Polish cuisine wins Israeli hearts and stomachs

How do you encourage Israelis to change their perceptions of today's Poland? November's Polish Culinary Week, which took place in restaurants, bakeries and bars in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, was a unique first attempt at redefining Israeli relations with the Polish people. For this ambitious festival, a first-of-its-kind culinary event, the Polish Institute invited chefs, restaurant owners, culinary experts and journalists from Poland to bridge the two cultures and expose Israelis to Polish contemporary cuisine. Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe up until the Holocaust.

The man behind the initiative is Aryeh Rosen, director of cultural programs at the Polish Institute.

"During my visits to Poland, I went through an outstanding culinary experience," says Rosen. "I was very surprised, because in Israel, Polish cuisine has become synonymous with awful food. I thought that Polish food could be a wonderful way to tell a story with a larger cultural significance and a way of breaking stigmas about Polish Jewry and its cuisine."

Polish Jewish cuisine has become the target of comical sketches in Israel. The national joke archive qualifies this cuisine as flavorless and unappetizing, with grey meatballs, lifeless noodles, washed-out meat stock and white fat. Rosen wishes to rectify this image with that remembered by Israelis of Polish origin.

"This was the strongest culture in Israel," he says. "Then it was forgotten, becoming a derogatory term. But actually, for many people this culture is still home, language, music and food."

Preparing this one culinary week took Rosen four months of traveling to Poland, tasting everything and inviting Polish chefs to come and cook in Israeli restaurants. Much to his amazement, "The response was immediate and overwhelming. They were all very enthusiastic — the Polish chefs, the Israeli restaurants, both Tel Aviv and Haifa municipalities."

"When we launched the initiative with the media, tens of thousands of Israelis flocked to the event's webpage," says Rosen. "The 'chef diners' were quickly sold out and we had to add new events. Chefs and restaurants begged us to join in. At the end of the day, some 5,000 people attended the open and closed events. We had to turn down so many."

Sherry Ansky, a food journalist and professional cook, was present at the "ABC's of Polish Cuisine" evening held in Tel Aviv's Town Hall Museum. The culinary creativity of the Shtetls (19th century Jewish villages in Eastern Europe), she explains, stemmed from poverty conditions. To illustrate this, she elaborates on the various preparation stages of a dish of stuffed neck, which she termed the unrenowned and unattractive cousin of kishka (stuffed intestine): "There was something about those preparations that connected me to mythological Jewish motherhood, the legendary cooks," she recounts. "Those women lived in a period in which they were forced to channel all their wisdom and creativity into cooking; they were forced to activate all their talents in order to stretch food rations by using bread, flour, semolina and a bit of grated potato. These fillers absorbed the taste of a small amount of meat, and also succeeded in transforming the dish into something better than just a meat ration."

Ulla Bikont is the daughter of Piotr Bikont, the well known Polish journalist and food researcher. She came to Israel five years ago. Bikont believes that the quality of the Polish Jewish cuisine depends on the quality of its ingredients. Abandoning this attention to quality in Israel has shaped part of the poor image this cuisine has become known for in Israel.

"Polish Jews came to Israel in immigration waves that had clear socialist overtones. The idea of investing in expensive foodstuffs and raw materials was foreign and unacceptable to them. They did not cook like they cooked in Poland and did not teach their children to do so, either, exactly like they didn't teach them Yiddish. They wanted to be Israelis. This was what they focused on."

But even those who did want to preserve the past did not succeed.

"The raw materials in Israel were different," says Bikont. "They were forced to almost completely part from familiar raw materials in favor of what they could find here. The result was very far from traditional Polish cuisine." It was also a period of austerity, so fat and butter had to be replaced by margarine and vegetable fats. Cream was replaced with yogurt. Meat soup became bone soup. According to Bikont, "Our great luck is that true Polish-Jewish food was preserved in Poland, and it can always be reproduced." 

The evening at the Tel Aviv Town Hall Museum focused on the cultural meanings of the term "Polish cuisine." "This word pair is known for arousing a variety of strong feelings among Israelis," read the program, "ranging from shudders to nostalgia and curiosity regarding the exciting culinary food scene in contemporary Poland." 

These "strong feelings" arise from more than just Israeli satire on the Polish-originated cuisine: many Israelis experience forceful and contradictory feelings about it. According to one estimate, 3.4 million Jews lived in Poland prior to the Holocaust. About 240,000 of them survived there or went back after the war. Jews who immigrated or escaped to Israel before and after the war endowed their children with conflicting feelings toward Poland: On one hand, longing for the place that was home for more than 1,000 years and then gone — little of which they manage to reconstruct in family dinners and festivities in the Holy Land. On the other, there are still feelings of rage and betrayal at those who aided the Nazis in exterminating their families. The feelings prompt attempts to distance themselves from their old identity and build a sabra (Israeli-born) new one. 

The organizers of Polish Culinary Week believe that the kitchen might be the best starting point for facing the Israeli collective memory of the exterminated Jewish Polish community. It might also constitute the best starting point for bridging gaps between two worlds: that of the Israeli born culture and the Polish-European one.

Makuch is the founder and director of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, which he first established in 1988. The popular festival extends over 10 days in the summer and attracts about 30,000 people every year from Poland and the entire world. Makuch believes that similarly to Israelis of Polish origin, Poles also cannot escape their cultural heritage. He emphasizes jokingly that the contents of the festival are very contemporary, "not of the Fiddler on the Roof genre."

"After a long study of the relations between Jews and Poles, I understood that the Jews played a central cultural role in Poland and that Jewish culture was an integral part of Polish culture," he says. Many Poles are beginning to understand what they lost, to understand that there are holes in their history. Poland was the only European country in which a giant Jewish community flourished over a thousand years, the only country whose inhabitants were exposed to Jewish life on a daily, routine basis.

Polish Jewry is part of my identity. I am the son of a nation that was a home to rabbis, melamdim (teachers of Jewish religious studies) and Jewish philosophers. The Jewish Polish cuisine is also my cuisine, because it is the kosher version of the Polish kitchen.

Rosen, for his part, intends to continue exposing Israelis to the beautiful past of Polish Jewry and to the contemporary Polish cultural scene. The food tactic, so it seems, made an excellent beginning for such a journey, a renewed meeting between the two nations. On one point, Rosen has no doubts: Polish Culinary Week 2014 will have to grow significantly.