Singer's Warsaw Festival Of Jewish Culture Comes To New York This Month

The internationally acclaimed Singer's Warsaw Festival of Jewish Culture brings three of Poland's leading music and theater artists to New York on Sunday and Monday November 24 & 25, in a unique sidebar of the Festival's 21st annual edition, which ran this past summer in Warsaw.  The Festival is organized by the Shalom Foundation, founded and directed by the Yiddish theater icon, Golda Tencer.

Concert great Adam Makowicz and the jazz innovator Krzysztof Medyna offer an evening of daring explorations of the music of renowned Jewish theater composers at the Polish & Slavic Center Concert Hall, 177 Kent Street in Greenpoint Brooklyn, on Sunday November 24, at 7pm. Free admission, to reserve e-mail claudian@polishslaviccenter.org

On Monday November 25, at 7pm, leading Warsaw actress Monika Chrzastowska performs a cabaret concert of the music of Wiera Gran, the legendary muse of pre-War and wartime Warsaw, at the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, 233 Madison Avenue (at 37th Street). Free admission, to reserve https://forms.gle/gy38MuC2E4qJqm9n8

Chrzaskowska has played many notable roles with Warsaw's Jewish Theatre.  In a unique cabaret-style performance Chrzastowkska will evoke the spirit of the singer and actress Wiera Gran, who famously entered the Warsaw Ghetto to be reunited with her family, and where she became a revered fixture at the Sztuka Café. Accompanying Chrzaskowska are Bartozzi Wojciechowski on the bass, Franciszek Wajdzik on piano, and Robert Seniuta on violin.

The internationally acclaimed pianist and composer Adam Makowicz, who is celebrated equally for his work in jazz and classical music, has toured internationally, and is also known for his cross-cultural performances and compositions. Among his 30 albums are several that joyously celebrate the music of American Jews such as George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern.  Many of his unique arrangements of this music will be re-interpreted   with the New York-based Krzysztof Medyna, a celebrated saxophonist and composer, who is the co-founder of the popular bands Breakwater and Komeda Project.

The two events this month will mark the third time the Shalom Foundation (www.shalom.org.pl) has presented highlights from the Singer's Warsaw Festival of Jewish Culture in New York.  The stated aim of the Foundation is to deepen its New York relationships with local artists and arts groups and to further explore cultural linkages between Poland and New York.  “We share so much,” says Golda Tencer, the Festival's founder.  “Especially we have a mutual debt to Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom Poland and New York can rightly claim as their own.”

The Festival is named after I.B. Singer (1903 to 1991), the Nobel Award-winning Jewish-American writer who wrote almost exclusively in Yiddish and who lived most of his adult life in New York (on the Upper West Side), where he emigrated in 1935.  Born in Leoncin Poland and raised as a boy in Warsaw, Singer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

The 21st annual Singer's Warsaw Festival of Jewish Culture presented more than 100 music, theater, literature and the visual arts events from August 24 to September 1, in venues big and small across Warsaw.  It is the world's largest festival of its kind to celebrate Yiddish and Jewish culture in multiple media.