Daniel Beltram, Jona Bookstein and Michael Schudrich at a Jewish wedding in Cracow

This picture was taken at a wedding of foreign Jews in Cracow. Besides me (first from right in the front row) Jona Bookstein and Michael Schudrich - the rabbis from R. Lauder's Foundation are also on the picture.

For a long time there was no rabbi at all in Cracow. Even if anyone had wanted a wedding, a ritual one, they couldn't have, because there was no way. There were only civil weddings. Only later did Rabbi Joskowicz come, for a few years. [Pinchas Menachem Joskowicz, the chief rabbi rabbi of Poland from the late 1980s till 1999, officially lived in Warsaw, but spent most of his time in Israel.]

After him came Sasza Pecaric [the rabbi working at the Lauder Foundation center in Cracow till 2003]. And if anyone wanted to get married, he married him or her. He married perhaps two couples. As to the first one, she was English and he was an Austrian from Vienna. We went to the wedding service and the reception, which went on all night. And the wedding took place on Lag ba-Omer, which is the 33rd day counting from Pesach. I can't remember what year that was in, but I have a photograph. After the war marriages tended to be mixed. All the people who have been going to Remuh for some time now, those who stayed and didn't emigrate, all of them have Polish wives, except Reiner. Reiner's wife was Jewish. And I didn't have a Polish wife. But other than that they all had Polish wives.