BIOGRAM
Doctor of Musical Arts and a Doctor of Economics, Head of the Centre for Revived Music based in Szczecin, and organist at the Pestalozzistraße Synagogue in Berlin. He graduated from the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, where he studied in the organ class of Professor Andrzej Chorosiński. Since 2017, he has been a lecturer at the Academy of Art in Szczecin. From 2018, he led the Jewish Music Days Festival in Szczecin, now transformed into the Festival of Revived Music.
In 2023, Requiem Records released his solo album THE ECHO OF THE TEMPLE, featuring world premieres of works dedicated to him by Adam Porębski, Aleksandra Chmielewska, Anna Maria Huszcza, Marcin Tadeusz Łukaszewski, Dariusz Przybylski, and Ignacy Zalewski. In 2025, he was awarded a scholarship by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
He has given lectures and concerts in dozens of cities across Poland, as well as in Germany, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Austria, Israel, and even in such an exotic location as the organ-equipped synagogue in Kingston, Jamaica.
His projects and artistic initiatives are increasingly recognized as historically significant and groundbreaking. He took part in the first post-war concert in the history of Warsaw’s synagogues to feature organ music, held at the Nożyk Synagogue. In Berlin, he made the first-ever recording of organ works by Arno Nadel, the pre-war music director of Berlin’s synagogues. At his initiative, the music of Warsaw’s most renowned Jewish composers and cantors—Jakub Weiss and Dawid Ajzensztadt—was performed and recorded for the first time in modern history. At the Tempel Synagogue in Kraków, he was the first since the war to perform works by Eliezer Goldberg, and he restored to Białystok the song of Moshe Rabinowicz—both of whom had served for decades as cantors in those cities.
The subject of his doctoral dissertation in music, defended at the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music in Wrocław, was “The Works of Jewish Composers of Organ Music in Central Europe, 1810–1938”—the first monograph on this subject in Polish scholarship. The dissertation received third prize in the 10th Majer Bałaban Competition for the best doctoral theses, organized by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, becoming the first work in the field of musical arts ever awarded in the competition’s history.
Jakub Stefek is also a cultural economist, a certified IPMA project manager, and a graduate of postgraduate studies at the Warsaw School of Economics. He has participated in numerous artistic and academic conferences and has collaborated with, among others, the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and the Main Board of the Polish Association of Choirs and Orchestras. He was a TEDx Warsaw speaker, where his talk on the inspirational power of the organ was heard live by an audience of several thousand.
He is the author of publications including “Defining Audiences of Organ Music,” “Cultural Products in the Opinions of Consumers: The Case of the POLIN Museum,” and “Were Organs Hipster? A Historical Instrument in Contemporary Culture.” His doctoral dissertation in economics, defended at the University of Economics in Katowice, focused on modeling consumer behavior in the Polish performing arts market.
He is actively involved in initiatives promoting the cultural history of Szczecin and collaborates with the Mieczysław Karłowicz Philharmonic in Szczecin. He is a member of the Presidential Council for Culture appointed by the Mayor of the City of Szczecin.
