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A Jerusalem-based group announced the opening of the first Jewish kindergarten in decades in the Polish city of Lodz. Shavei Israel, which tries to bring people with Jewish roots back into the Jewish fold, said Monday that the kindergarten would open in partnership with the city’s Jewish community of a few hundred members. The first class of 10 children will start in September. The city in central Poland, about 80 miles from Warsaw, was historically home to one of the country’s most vibrant Jewish communities – and one of the largest ghettos during the Holocaust. But Jewish life all but disappeared from Lodz in 1944.

A new Web portal, Jewish Life in Poland, is making directly accessible thousands of maps, photos, films and other everyday artifacts of what was once the largest community of Eastern European Jews before World War II. Little remains of that world, but the site’s creator, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, once located in Poland but now in New York, has created a portal that presents a variety of documents, videos (from film), audio clips in Yiddish , Polish, Hebrew and Russian — all described in English.

After a gestation period of nearly two decades, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw is finally set to open its doors April 19, which is the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

In its fifth semester, the Auschwitz Jewish Center Program for Students Abroad is a long-weekend (Thursday PM through Monday AM) program in Kraków for North American students studying overseas. The program, which includes a scholarly visit to Oswiecim/Auschwitz, provides an academic environment through which participants engage intensively with the history of the Holocaust and Jewish life in Poland.