III. Sukkah (סוכה)

Text: Magdalena Krysińska-Kałużna, March 2022

‘I’ll show you where it is’ says Aleksander Chojnacki as he puts on his coat. He seems to be in a bit of a hurry. We put distance between his legal office at Wojska Polskiego and 3 Maja 42 in three minutes.

I remembered Mr. Aleksander and how knowledgeable he was about Konin’s sukkot from a meeting with Mrs. Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak. Following the disgraceful demolition of the Talmudic school building, we organized a series of meetings on Jewish culture with the Pełnym Głosem foundation six years ago. One of the events was a meeting with a former director of the history museum in Gosławice. Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak knew everything about the Jewish history of Konin. As it turned out, a portion of the audience was quite well-informed on the matter too.

We arrive in front of the building that I walked past hundreds of times. Yet, it never occurred to me that the balcony visible from on the backyard side could be a sukkah.

Photo: Magdalena Krysińska-Kałużna

Sukkah means “a hut” in Hebrew and it is required for celebrating Sukkot. In practice, however, sukkah doesn’t have to resemble a hut, especially in countries where autumns, which is when Sukkot takes place, are cold.

In order to celebrate Sukkot, Jews construct huts and spend time in them over the seven days of the holiday. The tradition requires that the shelter becomes a temporary house, an obligation which is fulfilled at least by consuming all meals inside of it. In Israel and other countries with warmer climate, however, many people stay in the huts both in the daytime and the nighttime. In countries where the Sukkot time period tends to be cold and rainy, like in Poland, the tradition relieves from the obligation to consume meals inside the hut when the weather precludes it.

A sukkah, the holiday hut, must have at least three stable walls, made from any material. The roof can be made only from plants, such as tree branches, bamboo, etc. A sukkah should be placed under the open sky and its roof should have holes in them, so that one can see stars from the inside during the night. The interior of the hut should be decorated with fruit, flowers, fruit tree branches, paintings, cut-outs, ribbons and even oriental carpets.

[Source: https://polin.pl/pl/sukkot-swieto-szalasow]

‘I learned that these are sukkot [plural of sukkah] when I was drafting a notary act,’ tells Aleksander Chojnacki. ‘My clients told me about this. I’ll try to find out about the former owners of these buildings in the archives.’

I tell him that I’d appreciate it a lot and share some information about the tenement house on Wojska Polskiego Street, the starting point of our short walk. Józef Lewandowski described the building and his residents in his Four Days in Atlantis as follows:

On the opposite bank of the river, there is a three-story tenement house, the only one with running water and plumbing, property of Dr. Kabata. On the ground floor lived the old Bajrach, a local wealthy man. [...] Bajrach invited my father and me for tea one day and showed his book collection to us. It turned out that he was a collector of Hebrew old prints. He was taking out folios from the cabinet and we read the publishing dates together. Incomprehensible characters were appearing in front of my eyes, one volume had a pre-Gutenberg date. If it wasn’t an error, then it had been printed with a woodblock. I was too young to assess the library, but I knew that I was holding priceless treasures in my hands (p.14)

We bid each other farewell. I look at the tenement house by the Warta River, think about Bajrach, the Hebrew old prints, the war in Ukraine and how fast the world we know becomes history.

Translation: Ada Kałużna