A cultural event in a Polish town honouring a local Jewish composer has been cancelled after organisers said they received a “wave of hate and threats from antisemitic organisations”, stoked by far-right leader and member of the European Parliament Grzegorz Braun.
Września, a town of 30,000 in central Poland, was set to hold a series of concerts and lectures celebrating Louis Lewandowski, who was born there in 1821. Lewandowski became famous for his work composing Jewish liturgical music, which continues to be used by Jewish communities today.
Among the planned performances was a Hanukkah song sung in German by local children in a Catholic church. That sparked a backlash from some right-wing commentators.
One, a conservative Catholic YouTuber called Dawid Mysior, complained about “Talmudic songs in German in a church”. He launched a campaign to have the event cancelled.
“Now, children from the same city are being required to sing in German in a Catholic church, and what’s more, they are not singing Catholic songs, but Jewish ones,” he wrote. “Organising this event will dishonour the good name and memory of the strike participants.”
That campaign was picked up by Braun, who shared Mysior’s appeal on social media and also complained about the event in Września at a rally.
Following the backlash, one of the organisers of the event, an NGO called the Foundation for Września Children, announced that it had taken the decision to cancel it in order to protect “the wellbeing and safety of those performing and planning to attend”.
It said there had been a “wave of hate, threats, and announcements of disruptions from antisemitic organisations directed at all co-organisers of the project”. The NGO said it found the criticism “incomprehensible and incompatible with Christian culture”.
“We believed, and still believe, that it was worthwhile to showcase to the residents of Września the figure and music of Lewandowski, born in Września, his magnificent work known and admired worldwide,” they added. “Unfortunately, as we have learned, music can also divide if we don’t understand it.”
Meanwhile, Jakub Stefek, the concert’s artistic director, condemned the “hysterical, antisemitic campaign, first unleashed on a far-right YouTube channel and then picked up by Grzegorz Braun”, which had led to the event being cancelled.
“After ten years of creating projects that revive forgotten music, of telling and writing about values, of striving to build bridges between cultures and nations, of addressing the tragically scarred Polish-Jewish-German relations, this time we failed,” he added. “This is the worst day of my artistic life.”
Braun, meanwhile, celebrated the event’s cancellation, sharing Stefek’s statement with the hashtag #StopJudaizacjiPolski, meaning “stop the Judaisation of Poland”.
