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Life is a gift from God. It is sacred for God is the absolute holiness. Being received as a gift from God, it is our duty to bring her to its holiness and then give it back to God to render it eternal, not to let it be spoilt by our nature that was corrupted by the original sin. Meant to support human life, the Human Rights Declaration considers life to be the right of rights, which is the greatest right which ultimately surpasses the others. In other words, all the other rights are meant to give quality to life. Based on these realities, according both to divine right and human right, we all have the holy duty to respect our personal life and its proper dignity (values) and in the same time we have the duty to respect in all respects the life of our brother. All attempts to take someone’s life are forbidden.
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Our Class was received in Poland with enthusiasm. The author was praised for his courage and his voice was considered a balanced part of the Jedwabne pogrom discussion, taking place in Poland since 2000. Why this enthusiasm now, when the publication of the Neighbours was received without it? What changes to narration about Jedwabne provided by Słobodzianek were so successful? The article described the drama’s reception which turns out to be selective. It also refers to the play’s text, bringing out two orders of presenting and explaining the events. Firstly, Our Class creates a picture of interpersonal relations where social mechanisms of discrimination are erased. This thread is picked up and developed by the Polish reviewers. The Slaughter on Jews becomes an outcome of a conflict between two equal groups with similar possibilities of action and agency and therefore not linked to domination of the majority over the minority. Hence, the symmetry of harm and as a consequence, the question of guilt and the alleged tragedy of the characters becomes unsolvable. That is supported by psychological explanations of motives and behaviours, modelled on family relations. The viewpoint of the event’s participants, that is a discrimination symptom itself, is being treated as an objectifying description. Seen up close and psychologized fates of the characters veil the background of the dominating group’s violence. This violence can be explained only in sociological terms. However Słobodzianek refers also to descriptions on a social level. In that manner he constructs the scene of Rachelka’s wedding and the handling of her salvation after the war relating it to extraordinarily described phenomena of the Righteous Among the Nations’ social functioning. He notices and describes subordination rituals organised for the Survivors and the Survivor’s mimicry. Those threads were completely ignored by the reviewers, however. They were also unable to break through the narration structures of the first type, which are more recognisable.
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The paper provides a reconstruction and proposes the deconstruction of the conception of the Polish experience of the Holocaust as collective trauma. The analytical framework is based on the revision of concepts such as Polish witness (bystander/onlooker – according to Hilberg) and indifference on the part of Polish majority society towards the persecution and murder of the Jews. The text postulates that the concept of indifference as well as that of the non-Jewish witness (bystander/onlooker) be dropped from the standard terminology used when describing the Holocaust. It proposes that the concept of the non-Jewish witness (bystander/onlooker) be replaced by the concept of participating observer – with a different understanding from that established within cultural anthropology. Thus, watching would be a form of activity, a way of having an influence on the events, of agency, and therefore participation. A significant part of my argument includes an attempt to address the question of the construction of watching during the Holocaust. From this it follows that watching constitutes the most basic form of power (droit de regard – according to Foucault and Bourdieu). Therefore, the question arises of whether or not one can describe the margins of the Holocaust within the terms of panoptic reality (le panoptisme – according to Foucault). A further question under consideration is whether one can depict the dominant majority as an unofficial authority wielding something akin to social control over the completion of the Holocaust understood as the German Nazi system of persecution and extermination of the Jews. The argument also foregrounds the actual functions of the concepts of the non-Jewish witness (bystander/onlooker) and indifference as well as the idea of the Holocaust as a trauma for the non-Jewish witness (bystander/onlooker). These functions resulted several times in the elimination of the historical concrete and its societal-cultural conditions from the field of vision. In this sense, the conception of unacquired memory (i.e. the Polish trauma of the Holocaust) would be a strategy for acquiring the memory of the Holocaust in such a way that it does not endanger the dominant narrative about the past and the identity of the majority. Furthermore, the paper proposes the deconstruction of the concept of Polish-Jewish dialogue by identifying the phenomena of false symmetry and false universalization that frequently result in defining anti-Semitism and the Holocaust within the categories of a groups conflicts. The inspiration to undertake such a critical analysis came from the paradigmatic work by Michael C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust, published in 1997. (The Polish-language edition entitled Pamięć nieprzyswojona. Polska pamięć Zagłady [Memory unacquired. The Polish memory of the Holocaust] came out in 2000, translated by Agata Tomaszewska.)
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Review: Literatura polska wobec Zagłady (1939-1968) [Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968)], ed. by S. Buryła, D. Krawczyńska and J. Leociak, Fundacja Akademia Humanistyczna, Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012.
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The anti-Semitism of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin became, at the beginning of the Cold War, an anti-Semitic paranoia and took on the most radical form during the campaign against Western influence on Soviet society. Soon after the destruction of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, the Doctors’ Plot campaign was launched at the end of 1952; it soon became a perfect basis for blaming all Jews as disloyal to the Soviet regime. In the republics of the USSR the local Communist leaders supported the anti-Semitic campaign in Moscow with allegations about Jewish medical crimes at the local level.Despite much circumstantial evidence and many testimonies there still is no strong basis for the conclusion that the anti-Semitic campaign of 1952-1953 would soon turn into a large-scale repression campaign or wholesale genocide of the Jewish population in the USSR, but the clear anti-Jewish policy and the Soviet practice of the mass repression of nations leaves little doubt that the Soviet society was mentally prepared for the deportation of Jews to Siberia. The Soviet regime practiced constant archive purge campaigns, and documents about politically sensitive issues or regime crime were destroyed on a regular basis. Despite all regime efforts, some traces of anti-Semitic campaign preparation, control, and coordination may be found not in the central state institutions of the USSR but in the Communist Party archives of the republics. At the republican level Communist party Central Committees some top secret documents of the anti-Semitic campaign of 1953 were preserved in specific archive units, the so-called Osobaja Papka.In the USSR the reports of local party leaders to Moscow always described never-existing enthusiastic popular support for Soviet policies; thus the true scale of anti-Semitism in society can’t be determined on the basis of such sources. But they demonstrate that local Soviet institutions supported the spread of anti-Semitism during the infamous Doctors’ Plot campaign of 1953. They also permit the conclusion that any anti-Semitic campaign would not be limited to negative propaganda and at least part of Soviet society was ready to accept some repression of Jews.Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 put an early end to the anti-Semitic campaign. Soon Stalin’s political heirs quashed charges against the doctors and even punished a few distinguished instigators of the campaign, but there was no official and public condemnation of that anti-Semitic campaign. Thereupon anti-Semitism became less aggressive but still remained very strong in the USSR.
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« Nous ne voulons pas que notre histoire soit oubliée ! » » Ceci résume bien les motivations d’un bon nombre d’écrivains juifs francophones originaires des pays arabes. Or pendant longtemps, l’oubli menaçait d’une seconde disparition la civilisation séfarade. Aujourd’hui pourtant, cette mémoire resurgit comme jamais. “We don’t want our story to be forgotten !” This statement sums up the motivations of many French-speaking Jewish writers from Arab nations. For a long time, loss of memory threatened to make Sephardic civilisation disappear for a second time. Today,however, these memories are flourishing like never before. Keywords : Forgetting, silence, Sephardic memory, literature, Sephardic history Giovanni Rotiroti, « Perspectives psychanalytiques du regard : Gherasim
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The article discusses the reception of Tuwim’s manifesto in Israel, focusing in particular on the 1940s. The author analyses various critical reponses to the poem expressed by Jewish critics in Palestine. Tuwim’s reception in Israel is presented from a new perspective which has not been explore so far.
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The term “post-Jewish property” has a descriptive function in Polish. It is present in both colloquial speech and academic discourse. This specific collocation usually does not raise semantic suspicions and is considered a carrier of neutral content used to describe certain material assets, that is the property of Jews who were murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust, in particular – the real estate remaining in Poland, whose owners changed. The problem with the term “post-Jewish property” understood in this way is that it is based on false foundations and incorporates functions assigned to it in order to ensure the comfort of the Polish national community. The key objective of this paper is to deconstruct this highly convenient and useful conceptual collocation, indicate its origin and, primarily, to answer the question of what it tries to erase/conceal.
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Analytical registers to the catalogue of archive materials from Jewish Communities with the exception of that of Prague, drawn by K. Dolista and J. Šmolka
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Both the numbers are devoted to the archives funds from Bohemian and Moravian Jewish communities, Except Prague, kept in the State Jewish Museum and also to Jewish registers to be found in the Central State Archives in Prague. The archives material is put into twelve analytical tables each of them including 42 columns of basic data. The tables are published in number 2 of this volume, while number 1 contains the description of the archives funds in question, instructions how to use the analytical tables, and indexes.
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The authoress is interested in Renaissance synagogue curtains of Prague provenance. She analyses the curtains of this type preserved in the collections of the State Jewish Museum and also pays attention to their makers (the Perlsticker family and others).
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The restauration of Israel is one of the main concerns of the prophet Jeremiah. Yahweh is the one who gives life to the people wherever they are, as a gift, as a spoil of war. The deliverance of every believer from the bondage of sin and death is a pleasing concern to the Lord. The prophet Jeramiah is a model for any historical stage of man who fights to win his freedom, offering himself as a paradigm of courage and daring. Ebed Melec, an Ethiopian, therefore a stranger, a royal official in Jerusalem, trusts in Yahweh more than any native or Israel. Many Jews, during the conquering of the Holy citadel by the Babylonians, will die by the sword, by famine and by plague, while a foreigner, Ebed Melec, will be protected and kept alive. An authentic prophet shows how precious is the unforeseen and unexpected freedom obtained in a special historical context. The faithful man will be under divine protection wherever and whenever, because the Lord offers him a blessed freedom.
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The aim of the paper is to show the roots of Hitler's rule of terror. In this paper, we will look at Hitler's childhood and try to publish how it, to a large extent, influenced his delays in political activity.
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This paper presents the evidence regarding the history of Jewish community in Krusevac. It tells a story of those who remained firm to the faith of their ancestors, and those who, due to specific political and economic circumstances during the reign of Obrenovic dynasty, converted to Orthodox Christianity. The main source for this paper is based primarily on family archives and collected materials of brothers Slavoljub and Sava (Saul) Šaronjić, who themselves are descended from Jews who had converted to Orthodoxy.
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The only roof under which different believers and religious communities can live together in relative peace is tolerance. If they cannot be with each other, they can be next to each other, not necessarily against each other. Islamic believers are our younger brothers, just as Jewish believers are out older brothers – they can learn from each other and thus, make their experience richer. While they have a dialogue, they are out of any evil. If all three religions advocate the same values, which are love, justice and peace, where do hatred, conflicts and wars come from? Obviously, these phenomena do not come from religion, but from religious ideologies – clericalism, nationalism, and fundamentalism – i.e. they occur when religious faith is put into service of limited interests. Bigotry stems not from theology, but from ideology.
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This paper posits a variety of reasons for the particular ways in which both Holocaust theology and Jewish-Christian dialogue have developed over the last seventy years and suggests that, because of the particular circumstances of the Holocaust and its relationship to historical conceptions of judgement and forgiveness in the Jewish and Christian faiths respectively, it may not be helpful to use discussions of guilt and forgiveness arising out of Holocaust theology (formal or informal) as the basis for developing a Jewish, Christian or inter-faith theology of guilt, forgiveness and reconciliation in the wake of atrocity more generally. The paper explores the cost for perpetrator, victim and international/bystander communities of accepting any narrative according to which those involved in the enacting of atrocities are defined entirely by their guilt and denied all possibility of forgiveness. It suggests that, in the wake of a conflict where the experience is too raw for it to be reasonable to ask or expect perpetrators or their representatives to acknowledge guilt or victims and their family members to extend forgiveness, it may be helpful to encourage an interim stage in the reconciliation process during which those identified as part of the perpetrator community are asked to acknowledge the flawedness of any human decision or action and thus the possibility of culpability whist those who identify as victims are required to acknowledge the prerogative of God to forgive whom, as and when He (alone) sees fit.
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