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Jewish Heritage Europe spotlighted B’nai B’rith International honoring two recipients of the second annual “Gratitude Awards” recognizing Polish citizens and institutions for their commitment to preserving Jewish heritage in Poland and cultivating Jewish-Polish relations.
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Mazel tov!
B’nai B’rith International has granted its Gratitude Award honoring Polish citizens who have shown commitment to preserving Jewish heritage in Poland and cultivating Jewish-Polish relations to Professor Łukasz Tomasz Sroka in the individual category, and the Brama Cukermana Foundation in the institutional category.
The awards were presented at a ceremony Tuesday held at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow.
The Brama Cukermana Foundation (The Cukerman’s Gate Foundation)was established by Karolina and Piotr Jakoweńko in 2009 in the town of Będzin. Their first goal was the rescue and restoration of a private Jewish prayer house which had long been used as an apartment but where historic murals were preserved in a ruined state.
Since then, the major goals of the foundation’s activity have included caring for and protecting Jewish cultural monuments, commemorating the centuries-long presence of Jews in Będzin and the region, educating the local community to promote mutual tolerance and understanding amongst cultures and conducting research on the history and life of Jews in Będzin and the surrounding area.
Its most recent project established the “Ghetto Fighters House” in Będzin, housed in a building that was part of the ghetto from 1942 to 1943 and served as a meeting place for Jewish youth involved in the region of Zaglebie resistance movement.
In their acceptance remarks, the Jarowenkos dedicated the award — “with gratitude and love for everything he said, shown and done for us” — to the memory of Alex Dancyg, a Polish Israeli historian and Holocaust educator with whom they had a close relationship, who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 and died in captivity.
Łukasz Tomasz Sroka is a Polish historian, professor of humanities, chairman of the History Discipline Council at the Pedagogical University of Krakow, and a former director (2016–2019) of the Institute of History and Archival Studies of the University of Applied Sciences. He is the author of more than a hundred scholarly works devoted to a number of topics including the history and culture of Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries, Polish-Jewish relations, the history of modern Israel, Polish-Israeli relations, Galician history (particularly Lviv and Krakow), the history of Austria in the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of elites and Freemasonry, social communication and source studies. Sroka is the creator and co-creator of several exhibitions in Poland and abroad that focus on the history of Jews as well as the histories of Krakow and Lviv.
This was the second edition of the Gratitude Awards. Last year’s winners were Urszula Antosz-Rekucka (Shtetl Mszana Dolna) in the Individual category and Forum for Dialogue in the Institutional category.
Several awards are presented each year to Poles who care for and preserve Jewish heritage and memory; the longest-running is the Preserving Memory Award, established by Michael Traison in 1998 — Brama Cukermana received that award in 2013. But B’nai Brith International says its Gratitude Award represents “the first annual award established by the global Jewish community to honor Poles for their contribution to dialogue and preservation of Jewish heritage in Poland and Jewish-Polish relations.”