Justyna Biernat—founder of the Arcades of Memory Foundation. Justyna has been involved in the preservation of the memory of Jews from Tomaszów Mazowiecki both culture and academia for many years now. She runs educational-artistic projects, organizes tours in the area of the former Tomaszów ghetto, writes scholarly texts and remains in close touch with the descendants of Jews from Tomaszów. In my cultural and scholarly activities I try to decipher traces of the past. I understand the process of deciphering as seeking similarities building relations between what is now, and what has been hidden behind the trace, namely with the Jewish past of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Jews constituted one-fourth of the total population of Tomaszów in the interwar period. Today the only material vestige of this community is the cemetery. Obviously, there are many more vestiges, albeit non-material ones. These are various testimonies, memoirs, archival documents, family keepsakes. I try to collect all these traces and to share my collection during numerous educational and cultural projects. I have been running the Arcades of Memory Foundation which is engaged in the preservation of the Jewish heritage of Tomaszów Mazowiecki for several years. I run all sorts of workshops as part of my Foundation operation. With the participation of multi-generation groups we discover the Jewish past of Tomaszów and the traces I have mentioned. Together, we produce performances, we write literary texts, and we produce audio-guides. Moreover, I conduct research, I contact the descendants of Tomaszów Jews and I run a bilingual webpage devoted to the history of Jews from Tomaszów. I wish Jews were included in the collective memory of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. I would like Tomaszów to remember its Jews and Jews to remember Tomaszów. I am very keen on a relation that is based on reciprocity. One could say that the activities that I engage in are ephemeral. These are mostly workshops and other projects. Such is the dynamics of social, NGO and foundation-related activity. However, I deeply believe that it is precisely by way of these seemingly ephemeral actions, 
when we hold a discussion in a multi-generational group and establish a common language for a dialogue with one another, as well as with Tomaszów’s Jewish past, we truly preserve the memory of the Jews from Tomaszów. I prefer to focus on the category of memory rather than a category of commemoration.