Agnieszka Traczewska: Bracha – Blessing. Back to Polish Shtetls. ACT Jewish Community Centre Gallery | Closing date uncertain, but expected to continue throughout 2021. Open Monday to Thursday, 10am-3pm, except on Jewish holy days.
A fine photographic insight into pilgrimages by ultra-Orthodox Jews is on display at the ACT Jewish Community Centre gallery. Outstanding artistic black-and-white prints provided by the Polish Embassy provide this excellent exhibition of Chasidim (a sect of Orthodox Jews) returning to destroyed shtetls (small Jewish towns or villages) in Poland. The exhibition prints are of a very high quality. What’s more the quality of the photojournalism is great.
Bracha – Blessing. Back to Polish Shtetls was first shown publicly at the United Nations headquarters in New York in January 2019. Writing in New York’s The Jewish Week at the time, Jonathon Mark quoted the then Polish Consul-General as saying, “This is how my town must have looked [around] 1932, my grandmother’s reality.” Poland’s then UN ambassador told the guests at the opening that there is no Polish culture without Jewish culture. She suggested the photos showed that the traces of the Old World had not completely disappeared, and that Jewish heritage was well and alive in Poland. She did not mention that a community of millions was down to 10,000.
Read the article by Brian Rope in The Canberra Times.