Grant Map EU

Due to the historical events and political processes of the last century, migration of rural residents to the towns and disappearance of the Jewish population traditional for the city (town, shtetl), the shtetls also disappeared. And together with them, urban folklore and a traditional urban celebration, as a symbolic value that unites a diverse urban community, vanished as well. Nowadays ethnographers and cultural activists on the Program area collect and promote rural folklore mainly which is confirmed by the developed traditional dance movement in Poland and Belarus, the publication of folk song collections, the exhibits of national costume collections, the emergence of musical bands, academic and independent ethnographic communities and festivals of traditional (Belarusian and Polish) culture. There are Kamyanitsa festival, Bereginya and Metelitsa traditional culture contests in Belarus. This movement is even more developed in Poland. At the same time, urban (Jewish) folklore is poorly studied and difficult to access for research due to the events of World War II, the mass emigration of the Jews and the closed nature of the Jewish community, which before World War II accounted for about half (in some places up to 80-90%) of the urban population of the Programme area. The SHTETLFOLKFEST Project idea is to draw the attention of cultural activists, ethnographers and creative communities of the Programme area to the study of urban folklore and traditions of former Jewish towns, in order to preserve the “shtetl” as an important part of our common culture and to influence the re-thinking of the urban celebration as a symbolic value uniting the urban community. Our idea is to create an artistic forum for discussion in the form of an annual cross-border urban culture festival for the exchange of ideas and the promotion of urban (shtetl) folklore. A cross-border approach will benefit the project considerably.