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The article is a review of the exhibition Pamiątka, Zabawka, Talizman / Souvenir, Toy, Talisman, which opened at the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Cracow on 30 June 2013, during the Jewish Culture Festival. The exhibition was curated by Erica Lehrer.
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The exhibition Souvenir, Talisman, Toy, prepared by Erica Lehrer and shown in Cracow’s Ethnographic Museum in Summer 2013, deals with the phenomena of Jew figures production and currently extremely popular the "Jew with a coin" image. The phenomenon bears full characteristics of folk art. However, it is Holocaust that took place in Poland during the German occupation that should be its valid reference. This historical context that results in, for example, stereotypical way of portraying the exterminated neighbours (this way is often perceived as intentionally anti-Semitic), is not fully analysed or worked through at the exhibition. The rich ethnographic material shown in Cracow is calling for a comment that would include scientific descriptions of Polish-Jewish relations that are being formulated at, for example, the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research. The phenomena of the evoked images production, which became more intense in the last twenty or thirty years, has all the qualities of "phantom memory" or post-memory, which character, as well origins, should be thoroughly analysed.
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This paper presents how woman’s subjectiveness is expressed in the early (pre-Second World War) Kadia Molodowsky’s poetry and how it influences the definition of a social role of the poetry and the voice of the poetess in the debate about the Yiddish women’s lyric. These problems are described with the connection to the Jewish religious tradition which was a very important background of Molodowsky’s poetry.
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The negative phrase: “the brood of vipers” has no equivalent in the OT, neither it is present in the extra-biblical writings. The first evangelist is the one who uses the epithet most often. However, Luke does use it as well (Lk 3:7). The paper is a study of narrative strategies of both Gospel-writers within the context of the OT and the rabbinic literature in order to identify one of the important narrative threads of the third Gospel. Instead of stigmatizing the particular faction of the Israel’s religious society, Luke employs the primordial Christian tradition to stress sinfulness of human nature, which in the past resulted in rejecting the good news of Jesus.
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The article explores the events known as the “pimp pogrom,” which took place in Warsaw in May 1905, as presented by the Jewish press. The analysis of the sources has provided new insights into the events, which were very complex in their nature. For many years, the Jewish community of Warsaw struggled with a problem of prostitution and white slavery. The inaction of the Russian authorities and police as well as the ineffectiveness of abolitionist organizations provoked the feeling of hopelessness and evoked a rank-and-file initiative of the Jewish working class. The pre-revolutionary turmoil only accelerated the explosion of violence against the marginalized and suspicious elements of the society.
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In this article I describe the phenomenon of the false historical object in Holocaust research by analyzing the three Polish editions of Rutka Laskier’s diary (with particular attention paid to the latest one). I show that a false historical object is a result of the loss of material/physical contact with the historical source and that it attempts to substitute the document. This is why editions of certain novels stylized as personal document literature eagerly imitate the old texts both in the visual layer (the reader is faced with the manuscript’s facsimile, sepia-colored paper, and old photographs) and in the layer of the events presented (in the novel its author does not always specify that it is fiction). This essay also presents the key mistakes made while rewriting Laskier’s diary by its publisher; analyzes the visual and material layer of its third edition (which follows the ‘not a single page without a photograph’ rule) in reference to the rules adopted by the Polish Center for Holocaust Research and the Jewish Historical Institute for editing diaries (particularly those written by adolescent girls); and discusses the conceptions of necroesthetics and necropolitics, derived from new humanities, in the context of the practical aspect of the popularization of the diary, the history of how it was transported, and the interest taken in its author (particularly her appearance). In the part devoted to the conclusions Tomczok wonders why this type of practices is not accompanied with deepened scholarly reflection and why there is a marked quantitative and qualitative difference between the scholarly editions of Laskier’s diary and those addressed to the general audience.
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During World War II the Polish legation in Bern provided considerable help to Polish Jews in Switzerland and occupied Poland, not only through inancial and material support, but also its engagement, for instance, in the campaign to aid Jews in Shanghai by offering its diplomatic channels to various organisations and mediation in obtainment of South American documents. Those activities would have been impossible without the support, engagement, and efforts of legate Aleksander Ładoś and his subordinates. The article discusses Ładoś and the role of the Polish legation in Bern in rescuing Jews.
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Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, Jewish philosophy after Auschwitz, Jewish theodicy,cosmic religion
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Amikor 1940 nyarán a fasiszta Olaszország is belépett a második világháborúba, nagyon sok olasz zsidó levélben fordult Benito Mussolini kormányfőhöz, vagy egyenesen az uralkodóhoz, III. Viktor Emánuelhez kérvényezvén, hogy önkéntesként részt vehessenek a háborús küzdelmekben. Az írások keserű hangvétele arról a fájdalomról és csalódottságról tanúskodott, amely az olaszországi zsidóságot érte az antiszemita politika meghirdetését és a faji törvények elfogadását követően.
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Before World War II three Jewish museums existed in Poland: Mathias Bersohn Museum of Jewish Antiquities, opened in 1910 in Warsaw; the Museum of the Jewish Kehilla in Lviv, opened in May 1934; the Museum of Jewish Art opened in 1935 at the YIVO Institute in Vilnius. The outbreak of the war interrupted the activities of Jewish museums in Poland. The Third Reich and the Soviet Union, for obviously different ideological reasons, were not interested in preserving such institutions. The Germans confiscated the collection of the Bersohn Museum; in spring of 1940 it was carried off and pillaged. Its fate remains unknown. The Soviet occupational authorities closed down the museum in Lviv. In the years 1939–1941 the Art Museum in Vilnius continued, albeit with difficulties, its activities, first under the Lithuanian regime and then under the Soviet occupation. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union the most valuable items from the collection of the YIVO Museum were carried off to Frankfurt. The last attempt of those long-lasting efforts to preserve the national Jewish heritage was the idea of the Jewish Museum proposed after World War II by the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts but it was not implemented.
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The article examines Yiddish-Polish writers’ response to the Holocaust in their poetry written in the years 1941-1948 and published in Poland in the early postwar years, when the country enjoyed relative political freedom. Special attention is given to a highly interesting theme appearing in the wartime lyrics written by Jewish survivors in the East (like B. Heller, H. Rubin, R. Żhikhlinsky, A. Zak), i.e. their call to arms addressed to the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Poland. The refugees could not bear the thought that whole masses of Jews died without putting up a fight in the ghettoes and camps in the West. It was probably this helplessness that evolved into their poetic appeal addressed to their ghettoized brethren, their call for resistance and punishment of the Nazi German murderers. Interestingly, the works of some writers who survived in the ghettos (such as Y. Shpigl, Y. Katsenelson and others), prove that ghettoized Jews who were tormented by the “docile death” complex also dreamed about being involved in an armed struggle against the Nazi Germans, but were aware of their weakness in the face of a much stronger enemy. Immediately after the war, this discrepancy of experience and knowledge led to a serious lack of understanding between those Jews who had survived in Poland and those who had survived in the East. The article examines these difference of experiences as it is reflected in the poetry.
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The main goal of publishing this source is to make available a document of the type that remains unexplored and unrecognized, especially within the field of Jewish studies. The nineteenth-century testament of Tekla Kronenberg deepens our knowledge about the Kronenberg family in general and its female members in particular. In notary deeds we find primarily male testaments. It is therefore relevant to publicize a female testament which may prove helpful in historical research on women. It is possible to examine this document from various perspectives, such as the value of charity, the attitude toward converts, the extent of social bonds (what things were left and to whom? were inheritors mainly male, or female?). In addition, an analysis of the means of expressing emotions regarding particular persons mentioned in the testament enables us to make a quality assessment of family bonds. As a result, it sheds new light on a Jewish family’s life.
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The interpretation of the biblical books started already in the Bible itself, in which one can easily notice the plethora of quotations, allusions to and echoes of other biblical texts. This study analyzes theQUOTATION of Isaiah 49:16a found in the apocryphal Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch. By analyzing the immediate context of this verse in the Book of Isaiah, its form and historical background, the meaning of the text within its original context is reveled. Then a similar analysis applies to the form and the historical context of this verse within its new context, namely in 2 Baruch 4:2. The confrontation yields a significant number of possible interpretations and applications of this Isaianic text within its new context.
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Róża Berger is the only confirmed casualty of the Krakow pogrom, which took place on 11 August 1945. The woman died in her own apartment at Wolnica Street 4. The press did report on her death, but the exact circumstances of the crime remain unknown. New light on those events has been shed by a folder containing files of the investigation launched in August 1945 against Citizens’ Militia officer from MO Station II in Krakow. These documents not only provide detailed information about the circumstances of Róża Berger’s death, but also make it possible to reconstruct the atmosphere of the pogrom conducted in the vicinity of the building where the murder was committed. Supplemented with information from archival files, the documentation discovered also makes it possible to paint a group portrait of MO policemen from a station located 80 kilometers from the crime scene.
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Born in Paris in 1947, Michael Charles Steinlauf talks about his childhood in New York City, in the south of Brooklyn (Brighton Beach), in a milieu of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. His later experiences were largely associated with American counterculture, the New Left, an anti-war and antiracist student movement of the 1960s (Students for a Democratic Society, SDS) as well as the anticapitalist underground of the 1970s (“Sunfighter”, “No Separate Peace”). In the 1980s, having undertaken Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, Steinlauf arrived in Poland, where he became part of the democratic opposition circles centred around the Jewish Flying University (Żydowski Uniwersytet Latający, ŻUL). In the independent Third Republic of Poland, he contributed to the creation of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Michael C. Steinlauf’s research interests focus on the work of Mark Arnshteyn (Andrzej Marek) and of Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, Yiddish theatre as well as Polish narratives of the Holocaust. The latter were the subject of his monograph Bondage to the dead: Poland and the memory of the Holocaust (1997, Polish edition 2001 as Pamięć nieprzyswojona. Polska pamięć Zagłady). An important topic of the conversation is the dispute concerning the categories used to describe the Holocaust, including the conceptualisation of Polish majority experience of the Holocaust as a collective trauma. Controversies also arise in connection with the contemporary phenomena popularly conceptualised as the “revival of Jewish culture in Poland” and “Polish–Jewish dialogue.” Another subject of the conversation is Michał Sztajnlauf (1940–1942), Michael C. Steinlauf’s stepbrother. The fate of the brothers was introduced into the canon of Polish culture by Hanna Krall’s short story Dybuk (1995, English edition 2005 as The Dybbuk) and its eponymous stage adaptation by Krzysztof Warlikowski (2003). Looking beyond artistic convention, the interlocutors try to learn more about Michał himself. This is the first time the readers have an opportunity to see his photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto. The conversation is illustrated with numerous archival materials from periods before and after World War Two as well as from German-occupied Poland.
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The main purpose of this article is to analyse the reception of Izabela Glebard’s (Czajka-Stachowicz’s) works, with particular emphasis on her only book of poety Pieśni żałobne getta. At first Gelbard intentionally chooses poetry, but after the experience of World War II, she leaves it completely and replaces by prose. The root cause of this state of affairs is the war trauma. Very important is also the critical attitude of the writer to her poems. These works have not been appreciated by literary critics who treat them as a document and testimony rather than a valuable poetry. It seems that the Gelbard poems, like all her works, are waiting for a new, contextual reading.
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The article draws on a source material from The State Museum Majdanek Archives, a collection of video testimonies recorded in 1987–1989, to develop a fuller picture of social relations among prisoners of different ethnic backgrounds at the Majdanek Concentration Camp. From the fall of 1941 through July 1944, Majdanek functioned as a killing center and a concentration camp for about 150,000 prisoners from different European countries. Drawing on video testimonies as a type of oral history, the article traces the perception of Jews in the camp by Polish prisoners, their social interactions, and the interethnic social boundaries shaped by camp life.
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The text discusses the court iles of the trial of an Oświęcim Camp Security guard, who in 1946, while on duty, shot an individual suspected of profaning remains of victims of the Auschwitz camp. This case remains the only known and such well documented instance of a killing of a ‘Canada man’ (Kanadziarz) by an employee of the Auschwitz Museum. The documents were produced by the Magistrate’s Court in Oświęcim, the Regional Court in Wadowice, and the Appellate Court in Cracow, where the security guard stood trial. The procedural materials, which include reports on interviews with witnesses and the defendant, the sentences passed by the two instances and their interpretations, and the appeals, are stored in the Archive of the Cracow Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance. They show how the territory of the former camp in Auschwitz was protected during the irst years after its liberation. Moreover, they are a valuable source when it comes to research on profanation of remains of victims of the Holocaust and the former concentration camps.
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Elbeszélônk 1920-ban született egy Budapesttôl nem messze fekvô kisvárosban. Apja, aki ugyan a család szegénysége okán a 8 gyerek közül legnagyobbként egyedül nem tanulhatott, mire gyerekei a húszas évek elején megszülettek – Panninak két iker húga van – komoly egzisztenciát teremtett: jól menô fa- és építôanyag kereskedése van, s gyerekeit, a polgári iskola elvégzése után egy bécsi magánintézetbe küldi tanulni.
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