The Jewish Cultural Heritage of Wielkopolska from the perspective of contemporary photography
Piotr Piliuk
photographer, publicist and documentary film makerApril 16, 2009
Center for Urban History, Lviv
Piotr Piluk gave a multimedia presentation of photographs of the Jewish memorials of Greater Poland (Central Poland) taken by the author between 1989 and 2008; it showed the cultural heritage of Jews from such towns as Kalisz and Konin as well as German Jews in such cities as Poznań, Ostrów, Buk and Leszno. By means of photographs the author searches for traces left by the Jewish communities on the Polish-German border.
The meeting and multimedia presentation was combined with a presentation of the monthly "Słowo Żydowskie" published in Warsaw. Participants received free promotional editions of the January issue dedicated to the Jewish cultural heritage of Poznan and Great Poland.
Piotr Piliuk
is an independent photographer, publicist and documentary film maker who has been working on his own “Traces of Presence” project for many years; the project aims to show Jewish relics in the urban environment of East Central Europe. Piotr Piliuk presented his photographs in Poland, Germany, Great Britain, Bulgaria, Sweden, Ukraine and the U.S. He is a member of the board of the Socio-Cultural Union of Jews in Poland (Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów w Polsce) and works in the editorial office of “Słowo Żydowskie / Dos Jidisze Wort” in Warsaw. He was a scholarship recipient of the Institute of Jewish Studies of New York and the Goethe-Institute in Berlin. In October 2008 he took part in “The Jewish Urban Heritage and History of East Central Europe” conference organized by the Center for Urban History in Lviv.