Building a Jewish future in Poland, mired in history

Over the past three weeks I‘ve been fortunate to spend in Cape Town, conversations have repeatedly turned to what it means to be Jewish in Poland today: the legacy of the Holocaust, rising antisemitism, and whether I plan to stay. 

I understand why. Those conversations remain essential. In Poland, history is never far away, and in recent years, it has often felt closer than many of us had hoped. The question that occupies me more these days, however, is different. How do you build a Jewish future in a place where the past is never silent? 

For the past decade, I have helped build FestivALT, a Jewish arts and activism organisation based in Kraków. My days are far more likely to be spent working with artists, opening new cultural spaces, curating festivals, asking whether a souvenir can reshape a city’s identity, than they are talking about memorials. 

That usually surprises people. 

For many outside Poland, Jewish life is still imagined almost entirely through the lens of history. Yet one of the most striking things about living in Poland today is that so much still feels open-ended. Questions of belonging, memory, and public life are not settled; they are actively negotiated.  

In this, Poland and South Africa, despite their profoundly different histories, share something important. Both are relatively young democracies. South Africa has spent just over three decades building democratic institutions; Poland slightly longer, since 1989. Neither inherited settled answers about identity or whose stories should be told. Those conversations continue, in politics, around family tables, and inside cultural institutions.  

That can be exhausting. 

But it can also be an extraordinary source of creativity. When institutions are still being shaped, culture has room to experiment. Citizens still believe they can influence public life. Small organisations can have an outsized impact. Things that might seem impossible elsewhere sometimes become possible simply because no one has yet decided they cannot be done. I see that happening within Jewish life too. 

Across Poland, people continue to rediscover Jewish family histories that had been hidden or left unspoken for generations. Others have always known they were Jewish but are only now finding the confidence to participate publicly. None of these stories looks the same, yet together they are quietly changing what Jewish life in Poland feels like, not by replacing older institutions, but by adding new voices to them.  

Ten years ago, FestivALT began in a private apartment. Before there was a festival, there was simply a home: a place where artists gathered around a kitchen table to test ideas, imagine, and ask what contemporary Jewish culture in Poland might become. This year, after a decade of building festivals and public programmes, we found ourselves returning to that apartment. 

It is now HOIZ, Yiddish for “home”. That return wasn’t nostalgic. It was a reminder that before a public institution, there is a private act of opening your door. Before programming comes conversation. And perhaps that is the question I find myself thinking about most today. Not how we remember Jewish life. But how we make it worth choosing.  

Jewish communities today often find themselves caught inside false binaries. Memory or the present. Tradition or experimentation. Religion or culture. Israel or the diaspora. Jewish life has always been richest when it could hold competing ideas in tension. The communities that inspire me are those that preserve memory while making new culture. That honour difficult histories without allowing those histories to become the only story they know how to tell. 

Perhaps this is the greatest privilege of working in Jewish Poland today. Not that history has become easier. It hasn’t. The echoes of the past remain loud. Antisemitism has not disappeared. Public debates continue to shift. The questions facing Jewish communities are not becoming less complicated. But alongside those realities, something else has become possible.  

We have enough confidence to experiment. Enough confidence to be self-critical. Enough confidence to ask difficult questions – not because we reject our traditions, but because we trust them enough to let them grow. 

For me, choosing life today means something very practical. It means opening another door instead of closing one. Creating another artistic collaboration. Building another institution that welcomes curiosity instead of demanding certainty. 

One example is Kultur-Lige, a growing network of more than 50 contemporary Jewish artists across Poland. It is less a movement than an invitation: a recognition that contemporary Jewish art deserves space, not only to preserve memory, but to ask new questions, respond to today’s realities, and imagine futures that are recognisably Jewish without being confined by inherited expectations. 

That, to me, is also what choosing life looks like. Not replacing memory. Building upon it. Not abandoning difficult conversations. Having enough confidence to make them richer. Not pretending the past is behind us. Refusing to let it become the only horizon ahead of us. 

That is the Poland I hope to share during the coming Limmud and my visit to South Africa. Not because I think Poland has found the answers. Far from it. But because I suspect Jewish communities everywhere, including here, are wrestling with similar questions. How do we create Jewish life that people choose, not because they are afraid of losing it, but because they genuinely want to be part of it?  

Lena Rubenfeld is a cultural activist and social entrepreneur passionate about creating spaces for difficult conversations. She is the co-founder and artistic director of FestivALT, a festival of contemporary Jewish culture in Kraków.   

She will be speaking at Limmud Cape Town, which will take place from 14 to 16 August, Limmud in Durban on Monday 17 August, and in Johannesburg from 21 to 23 August.