Polish town’s event honouring local Jewish composer cancelled after far-right backlash

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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 this weekend 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.

Mysior argued that singing in German was particularly inappropriate because in the early 20th century, when Września was under German rule, local Polish children organised strikes and other protests against the Germanisation of local schools.

“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 last weekend, reports broadcaster Tok FM.

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”.

That was a slogan Braun used during his recent campaign for this year’s presidential elections, where he finished fourth with 6.3% of the vote. His campaign was littered with anti-Jewish, anti-Ukrainian and anti-LGBT sentiment.

Braun is currently facing multiple charges in Poland from prosecutors who accuse him of various crimes, including inciting hatred, Holocaust denial, theft, criminal defamation, and destruction of property.

Some of those alleged offences are related to an infamous incident in December 2023, when Braun used a fire extinguisher to put out Hanukkah candles during a parliamentary ceremony involving Jewish leaders.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: © European Union 2025 – Source : EP

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.