Kosher cooking in a Polish town
Noemi and Debora demonstrate kosher cooking on the former site of a synagogue in Tarnowskie Gory
In an open air plaza, on the very spot where a synagogue once stood in the Polish town of Tarnowskie Góry, two proud Jewish women conducted a workshop on kosher food and Jewish cooking. The women – Noemi Berenstein and Debora Saleh – are two of the three residents of Shavei Israel’s Be’er Miriam project, an apartment and cultural center in the city of Katowice, opened earlier this summer under the auspices of Shavei Israel and its emissary to the region, Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis. (See our full report here.)
Tarnowskie Góry is about an hour’s train ride from Katowice and is part of the Silesian metropolitan area of over 5 million people. The setting for the workshop was a larger “Collage of Cultures” festival and Be’er Miriam was invited to represent the Jewish history of the region.
Jews have lived in Silesia for hundreds of years. In the mid 1700’s, a Jewish entrepreneur, Salomon Isaac, became one of the founders of the Upper Silesian mining and metallurgical industries. The synagogue in Tarnowskie Góry was established in 1864; it was burned to the ground when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and its ruins completely dismantled in 1943.
In 2006, the Culture and Art Foundation in Tarnowskie Góry unveiled a monument in the square at Szymala Street, where the cooking and food workshop took place, to commemorate the location’s former synagogue. The monument has the shape of a column and includes a quotation from the book of Genesis in both Hebrew and Polish: “He was afraid and said, how awe-inspiring is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:17) Here are some pictures of both the former synagogue and the monument now in its place [link].
Noemi and Debora traveled the hour to Tarnowskie Góry complete with pots, pans and kosher ingredients to demonstrate a repast of mostly Israeli delicacies: hummus, falafel and pita. There was also salad with spinach and mandarin in poppy seed sauce, and a Middle Eastern-inspired dessert of yogurt with pomegranate, tahini, honey and mint.
Rabbi Ellis reports that the visitors to the workshop “mostly didn’t know much about Jewish culture and asked many questions about the ingredients, about what is kosher, and basically what is important in Jewish life.” The workshop was popular for another reason: spectators got a chance to try some foods that they’d never experienced before. (The Be’er Miriam women fortunately are good cooks!)
The workshop also was an opportunity to share with locals more information about the activities at Be’er Miriam in general. “We invited all the people who came to join us in our regular Israeli cooking classes, film screenings, and the Krav Maga courses we offer, and several signed up,” Rabbi Ellis continues. [Krav Maga is an Israeli-invented martial art intended primarily for self-protection.] The local media came out as well and Noemi and Devora were interviewed with more questions about Jewish culture. You can read more about Be’er Miriam here.
Here are some pictures from the workshop and day in Tarnowskie Góry.
