Whether you have three hours, three days, or three weeks, Taube Jewish Heritage Tours is prepared to offer you, your family, your campus, or your organization an extraordinary experience of discovery and connection.

Journeys of Discovery through Poland

About Taube Jewish Heritage Tours

We are a mission-driven, on-the-ground Jewish heritage tour service based in Poland. We design tours for visitors from around the world, most frequently including the United States, Canada, Israel, and Europe. Our professional team of academics, guides, educators, and community leaders provide meaningful and engaging customized tours of Poland’s multicultural landscape, infusing each encounter with illuminating personal stories and insights from those engaged in Polish Jewish life and committed to the preservation of Polish Jewish heritage.

You have many choices, and we are ready to help you make them:

We are a full-service operation and can attend to all of your travel logistics, offer special rates at five- and four-star hotels, and partner with land providers in the US and Israel.

Our guides are scholars and educators who have been trained for presenting Poland’s multicultural landscape.

We provide orientations and educational resources that prepare you for your journey.

We have extensive experience in organizing educational and community group tours, family genealogy excursions, VIP delegations.

Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland

Taube Jewish Heritage Tours is the flagship program of the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland Foundation. The Taube Center was established in Warsaw in 2009. The Taube Center offers innovative educational programs and extensive resources with the aim to enrich Jewish life in Poland and to connect Jews from around the world with their Eastern European heritage. Through educational and cultural programs in Jewish studies, tourism, publishing, and the arts and media, the Taube Center strengthens Polish Jewish literacy and cultivates global knowledge and a celebration of a living Polish Jewish heritage drawn from a rich historical legacy.

The Taube Center places special importance on heritage study tours that bring special groups of people —Jewish professionals, students and faculty, and families — in direct contact with a new and different Polish Jewish experience in the broader influential context of a 21st century democratic Poland.

A tour’s effectiveness depends greatly on the skill of the personnel leading it, so the Taube Center has established a special training program, Mi Dor Le Dor, for tour leaders and educators to study both the thousand years of Polish Jewish history and the post-Communist emergence of Jewish culture. The curricula, professionally led and organized tours and mentoring, provide a broad perspective on current-day realities in Poland.  

We are a mission-driven, on-the-ground Jewish heritage tour service based in Poland. We design tours for visitors from around the world, most frequently including the United States, Canada, Israel, and Europe. Our professional team of academics, guides, educators, and community leaders provide meaningful and engaging customized tours of Poland’s multicultural landscape, infusing each encounter with illuminating personal stories and insights from those engaged in Polish Jewish life and committed to the preservation of Polish Jewish heritage.

Our team

Meet us

Helise Lieberman

Director

Ms. Lieberman is the director of the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland. A former Hillel director, she was the founding principal of the Lauder-Morasha Day School in Warsaw and has served as consultant to the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe, the Westbury Group, and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Aleksandra Makuch

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

Aleksandra holds a BA in linguistics from Jagiellonian University, Kraków and an MA in International Relations from the Tischner European University in Kraków.

Jakub Lysiak

General Tour Manager

Jakub joined the Taube Jewish Heritage Tour staff in December 2015. He is an experienced tour assistant, guide, and researcher, having established and managed his own firm, Polin Consulting, in 2007 (now incorporated into TJHT).

Anna Szczesniak

Assistant General Tour Manager

Anna Szcześniak, joined the Taube Jewish Heritage Tour staff in April 2017. Anna holds a Master’s in Hebrew Studies and a Bachelor’s in Iberian Studies from the University of Warsaw. She also studied in Paris and Berlin.

Paweł Łukaszewicz

Program Coordinator

Among various other duties at the Taube Center, Paweł is the coordinator for Taube Jewish Heritage Tours. He is interested in the topics of Warsaw and urban planning, and the city of Lviv and the region of Eastern Galicia.

Aleksandra (Ola) Sajdak

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE

Born in Warsaw, Ola has interned at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute. She served as a Taube Center intern in 2011 and joined the staff in 2012, bringing her research and computer skills to the team.

Kaja Siczek

ASSISTANT TOUR COORDINATOR

Kaja Siczek was born in 1995 and was raised in Warsaw. For the last 13 years, she has been connected with the Jewish community in Warsaw. She joined the Taube Jewish Heritage Tours staff in September of 2018 and previously worked at JCC Warszawa. Kaja is a camp counsellor at the Polish Jewish Youth Summer Camp „ATID” and eternal challah lover.

Our Scholars

Dr. Karen Underhill

Dr. Karen Underhill is assistant professor of Polish literature and Polish-Jewish studies in the  Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research at the intersection of Polish and Jewish cultures and literatures focuses on Polish and Yiddish modernisms; Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish culture in the interwar period; and changing narratives of Poland as a multilingual and pluralist space of encounter.  Dr. Underhill received her PhD in Polish and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, was 2013-2013 Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; is co-founder of Massolit Books & Cafe in Kraków, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Chicago YIVO Society. She has published articles in POLIN Journal, East European Politics and Societies (EEPS), Slavic and East European Journal (SEEJ), Czas Kultury, and Jewish Renaissance, and is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled “Writing in the Third Language: Bruno Schulz and Jewish Modernity”.

Dr. Samuel Kassow

Dr. Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity  College. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and has lectured and taught in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Lithuania, Russia, Poland and Israel. He has been a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, the Leon I. Mirell Visiting Professor at Harvard and the Shier Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto. From 2006 until the present, he has been the lead historian for two of the galleries at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson and Danforth Fellowships and has been an IREX Fellow at Warsaw and Moscow. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research.

Dr. Tomasz Cebulski

Dr. Tomasz Cebulski was born in Krakow and received two Master’s in International Relations and in Middle and Far East Studies, and a Ph.D. in Political Relations, all from Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His degrees focused on Polish – Israeli Relations; the role of the Holocaust Memory in shaping Israeli identity; and political and international aspects of the functioning of the state museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. He is an official guide for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, the city of Krakow, the Galicia region, and the Schindler’s Factory Museum. He has guided and offered genealogical services with his firm POLIN TRAVEL for over twenty years. 

Dr. Agnieszka (Agi) Legutko

Dr. Agnieszka (Agi) Legutko is the Director of the Yiddish Language Program at Columbia University. Dr. Legutko specializes in modern Yiddish literature, language, and culture, women and gender studies, spirit possession in Judaism, as well as in American and European modern Jewish literature, theater, and film. She is the author of Krakow’s Kazimierz: Town of Partings and Returns (Bezdroża, 2004). 

Dr. Deborah Esther Lipstadt

Dr. Deborah Esther Lipstadt  is an American historian, best known as the author of Denying the Holocaust (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005) and The Eichmann Trial (2011). She is currently the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Lipstadt was a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1994, she was appointed by Bill Clinton to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, serving two terms. Lipstadt is the heroine of the film “Denial” by Mick Jackson. “Denial” is a fact-based courtroom drama which revolves around the famous libel suit. In 1998, British historian and famous Holocaust denier David Irving sued Lipstadt for libel. On April 11, 2000, the British Royal High Court of Justice ruled in her favor. Lipstadt visited Poland in January 2017 at the invitation of UIP and Taube Center for the Polish premiere of “Denial”. 

Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is the Chief Curator and advisor to the Director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. A New York University cultural anthropologist and museologist, Dr. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was named a “Forward 50” Jewish American Leader in Jewish Thought and Culture in 2008; received both the 2008 National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2008 Yosl Mlotek Prize for Yiddish and Yiddish Culture; and is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work stands at the forefront of Jewish scholarship in the U.S. and worldwide. She is a university professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and is also affiliated with the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She has been co-convening the Working Group on Jews, Religion, and Media at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media with Jeffrey Shandler since 2003. Dr. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is also the author of numerous publications. Long associated with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett worked with Polish-born scholar Lucjan Dobroszycki on the landmark 1976 exhibition “Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life Before the Holocaust,” which later was made into a book and a film. Her book, They Called Me Mayer July (University of California Press, 2007) was a collaboration with her father, Mayer Kirshenblatt, who died in 2009 at the age of 93. The book combined Mr. Kirshenblatt’s paintings depicting pre-war life in his hometown of Opatow, Poland, with stories gleaned from interviews that Dr. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett began conducting with him in the 1960s.

Jeffrey Yoskowitz

Jeffrey Yoskowitz is a unique voice in the food world. A Brooklyn-based writer, food entrepreneur, educator and public speaker at the intersection of food, culture and business, he’s a co-founder of The Gefilteria, a hub for innovation in Jewish food. He produces culinary events and presents lectures and demos around the world. In 2019, he’ll serving as the chef and scholar-in-residence for History, Heritage and Herring, a food and heritage tour through eastern Europe with Taube Heritage Tours and the award-winning POLIN museum. He teaches a summer course on the anthropology of Jewish food at Brandeis University. In 2016, he co-authored the cookbook The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods, named a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Jeffrey writes about food, culture and politics for some great publications, from The New York Times to The Atlantic to The Forward, among others. He was named to both the Forbes 30 Under 30 in food & wine and to the Forward 50.