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The interwar period was a highly special time in reference to defining and constructing all kinds of cultural identities in Europe. One of the groups building their identity at the time were the so-called Westjuden, a Jewish community culturally defined as Ashkenazi assimilated under the influence of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah). In German territory, Westjuden considered themselves German citizens of the Jewish faith, thus separating themselves from the remaining groups of Ashkenazi Jews, i.e. the Ostjuden. Also describing themselves as Germans in the German-language Jewish press, Westjuden frequently characterized, analyzed, and searched for confirmation of their belonging to the German cultural circle. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the image of Germans and Westjuden themselves in the German-language Jewish press at the time of the First World War and in the interwar period.
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The goal of the article is to introduce one of the youngest Jewish generations in Poland, known as the “unexpected generation”, based on my own research and the findings of other researchers. At the same time, I consider the essence of upbringing in a mixed family and its consequences for the socio-cultural identity of this generation. I look at ways of constructing patterns of Jewish family life and possible forms and content of intergenerational family transmission. I also highlight challenges and potential threats faced by Jewish families living in Poland today. Consequently, I try to outline possible further research directions related to issues of cultural content transmission in a family and the transmission of Jewish religious and linguistic heritage.
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Based on archival documents and published and unpublished materials of oral history, the paper offers an overview of the Holocaust in the Kalinindorf district (territories of modern-day Kherson and Mykolaiv Oblast, Ukraine) and the reaction of survived Jews after their return from evacuation and the front. Through particular cases, the paper shows the variants of behaviour and adaptation of Jews to post-war living conditions. The mid-1940s serves as the historical background; it was a period when antisemitic attitudes strengthened in society and in the party leadership. The article indicates how the Jews returned to the pre-war lifestyle in rural areas, but also their rejection of new conditions and changes in the place where they lived. It also investigates the formation of the Jewish community’s tradition of commemorative practices in places of mass executions of Jews.
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Review:Krzysztof Rybak, Dzieciństwo w labiryncie getta. Recepcja mitu labiryntu w polskiej literaturze dziecięcej o Zagładzie, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa 2019.
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The Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) of Birobidzhan in Siberia is still alive. The once famous “Siberian Zion”, at the confluence of the Bira and Bidzhan rivers, a stone’s throw away from China and a day from the Pacific Ocean, 9,000 km and six days by train from Moscow, is still a geographical reality. The political class of the Soviet Union decided to create a territory the size of Belgium for a settlement for Jews, choosing a region on the border between China and the Soviet Union. It believed that Soviet Jews needed, like other national minorities, a homeland with a territory. The Soviet regime thus opted to establish an enclave that would become the JAR in 1934. We should note that the creation of the JAR was the first historically fulfilled case of building an officially recognised Jewish national territory since antiquity and well before Israel. Nevertheless, many historians declared this experiment a failure and the history of the Region only tragic. It is interesting to note, however, that the survival of the JAR in post-Soviet Russia has been not only a historical curiosity, a legacy of Soviet national policy, but today – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – it represents a very interesting case study. It is also a topic useful for the analysis and understanding of inter-ethnic relations, cooperation, and coexistence and it is a unique case of geographic resettlement that produced a special case of “local patriotism”, as an example also for different ethnic groups living in the JAR, based on Jewish and Yiddish roots.
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Moderno židovsko pitanje potječe iz vremena prosvjetiteljstva; postavilo ga je prosvjetiteljstvo – to jest, nežidovski svijet. Njegove formulacije i njegovi odgovori odredili su ponašanje i asimilaciju Židova. Još od prave asimilacije Mosesa Mendelsshona i spisa Christiana Wilhelma Dohma »O građanskom poboljšanju Židova« (1781.), isti argumenti koji su svojega glavnog predstavnika našli u Lessingu pojavljuju se uvijek iznova u svakoj raspravi o židovskoj emancipaciji. Lessingu takve diskusije duguju propagiranje tolerancije i humanosti, kao i razlikovanje između istina razuma i istina povijesti. Ta je distinkcija toliko važna zato što može legitimirati svaki slučajan primjer asimilacije u povijesti; zato mora izgledati samo kao stalno uviđanje istine, a ne kao usklađivanje i prihvaćanje neke posebne kulture na nekom posebnom i stoga slučajnom stadiju u njenoj povijesti.
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Jewish homes for the aged (moshav zkenim) began to be established in Eastern Europe in the 1840s. In the interwar period, probably over sixty Jewish institutions of this kind operated in Poland, providing care for several thousand people. We know relatively much about the figures of their founders, benefactors, social activists, and senior employees. However, gaining information about residents themselves requires much more intensive queries. The article is based primarily on articles, reports, and announcements appearing in Jewish press, supplemented by accounts published in memorial books and other sources, to recreate a general portrait of people who lived under the care of such institutions in Warsaw, Lemberg (Lviv), Vilnius, and other places.
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The main aim of the article is to present a picture of contemporary celebrations of the Victory Day in Israel from the perspective of reports from Russian-language Israeli web portals. Although the tradition of celebrations dates back to 1950, the Victory Day did not become an official public holiday until 2017. Established on 9 May as the day of remembrance for the veterans of World War II, it resulted from the actions of the Russian-speaking population in Israel on two levels. The first was the political sphere and the activity of immigrant parties, especially Yisrael Beiteinu, in the work of the Knesset. The other was the social activity of local activists. However, both of these factors would not have been so effective if it were not for the reports of Russian-language Israeli media, in particular web portals. Although the arguments of the journalists associated with the portals were not always fully justified, their work contributed to the increased interest in the issue of veterans in Israel and Victory Day celebrations.
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The project “Canon of the Memoir Literature of Polish Jews”is currently being prepared at the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław in cooperation with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Polish Scientific Publishers PWN in Warsaw. Its purpose is to introduce 27 volumes of Jewish memoirs that make up the Jews. Poland. Autobiography series into Polish academic and literary circulation, and to integrate this corpus into the current scholarly discourse on Polish history and culture. This section presents excerpts from the autobiographies of two Jewish writers translated from Yiddish: Rachel (Rokhl) Feygenberg (1885–1972) and Kadia Molodowsky (1894–1975). Rachel Feygenberg depicts her childhood in the shtetl of Lubańin Minsk province, reminiscing about her education, her family’s religiosity, her work in a shop, and the first signs of her writing talent. Molodowsky describes her work teaching homeless children during World War I and the beginnings of her poetic career. She also portrays the Jewish literary milieu in Kiev centered around the Eygns almanac, and her meeting with the patron of Yiddish literature and publisher Boris Kletskin that resulted in the publication of her first volume of poetry Kheshvendike nekht [Nights of Cheshvan].
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The project “Canon of the Memoir Literature of Polish Jews”is currently being prepared at the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław in cooperation with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Polish Scientific Publishers PWN in Warsaw. Its purpose is to introduce 27 volumes of Jewish memoirs that make up the Jews. Poland. Autobiography series into Polish academic and literary circulation, and to integrate this corpus into the current scholarly discourse on Polish history and culture. This section presents excerpts from the autobiographies of two Jewish writers translated from Yiddish: Rachel (Rokhl) Feygenberg (1885–1972) and Kadia Molodowsky (1894–1975). Rachel Feygenberg depicts her childhood in the shtetl of Lubańin Minsk province, reminiscing about her education, her family’s religiosity, her work in a shop, and the first signs of her writing talent. Molodowsky describes her work teaching homeless children during World War I and the beginnings of her poetic career. She also portrays the Jewish literary milieu in Kiev centered around the Eygns almanac, and her meeting with the patron of Yiddish literature and publisher Boris Kletskin that resulted in the publication of her first volume of poetry Kheshvendike nekht [Nights of Cheshvan].
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The purpose of the article is to present fragments of the diary of Miriam Korber-Bercovici, a young Jewish woman deported with her whole family from Southern Bukovina to the Transnistria Governorate under the Antonescu regime. The excerpts translated from the original Romanian into Polish mainly concern the author’s experiences of deportation and everyday life in the Djurin ghetto. They were selected in order to acquaint Polish readers with the situation of the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia displaced to the Transnistria Governorate during World War II. The diary was first published in Romania in 1995 as Jurnal de ghetou. The presented translation is based on the second edition of the diary published in 2017 by Curtea Veche Publishing House and Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania.
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The article looks at the fate of matzevas from the old Jewish cemetery in Pilica, probably established shortly after obtaining the requisite privilege in 1620 and used until a new cemetery was opened in 1842. After World War II, part of the matzevas from the devastated old cemetery was used as building material for a residential building. Almost 30 years of efforts to tear down that building and then the ruin that became of it, succeeded in 2018. The texts of the inscriptions from the preserved matzevas, coming from the second half of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th century are published in an annex.
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The article falls into in a series of comments on a famous Cyprian Norwid’s poem “Żydowie polscy” (“Polish Jews,” 1861). The authors, referring to the poem’s interpretations to this day, focus first and foremost on the potential of its actualisation in the context of the contemporary reflection on the Polish-Jewish relationships, and in effect they turn attention to the risk of instrumentalisation that this mode of analysis brings about. A flagrant example of such practices is the reception of the text that took place in connection with the celebration of the poet’s 50th death anniversary in 1933 in the papers of disparate worldview and political orientation (from “Myśl Narodowa” <“National Thought”> to “Nasz Przegląd” <“Our Review”>). The analysis of the statements allows to settle that the poem’s variously profiled clarifications reveal its ambiguous reading in the context of Norwid’s alleged attitude to Polish Jews and their place in citizen society, and in our perspective also induces to verify the modes of their presentation in the Polish imaginarium.
More...Dési János interjúja egy barátságról, s Hernádi Miklósról a műgyűjtőről
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Review of: Ilan Pappe, Deset mitova o Izraelu, Udruženje građana „Multi“, Tuzla, 2021.
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