Sukkot. Multimemo on the road

Event program

Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles, commemorates the 40-year journey of the Israelites through the desert on their way to the Promised Land. On Sukkot 2024, the Jewish Community Center JCC Warsaw invited our community (and all interested parties) to reflect and discover the tradition of Sukkot during a mini-festival.

Our mini-festival consisted of two events: a culinary workshop with Junona Lamcha-Grynberg and “The Sugihara List.” Author’s meeting with Zofia Hartman.

The first workshop consisted of two parts: in the first, we learned about the holiday of Sukkot and the traditional customs associated with it. In the second, participants prepared dishes containing products traditionally eaten during the holiday (pomegranates, dates). Then, we ate everything we prepared in the sukkah.

The second meeting was devoted to Zofia Hartman’s book “The Sugihara List.” The history of the Holocaust has its non-European threads. Zofia Hartman’s work tells the story of one of them. Chiune Sugihara (1900–1986), a Japanese diplomat and spy who served as the consul of the Empire of Japan in Kaunas, issued transit visas to several thousand Jews, mostly refugees from Poland, in the summer of 1940, allowing them to pass through Japan on their way to the Dutch island of Curaçao in the Caribbean. This was fiction – in reality, no one went to Curaçao, and most of the rescued Jews eventually found refuge in Japan, a ghetto in Shanghai, Australia or New Zealand. The meeting consisted of two parts: a conversation with the author led by JCC General Director Patrycja Dołowy, and a question-and-answer session. Michael Schudrich, the Chief Rabbi of Poland, was also present. He met with Chiune Sugihara (when he was a rabbi in Japan) and told us this story, which was very moving.