nansen Refugee Award award will go to Poland for the first time According to the office of the UNHCR High Commissioner this year's regional wi .. Czech developer CTP has been granted a EUR 200 mln loan from the European Investment Bank for the roll-out of its large-scale solar panel installation .. while the ADR has finally surpassed the milestone .. Jarosław Szanajca plans to resign from the position of president of the management board of Dom Development at the end of the year and join the superv .. The Polish and Danish governments have entered preliminary discussions for the construction of a tunnel between Szczecin and Copenhagen underneath the .. Viterra has moved into its ​​new 1,500 sqm offices in Olivia Prime part of the Olivia Centre business complex in Gdańsk Panattoni has acquired two properties near Gothenburg The brownfield sites will be replaced by a modern 43,000 sqm facility Contemporary cities are grappling with the challenge of fostering dynamic growth while alleviating environmental pressures Colliers has taken over the management of the Studio B office building located in the Warsaw Wola district The property is owned by Stena Real Estate .. The University of Warsaw has signed a contract with the general contractor for a project at ul The new building will house the faculti .. Velis Real Estate Tech is officially changing its name to Singu adopting the title of its property management product the construction of the Panattoni Park Unterfranken has officially started She survived the Nazi death camps but never spoke of their horrors – except through her sculptures of lip-lamps As the first major UK show of her work opens the first major exhibition of her sculpture in the UK because she has not been absorbed into the tidy narratives of art history her sculptures can look as if they have been created by a singular imagination from another world There are bulbous shapes cast in resin from human bellies embedded in a sea of polyurethane foam; lipstick-red lips and nipples growing from slender stems like flowers and serving as lamps; shiny boulders of alabaster-like resin from which crushed-up human features emerge – her own cast face (These last are called “personified tumours” and were made after she was diagnosed with breast cancer There is a lot of shine and slime in her work A work called Stele – the title a reference to the funerary monuments of classical antiquity – shows a woman’s lips chin and knees protruding from a slab of what almost looks like hardened tar as if the gravestone has engulfed or consumed These are works that are not easy to look at of what fails to be contained by the skin: sputum They are not polite; they are not what you might call “tasteful” She made an exchange of works with the last: Bourgeois kept a pair of Szapocznikow’s lip-lamps in her bedroom She was a vivid presence on the art scene in Paris the city where she spent most of her adult life “She was a fantastic artist and a lovely woman,” says her son If you were going to sum her up in two words they would be ‘love and hate’.” She was seductive it was obliquely – through the poetry of her sculpturePeople ended up “besotted by her charm” Photographs of her in her studio show a woman of intense and buoyant beauty with an utterly disarming grin the Paris gallerist who manages her estate says that veteran members of the city’s art scene sometimes show up to the gallery and reminisce “People still speak of her with a tremor in their voices She left an impression on people’s emotional lives.” The story of Szapocznikow’s life is so extreme that it can threaten to overwhelm the experience of looking at her art. She was born in Pabianice, Poland, the daughter of a dentist father and a paediatrician mother. Her father died in 1937 from TB; and when Poland was occupied by the Nazis she was interned first in the Pabianice and then the Łódź ghetto where she assisted her mother in a hospital she was transported to Bergen-Belsen via Auschwitz Cendrier de Célibataire I (The Bachelor’s Ashtray I) (1972) Coloured polyester resin and cigarette butts Courtesy The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/Galerie Loevenbruck Paris/Fabrice GoussetBut these were years never to be spoken of – certainly not to her son Piotr Stanisławski nor is there any allusion to them in her correspondence with her first husband Ryszard Stanisławski Piotr recalls that he once came home from school to find her “sitting on the sofa looking at a book about the camps When she heard I was there she snapped it shut and hid it.” He asked her why – “after all I knew what had happened in the camps” – but the subject remained as closed as the book or she wanted to protect me,” speculates Stanisławski and – though the precise circumstances are unknown – at the end of the war she ended up in Czechoslovakia claiming that she had been born on the Czech side of the border She had assumed none of her family had survived (indeed her brother died in Terezín) but in late 1945 her mother she began to study stonemasonry and then sculpture at the Higher School of Arts and Industry in Prague beginning studies at the Beaux-Arts the following year Alina Szapocznikow Photograph: courtesy the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/ Galerie Loevenbruck Photograph Bartek Buśko.What Stanisławski can only guess at is how and why his mother who from the age of 13 had lost her childhood to incarceration and unspeakable horrors Perhaps part of the answer – a theory that seems borne out by looking at her work – lies in the human body which she must have seen at its most anguished fragile and abject during her years as a medic in the ghettos and camps What is clear is that her early training was complete and solid bodies made not of frail flesh but of stone Szapocznikow began to live the life of the emigree artist – mixing with a group of expatriate Polish intellectuals and writers travelling on occasion to Prague and to Poland a student at the Sorbonne who switched his studies to art history (and in later life her life saved by an experimental antibiotics treatment In 1951 she and Stanisławski moved back to Poland, partly in order to throw themselves into the country’s postwar reconstruction. There, they adopted Piotr, a fact only discovered by him after his mother’s death. Szapocznikow made figurative, social-realist works such as a portrait of Stalin and Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship restrictions on artists began to loosen up and the seeds of her mature work began to emerge A remarkable small sculpture from 1957 called Exhumed is a blurred and blunted figure that reminds me of the casts made of the victims of Pompeii; it seems to hover between being consigned to death unearthed from the grave and raised to life She also made a decisive move in her art in 1962 when she cast her own leg: from then her work would focus more and more on her body Illuminated Woman Photograph courtesy of the estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/Galerie Loevenbruck Photo Fabrice Gousset.That same year she returned to Paris – at least partly because she felt the need to experiment with new methods and materials For the next decade came restless experimentation with polyester resin and other novel materials documents sculptural forms made with that most everyday of materials something shaped by the body in a crudely primal manner (She wrote of these works: “One has only to photograph and enlarge my masticated creations in order to achieve a sculptural presence Creation lies just between dreams and daily work.”) Stanisławski remembers accompanying her to the labs of the Rhône-Poulenc pharmaceuticals firm where she would question chemists on the properties of polyester – “how it could be mixed With these new materials her exploration of the body seemed to become more intense: she took it apart loosing lips from bodies and breasts from torsos A late and remarkable sequence of pieces were called Herbariums: fragments of her body cast in resin and then partially flattened like flowers kept in a press to preserve them The artist working on Grands Ventres (Big Bellies) in 1968 © ADAGP Courtesy The Alina Szapocznikow Archive/Piotr Stanislawski/National Museum in Krakow she wrote that she made “objets maladroits” – awkward objects She had begun her life in art studying the problems of “balance space shadow and light” and found that to be a “thwarted vocation” She had found her mature voice through her casts of the body with which “I try to fix the fleeting moments of life After her death a single exhibition was held in Paris and then came years of oblivion in western Europe – despite a significant exhibition in Warsaw in 1998 The works sat in a grubby theatre storage space “near the worst place on the Périphérique” like so many female artists of the mid-20th century (Pauline Boty her sculpture long dismissed by grandees of the Paris art scene as “not our taste” Now the time has finally come for this singular artist for her conviction that “of all the manifestations of the ephemeral the human body is the most vulnerable Griselda Pollock 7 min readWhat happens when art confronts horror Can art testify to suffering without betraying it Is art sometimes undone by the surfacing of traumatic memory respond to artworks that tell us of the unbearable experiences that artists who survived the Shoah have witnessed I have been pondering these ethical questions by investigating how art can transform traumatic pasts in the work of largely Jewish artists of the twentieth century who are women — Charlotte Salomon,Vera Frenkel One of these artists is the Polish-born Jewish sculptor named Alina Szapocznikow (1926-73) (pronounced: Shah-potch-nikoff) whose amazing sculptures are now on view at The Hepworth in Wakefield until January 28 It has taken several decades for this brilliant artist whose life was tragically cut short at the age of 46 by cancer to return to the level of public renown she enjoyed during her lifetime where she had lived during the last decade of her life Now frequently exhibited alongside Louise Bourgeois Hannah Wilke and other well-known contemporaries her work has never been exhibited in Britain before             Alina Szapocznikow was born into a medical family in the Polish town of Kalisz in 1926 following the conquest of Poland by Nazi Germany her mother and brother were forced into the ghetto of Pabianice and then the infamous Lodz ghetto but soon moved to Bergen-Belsen  (as was Anne Frank and her mother and sister) where she worked alongside her doctor mother Alina Szapocznikow was finally liberated alone from the ghetto-camp of Terezin in the Czech Republic in 1945 where her brother died earlier She believed she was the sole survivor of her family whose powerful memoir Winter in the Morning (published in 1986 and reprinted in 2006 as Beyond These Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto) makes us share her adolescence in Warsaw ghetto and then in hiding Szapocznikow’s formative years were passed in some of the most terrifying and unspeakable places on earth             Defiantly deciding to identify as Czech rather than return to Poland when she was liberated Szapocznikow moved to Prague to study sculpture before moving to Paris to continue her artistic training where she encountered the modernist art of Jean Arp and having refound her mother from whom she had been separated in 1944 the artist worked under the new Communist regime in Poland that at least supported artists providing them with studios and resources She took part in the competition for the memorial at Auschwitz then considered by the Polish state a memorial site for its own national suffering Despite the political control of artistic production Szapocznikow produced works that indicted Stalinist repression such as a sculpture now on show at the Hepworth Exhumed  (1957) It is a bronze sculpture of a partly mutilated body that suggests partial decomposition in the grave It commemorates the belated vindication of an executed Hungarian resistance politician in 1949 in the aftermath of the brutal repression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 Yet I cannot but also be reminded of images of charred bodies glimpsed in rare film footage from Auschwitz-Birkenau This dreadful association on my part exposes the twin dimensions of Szapocznikow’s sculptures Her work fearlessly engaged with the politics of her own post-war present the affectively charged work is recaptured by powerful images from a traumatic past she attempted to silence Visceral memories surface in her work even as he artist bravely uses the form-making aspect of sculpture to rebuild bodies that stand up to the world as for instance in bold sculpture of a teenage girl While a non-Jewish world might cling onto the contemporary dimensions in her work and celebrate its later sensuality a sensitised Jewish viewer may be pierced by the pathos of the figure in Exhumed with a gaping hole in place of its once human face that nonetheless suggests a visceral scream of pain delivered to the heartless world             Enjoying growing international recognition for her new direction in abstract forms made from fluid concrete after the death of her mother the artist returned to live in Paris in 1963 There she became a visible member of the lively artistic community that was creating the French version of Pop Art named New Realism She returned to the body as her core subject experimenting with often toxic new industrial materials: polyester resin as well as electricity (illuminating lamp-sculptures of her lips and breasts) and found objects often associated with violence and increasingly shockingly dark sculptures often embedding photographs alongside clothes and even grass she made clear what was the core of her work: the uneven contest between a sometimes deadly technological modernity and the fragility of our human bodies referencing Pop Art’s love of modern things: I have been defeated by the main protagonist the discoveries and testimonies of our times True dreams belong to it; it is applauded by the public Then she described a more poignant dimensions of this project which was based on making casts of her own body: I persist in attempting to fix in resin the imprints of our body: I am convinced that among all the manifestations of perishability all truth…on the level of consciousness because of its ontological misery which is as inevitable as it is unacceptable These piercing statements are a touchstone for our understanding of what at a desperate moment of her fatal illness (she was agonizingly dying of breast cancer) she had come to understand were the stakes of her artistic practice is to produce objects that knowingly lack both traditional formal beauty and resist the aesthetics of the new technological order of the of the machine age emblematic of an inhuman genocidal industrial modernity they defiantly exhibit their own vulnerable deformation as testimony to the lived misery of human bodies in the face of our acute sense of mutability and mortality             The sculptor is not just talking about flesh versus machine her words evoke the extreme experiences witnessed during the years 1939-45 Even while she refused ever to speak in public of what she had endured the drag of that trauma becomes clear as we progress through the exhibition at Wakefield As much as the artist sought at first to create proud beautiful bodies that stand upright and defiant A work titled Tumours Personified (1971) is a collection of casts of the artist’s head in various states that pathetically yet with dignity lie scattered on a bed of stones Other works of this moment offer repulsively compelling formless masses composed of paper cigarettes held in viscous now brittle and discoloured polyester resin or black polyurethane foam As she pushed the boundaries of her art with experiments with these toxic new materials that may have contributed to her cancer tensely holding to a desire to create forms and accepting the utter impossibility of doing anything but bear witness its impossibility One of her final works becomes more personal Souvenir I (1971) floats a photograph of the child Alina in bathing suit perched on the shoulders of her young father— a precious childhood memory of a summer holiday before—while the smiling child is ominously ’watched’ from two bulbous paper stuffed forms protruding from the dried curling ‘skin of polyester resin in which is a third repeat of this ghastly face of a dead woman from a found photograph from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 We who had not seen and endured what she had seen and endured may not understand the full implications of her knowing in her own body at several different times of her very short life that the body is not only perishable but the site of prolonged and sustained torture and degradation The forced encounter with human perishability is traumatic – through bereavement or diagnosis of a fatal disease Exposure to the daily possibility of undeserved death and the witnessing of dying in atrocious conditions sets Alina Szapocnikow apart from whatever comfort we non-survivors might draw from the poetics of her text as a statement of the human condition The concentration and the death camps–very different from each other—were novel political laboratories for systematic dehumanization the lived but deadly torture of still human consciousness witnessing the attrition of starved diseased and brutalized and abused bodies until their physiology no longer supported human identity Witnessing in post-war culture the adulation of technology and mechanical beauty Szapocznikow’s work is both the symptomatic registration of the politicisation of industrial production to destroy and a conscious defiance of it at the deepest level that could only play itself out through the life-long exploration of the relation of hand made forms that try to re-present the body as a human form Yet the powerful force of her sculptures arises from the creative failure which produces a radical and affecting sculptural language to assert both the intensities of the body and our existence as embodied beings in its totally novel condition of post-Auschwitz perishability Hence the sexual body and dead body are the twin poles of her work Her materials enshrine and entomb as well as represent this classic doubling of life and death rendered terrible by the real of actual historical occurrences which we sentimentally package up in words like camps the Holocaust without pausing long enough to grasp the implications of those events for all who live and die after them Alina Szapocznikow produced one of the most powerful artistic monuments to one woman’s experience of the Shoah precisely by trying never to represent anything of what she had seen Do not miss this exhibition if you have the chance  Griselda Pollock is author of After-affects I After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation  (MUP 2013)  Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory Yale 2018) which will be discussed in Jewish Book Week on 6 March at JW3 The Alina Szapocznikow exhibition is at the Heworth Wakefield until January 28 sweltering box car packed with Jewish prisoners the 20-year-old was on his way to another concentration camp Part of that camp was recently recreated in Taunton by director Martin Scorsese for scenes in his upcoming film “Ashecliffe.” He had spent most of his teen years as a slave laborer at Auschwitz in Poland the prisoners were drenched in sweat and itching from lice The prisoners began begging Nazi officers for water “They opened up the doors and threw (water) at us said from the living room of his Canton home last week “I squeezed the blanket and sucked out everything I can,” said Geller He saw five men hanged for smuggling vegetables to other starving Jews three of which he was forced to wear on his clothing He saw emaciated people and dead bodies on ghetto streets He saw the grass at Auschwitz white with human ashes “we could smell the fumes of the human beings” who Geller lost his identity and was known only as “159320.” Then they put us in a line and they gave us the numbers on the arm pointing to the six digits seared onto his left forearm Geller was a teenager when Nazi soldiers occupied his hometown of Pabianice Jewish residents were immediately forced into a ghetto systematically abused and put into forced labor He was returning from work one day when he saw his brother Riven on the street calling to him tell him him it was dangerous to come home But he was soon captured and forced to remain in the Pabianice ghetto He was among 230 people rounded up into the Lodz ghetto in the spring of 1941 and then then sent to Benchen for 2 years the 5-foot-2-inch Geller volunteered to chop wood carry 50-pound cement bags or do other work — anything to stay alive Violence and starvation in the ghetto intensified after the Germans attacked Russia on June 22 “That’s when the beatings really started,” Geller said Food was scaled back to a loaf of bread for eight people Geller tore the gold stars off his clothing and asked German soldiers for bread Nazis “liquidated” the ghetto where his father where food was black coffee and one slice of bread “that you could see all of Europe through.” Geller slept on hard they filled up the barracks with 1,200 people,” he said no nothing,there was a barrel put up in a corner Dozens of people were ushered into gas chambers disguised as shower rooms ‘We usually get a shower once every six months and here you get it already?’” he said He spent about two months there before being sent to Meldorf to work on an underground airplane repair station for the Nazis Geller broke from the crowd and went into woods to rest He was awakened by a German officer standing over him He could have put a bullet in me and no one would ever know,” Geller said Nazi officers suddenly changed their plans and began transporting 3,000 Jewish prisoners supposedly to be executed in the Austrian Alps Air Force planes attacked the train and destroyed the engine the prisoners were too afraid to get off the train; they thought the attack had been by Germans The elated prisoners began shouting once they saw the American soldiers A friends of Geller’s ran toward them but was shot dead by U.S soldiers who could not immediately identify him “They didn’t know who he was,” Geller said “That was my sad thing and happy thing that day the 24-year-old Geller arrived at Ellis Island aboard the USS Holbrook where he rented a room for $5 a week and took a job as a presser the Gellers went back to Europe and toured Auschwitz and Warsaw The memories of those years still haunt Geller “He can wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll give him a little nudge,” Marilyn Geller said Her husband has lived life with a positive attitude “about a lot of things,” Marilyn Geller said