„Jedna z najdonioślejszych epok w życiu Żydów”. Kongres Żydów Amerykańskich w Filadelfii (15–18 grudnia 1918 roku)

Author(s): Dariusz Jeziorny / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2018

The Congress of American Jews began its activities as an organization established to represent all Jews living in the United States during the Congress in Philadelphia. On December 15–18, 1918, a meeting of 400 delegates representing all Jewish political parties and social groups in the USA took place. It aroused great hopes because new opportunities were opening up for the Jews to resolve the Palestinian question, the main Zionist project, and to guarantee equal rights for Jewish minorities in East-Central Europe. The article answers questions about how the Congress of American Jews was convened. How did the main political groups of Jews in the USA respond to it? What was the subject of the debate? What decisions were made? And then how were they implemented and what was the future of the initiative launched in Philadelphia? Answers to these questions will allow us to draw a conclusion as to the importance of the December congress in the history of Jews in the USA and whether it fulfilled its tasks. // Kongres Żydów Amerykańskich jako organizacja mająca na celu reprezentowanie wszystkich Żydów zamieszkujących Stany Zjednoczone zapoczątkował swoją działalność od zjazdu w Filadelfii. W dniach 15–18 grudnia 1918 r. doszło do spotkania 400 delegatów reprezentujących wszystkie żydowskie stronnictwa polityczne i grupy społeczne w USA. Budził on ogromne nadzieje, ponieważ przed Żydami otwierały się nowe możliwości co do rozwiązania kwestii palestyńskiej, głównego projektu syjonistów, a także zagwarantowania równych praw mniejszościom żydowskim w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej. W artykule została udzielona odpowiedź na pytania o to, jak doszło do zwołania Kongresu Żydów Amerykańskich. Jak ustosunkowały się do niego główne ugrupowania polityczne Żydów w USA? Co było przedmiotem obrad? Jakie decyzje podjęto? A następnie w jaki sposób je zrealizowano i jakie były dalsze losy inicjatywy zapoczątkowanej w Filadelfii? Odpowiedzi na powyższe kwestie pozwolą sformułować wniosek co do tego, jaką wagę miał grudniowy kongres w dziejach Żydów w USA oraz czy wypełnił stawiane przed nim zadania.

„Jestem sobie piękną dziewczyną, czerwone nici przędę” – genderowe odczytanie obrazu kobiecości w żydowskich pieśniach ludowych

Author(s): Joanna Lisek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 31/2013

The article offers a gender reading of Yiddish folk songs: lullabies, family songs, love songs, mikveh songs, lyrical dialogues between mothers and daughters. Placed in their cultural context, they are analyzed from the perspective of the female subjectivity they express. Numerous Yiddish folk songs emerged among women, who also recorded and transmitted many of them. Alongside tkhines (women’s prayers in Yiddish), folk songs constitute the most important sphere of female literary expression before the emergence of modern Yiddish literature. By means of simple forms they describe typical gender roles of a daughter, bride, wife and mother, as well as an agunah (deserted wife); quite often they also contain social criticism of the constraints these roles imposed upon them.

„Kamienie niepokoją się i stają się agresywne”. Holokaust w świetle ekokrytyki

Author(s): Aleksandra Ubertowska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 25/2015

The article is an attempt to apply the theoretical and analytical tools derived from ecocriticism and the environmental studies, in the analyses of the literature of the Holocaust. The author proposes a thesis that a full recognition of the role of non-human factors (non-humans), such as nature, landscape, climate, plants and animals became only possible after the anthropocentric paradigm in the humanities have been overcome and a new, supra-species kind of “agency”—elaborated from the theory of Brunon Latour—became widespread. The principal part of the essay contains the analyses of the role of landscape, organic and inorganic nature in the autobiographical prose of Piotr Rawicz, Henryk Grynberg and Wilhelm Dichter. In all of the studied writings nature assumes the function of an ethical subject and additionally the role of anti-historical narration.

„Ki itt belépsz...”. Valkó László kiállítása elé

Author(s): János Weiss / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2013

A kiállításra érkezőt egy hatalmas diptichon fogadja, egy női és egy férfiarc, alig-alig felismerhetően, mintha a vászon furcsán meggyûrődött volna, talán a festés előtt, de az is lehet, hogy utána. A két portré tekintete keresztezi egymást. Ez szinte arra ösztönzi a látogatót, hogy álljon be ebbe a keresztezési pontba. Ezzel az invitálással fogadja (a művész és a kurátor) a kiállítás a látogatóit. Te, aki itt belépsz, egy életműkiállítással találkozol, Valkó László kaposváribudapesti- pécsi festőművész és grafikus kiállí - tásával.

„Klin” Tuwima: strategie przeżycia polsko-żydowskiego poety

Author(s): Giovanna Tomassucci / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2014

Tuwim’s approach to the “Jewish question” has already been analyzed by Polish and foreign scholars. The article is intended to consider some “survival strategies” of the Polish poet from a slightly different angle. In Poland, in the period between the wars Jewish writers were persuaded to accept total polonization and a rejection of their ethnic identity; yet, at the same time they often suffered rejection from the circles of Polish artists. Any attempt of highlighting their Jewish identity or even a slight interest in Jewish culture incited brutal Jew-bashings. Tuwim considered his being a Polish Jew not only as a fact to be proud of, but also as an opportunity for engaging with self-criticism. He painfully felt the Jewish question as “a powerful wedge cleaving [his own] worldview”. However, like many other Polish-Jewish writers he masked its enduring presence in his own psyche, constructing his public persona through a process of self-fashioning. This paper tries to follow the traces of this “wedge” in Tuwim’s works: from poems supposedly having nothing to do with the “Jewish question”, to encrypted allusions to the great Yiddish writers, from his relentless questioning of all forms of intolerance and nationalist rhetoric, to his conviction that a new poetic language could “reform the world” and become a homeland for all readers regardless of their nationality.

„Lost everyday life" – problems using materials diaries in research on occupational everyday life, based on the example of Krakow – observations on the margins of the study

Author(s): Anna Czocher / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2014

Materials about the nature of personal relationships are an important source of information about everyday life. This article bring information on daily life and attention is focused on the city of Krakow. In addition leading themes, personal relationships contain a lot of information about the difficulties with the supply and quality of housing, the attitude towards the changes taking place in the city, functioning within the official public life and privacy. The purpose of this article is not to criticize source materials such as memoirs, or reflections on the formation and functioning of the memory of the war and occupation.

„Ma ono na twarzy grymas dojrzałego i gorycz pokrzywdzonego […] – nie ma dzieciństwa”. Przemiany ról dzieci w rodzinie w getcie warszawskim

Author(s): Maria Ferenc Piotrowska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 11/2015

The author analyses fragments of testimonies about the Warsaw ghetto regarding children’s family relations. The article describes the demographic transformations that changed the social structure, which forced the families into functional adjustments. The most important change was the forcing of groups, which had not worked, that is children, to earn money. The article presents the consequences of those transformations for family relations and analyses the experience of childhood and parenthood in the ghetto.

„Meine Familie hatte es gut in Auschwitz“ - Das Leben der Lager-SS in Auschwitz-Birkenau nach Dienstschluss

Author(s): Anna-Raphaela Schmitz / Language(s): German / Issue: 2/2018

For SS personnel, the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp was a workplace and residence. This article focuses on the lives of the male perpetrators after official hours and explores what influence this had on their work within the camp complex and vice versa. Family structures as well as comradeship among perpetrators were meant to help maintain a subjectively experienced sense of ‘normality’. Retrospectively, it seems difficult to imagine that the SS families managed to have a ‘normal’ life in close proximity to the concentration camp. They benefited from the amenities of the infrastructure that developed around the camp complex. They often took advantage of the practice of robbery and appropriation of the prisoners’ goods. Since work life and private life in Auschwitz-Birkenau were intertwined in this way, the Holocaust and the mass crimes should also be examined from this perspective.

„Meir Ezofowicz” w cyklu ilustracji Andriollego

Author(s): Małgorzata Imperowicz-Jurczak / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 12/2009

The article concentrates on the issues of the cycle of illustrations by Elwiro Michał Andriolli in Eliza Orzeszkowa’s Meir Ezofowicz as a work of art of the second half of the 19th century, an excellent inter-semiotic translation of literature into the “image rhetoric”, and an example of a turn in the artistic work style – from romanticism, preferred by the artist, to social realism. Wood engravings were made by the graphic artist with both artistry and kindliness towards the author and the subject matter of the novel. Andriolli’s thorough artistic interpretation fills in the book’s unsaid parts, highlights the meanings that the writer was not allowed to touch upon in the novel because of the censorship, e.g. he showed the centuries-old relationships between the Jews and the Polish in the context of the loss of statehood. In the cycle, the graphic artist recorded the collective portrait of the Jewish community, depicted their cultural richness and internal problems (concerning economy, religion and identity).

„Mienie pożydowskie” jako figura polskiego dyskursu publicznego

Author(s): Piotr Forecki / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2015

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.

„Minden van köztünk”

Author(s): Zsuzsa Bodnár / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 08/2014

„Myśmy się nawzajem poznawały po oczach”… Z badań nad strategiami przetrwania kobiet żydowskich funkcjonujących „na powierzchni” po tzw. aryjskiej stronie w okupowanym Krakowie i okolicach

Author(s): Martyna Grądzka-Rejak / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2015

The purpose of this article is to show the survival strategies and the everyday life of Jewish women living on the so-called Aryan side in occupied Krakow and its surroundings. Ego-documents are the core source: relations and diaries collected in the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Archives of the Metropolitan Curia in Kraków. A thorough analysis of the phenomenon is very complex, therefore this article only discusses the fate of the Jewish women who co-existed amongst Polish society rather than those who did not have ‘Aryan documents’ or could be betrayed by their appearance, and were thus forced to remain in hiding the whole time. The article not only pays attention to the survival strategies and ways in which they disguised their origins and identities, but it also explores the everyday life, family relationships, work and religious life of these women. The author’ s aim was not to analyse aid provided to Jewish women by non-Jews, or symmetrically, to synthesise problems regarding the selling out of Jews in occupied Krakow. Both issues do appear in the article, but rather as background to the individual cases, since they were, in fact, inseparable elements of any survival strategy on the Aryan side in the GG ‘capital’. The article also notes the absence of certain topics in the interviews, related to the daily life of Jewish women in hiding, which makes a more comprehensive analysis difficult.

„Nad morzem miasto biało-błękitne”… Obraz Tel Awiwu w poezji polsko-żydowskiej lat międzywojennych

Author(s): Beata Tarnowska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: XV/2013

The subject of the paper is the image of Tel Aviv that emerges from the poetry of thepoets of the Jewish origin but writing in Polish, in the 20’s and the 30’s of the 20th century,especially from the poems of Anda Eker and Maurycy Szymel.In the Palestinian poems of the young poet Anda Eker who was traveling a few timesto Erec Israel, Tel Aviv, showing many Arcadian traits, seems to be the symbol of freedomand safety for the Jews from all over the world. Yet, the poem The Jewish state of MaurycySzymel, depicts that city – a symbol of the future Jewish state and simultaneously themodern Babylon – in the context of the Biblical extermination. The contestation of the urbanutopia that appears in this poems, reflects characteristic for the Jewish Diaspora diversity ofattitudes towards the Zionist idea.

„Naród słabych i skrzywdzonych”. Wojny i rewolucje lat 1914–1921 w pamięci młodzieży żydowskiej okresu międzywojennego

Author(s): Kamil Kijek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 34/2014

The article presents the experience of the years of World War I and revolutions as remembered by Polish Jewish adolescents in the 1930s. The author attempts to answer the question what was the common meaning attributed to the representations of the war years among young people coming from different strata of interwar Polish Jewish society, as well as the social and political significance of these representations.

„Nasz mały sabotaż…” – rola polskich więźniarek w życiu obozowym (legalnym i nielegalnym) KL Stutthof

Author(s): Danuta Drywa / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2017

Among the relatively small group of women who had been evidenced in the KL Stutthof by the end of 1943 there were Polish women inmates who, as far as it was possible, though not being able to help all the inmates, organized the so-called minor sabotage. It involved damaging German uniforms that had been sent in to be mended, burning in stoves the best furs cut up into small pieces, conveying illegally obtained radio information about the army front, organizing additional clothes and food for imprisoned men, damaging the best leather belts, cufflinks and clips to be packed with soldier outfits, as well as taking care of children and teenage inmates of the camp. Teachers and girl-scout activists organized for their fellow-women inmates poetry readings, religious festivals and – in 1944 – secret schooling. The women took advantage of every possible moment and opportunity to devote themselves to illegal work, however little they could do, and even while working under the supervision of kapos or German overseers.

„Neboť to bylo řízení Hospodinovo ...“ Hebrejské prameny ke třicetileté válce

Author(s): Martha Keil / Language(s): Czech / Issue: Suppl./2011

Kurz nach dem Friedensmahl in Nürnberg am 25. September 1649 stellte ein Zeitgenosse fest, dass der Westfälische Frieden „den dreißigjährigen Krieg nachgehends erfreulich geendet“ habe. Die ,Schlusshandlung‘ mit der Unterzeichnung der Friedensverträge sei „hauptsächlich eine Göttliche Gnaden-Schenkung“. Die Bezeichnung ,Dreißigjähriger‘ für diesen Krieg erfolgte also nicht mit langem zeitlichen Abstand, sondern aus der aktuellen Perspektive: Den Überlebenden war schmerzlich seine ungewöhnlich lange Dauer und Härte bewusst. Die Brutalität und Zerstörung hatten ein bis dahin kaum bekanntes Ausmaß erreicht und die traumatisierten Opfer bedurften der kollektiven wie auch der persönlichen Aufarbeitung. Juden wie Christen in ihrem streng religiös geprägtenWeltbild fanden in den Gräueln die Bestätigung des biblischen, insbesondere prophetischen Deutungskonzepts, dass das Leiden die Strafe für die eigenen Sünden darstelle und sich Gott dafür der Kriegsgewalt und ihrer Vollzieher bediene.

„Nem betegség ez, inkább egészség”

Author(s): Mihály Vajda / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 4/2002

The essay, by Mihály Vajda shows how and over what obstacles the Kertész oeuvre has managed to wrest meaning and value from the Holocaust.

„Nem veszedelmes többé.”

Jiddis a Magyar-Zsidó Szemlében, a magyar zsidó tudományos diskurzusban

Author(s): Szonja Ráhel Komoróczy / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2016

„Nie chodzi o to, czy nienawidzi czy nie. Muzułmanie mu przeszkadzali” – kategoria zakłócenia w narracjach o muzułmanie w literaturze Szoa

Author(s): Dennis Bock / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 25/2015

In the literary recollections of camp survivors the figure of the Muselmann is a recurring motif. The author puts forward a thesis about the existence of a dominating, prototypical narration about a Muselmann, which occurs not only in literary texts but also in scholarly studies. The questioning of the exemplary forms of depicting a Muselmann may lead to irritation and evoke in readers the feeling of “disturbance”. The re-enactment of such disturbances possesses a hidden analytical potential, as it reveals routinized and partly problematic cultural structures of reception and cquisition apparent especially in the context of post-catastrophic narrations and remembrance of the Shoah.

„Nie myśl, że to pisze obłąkany”. Listy rabina z Grabowa i jego misja informowania o Zagładzie

Author(s): Adam Sitarek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 15/2019

In early January 1942 escapees from the nearby death camp in Chełmno nad Nerem reached Grabów, a small locality in Regierungsbezirk Litzmannstadt in Wartheland. At that time the German Nazis were liquidating the nearby ghettoes one by one, deporting their residents to Chełmno, where the victims were murdered. In Grabów the survivors met with the local rabbi and gave testimony about the crime they had witnessed. The rabbi almost immediately decided to send a letter to his family and friends warning them against the deportations. The escapees also informed Grabów inhabitants about the tragic news in his house. The next day the rabbi wrote another letter. Other Grabów inhabitants followed his example. Consequently, the information about the mass murder was spreading. A lot suggests that the Grabów rabbi’s initiative might have been the ϐirst organized attempt to warn Jews detained in ghettoes of Regierungsbezirk Litzmannstadt in Wartheland against the approaching extermination. This means that the rabbi played an important role in the transfer of information about the murder committed in the nearby camp in Chełmno nad Nerem. Consisting in spreading news about the deportations’ objective, his activity hampered the work of the German oppressors and enabled the victims to verify the German’s assertions about the deportations purported aim (labor) and learn about the actual fate of their families and friends deported to Chełmno.