Jewish Krakow, Poland: the neighborhood of Kazmierz, a tour!

On my recent trip to Poland, I joined Professor Naomi Seidman and our remarkable guide, Janina, for a journey through Kraków, a city where Jewish history lingers like a phantom limb.

We walked the streets of Kazimierz, visited ancient synagogues, and traced the faint marks of mezuzahs still carved into doorframes. Janina told us how, even in her own childhood, the word “Jew” was whispered, and how guiding visitors through these spaces became a way of restoring memory.

For me, the trip was both homecoming and estrangement. My father is a Polish citizen, my grandfather was born here, and yet I arrived as an American Jew, uncertain how to feel in a place that is at once beautiful and haunted.

This video follows our tour through Kraków’s Jewish quarter, the old cemetery, and the living traces of a world that was never fully erased. It’s a story of history, absence, and the ache of return — and of how the Jewish Festival in Kraków brings new life to an old wound.

🙏 Special thanks to the University of Toronto for helping cover part of the costs of producing this video.

🎥 Featuring:
Naomi Seidman, University of Toronto
📚 **Books by Naomi Seidman:**
• *The Bais Yaakov Project: A History of the Bais Yaakov Movement for Girls*
https://amzn.to/3UpygGG
• *Freud’s Jewish Question: Lust, Hate, and the Jewish Politics of Psychoanalysis*
https://amzn.to/3TV0GYV
• *Faithful Renderings: Jewish–Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation*
https://amzn.to/40Bak6J

🎥 Janina, local historian and tour guide
Find her on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/krakuskakrakowcityguide

🎥 More Poland videos:
* My first impression of Poland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIDrp_S8Glk
* A long conversation with Naomi, which got a lot of contemptuous comments from Poles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zQ1rSDUUVE

Filmed in Kazimierz, Kraków, Poland, during the Jewish Culture Festival

💬 Watch to the end for reflections on the strange dialogue between memory and revival — and what it means to be both a visitor and a descendant.

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