Je li hrvatska vlast 1990-ih bila antisemitska?

Author(s): Andrijana Perković Paloš / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2016

The main goal of this paper is to discuss whether the first President of the Republic of Croatia Franjo Tuđman and the Croatian leadership in the 1990s were anti-Semitic. The minimization of the number of Holocaust victims and Holocaust denial, which includes statements that the Holocaust was a myth or a hoax produced by the Jews, are considered to be driven by anti-Semitism. These theories were present in historiography and later in politics. The outburst of political anti-Semitism, according to Western historians, can be found in Eastern Bloc countries after the collapse of their communist regimes. Croatia began its journey towards democracy and independence within this framework. Even before he became Croatian president, Tuđman was a controversial person due to his book Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy, which some circles described as anti-Semitic. Some of his statements were misinterpreted and his policy of national reconciliation, which meant ironing out the half-century-old political divisions between the Croats, was perceived as the rehabilitation of the Ustasha regime and its Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which carried out genocide against the Serbs, the Jews, and the Roma during World War II. Such widespread perception, supported by Serbian propaganda, prolonged the establishment of the diplomatic relations between the Republic of Croatia and the State of Israel until 1997. The relations between the Croatian leadership, Croatian people in general, and the Jewish community in Croatia in the 1990s were, however, very positive. Some established members of the Jewish community held high-ranking positions in the Croatian leadership. An appeal made by Nenad Porges, president of the Jewish community of Zagreb, to all the Jews in the world, in which he claimed that the Croatian Government was not anti-Semitic, proves the stability of those relations and the support of the Jewish community to Croatia during the Greater-Serbian aggression.

Żydowskie dziedzictwo. Uwagi o sagach współczesnych

Author(s): Marta Tomczok / Language(s): Polish Issue: 03/2015

In the article I pay attention to the contemporarily increasing importance of the family saga in the Polish Jewish studies. I propose the reading of the prose of Bronisław Wildstein (Czas niedokonany), Ałbena Grabowska (Stulecie Winnych), Ben Elton (Two Brothers) and Karina Schaapman (The Mouse Mansion. Sam and Julia). The 20th c. history of the European Jews present in these books usually focuses on several key pictures/moments/situations, that is: pre-war pogroms, the Shoah, and – only in the Polish version – żydokomuna [“Judeo-Communism”] and March 1968. I demonstrate their influence on pop-cultural narration through the analysis of Czas niedokonany in particular. In this story the inheritance of trauma, significant for the narration of the Second Generation, gains a supplement in the form of the inheritance of the Jewish capital, post-war Jewish careers and professional advancement. The article is an introduction to the profound study on the newest pop-cultural story tackling the subject of Jewishness; it also indicates the necessity of extracting from a large group of Polish, noble and post-noble family sagas the storylines centered on Jewish culture, based on a different ideology and distinct myths.

The Negotiated Past: the Memory of the Second World War in Post-Communist Romania

Author(s): Aneta Mihaylova / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2015

Soon after the collapse of communism in Romania the period of the Second World War became the focus of heated debates with two intertwined issues related to it, namely – the personality of the wartime leader Marshal Ion Antonescu and the topic of the Holocaust. The article traces the emergence and evolution of these debates, while also paying attention to the way in which the European and Euro-Atlantic perspective of the country affected the memory of these particular issues. It comes to the conclusion that the memory of the Second World War was somehow “negotiated” and suited to fit the present-day necessities of post-communist Romania and raises doubts whether the outside pressure on Romania’s revisiting this dark chapter of its history wasn’t in a way counterproductive, leaving the possibility of the existence of two parallel versions of the past – one for internal and one for external use.

Culture de la mémoire en Bulgarie d’aujourd’hui à propos de la déportation des Juifs des territoires sous administration bulgare en 1943

Author(s): Nadya Danova / Language(s): French Issue: 1-2/2015

The aim of the communication is to present the different manners utilized in contemporary Bulgaria for facing the painful problem of the participation of Bulgarian authorities in the deportation of the Jews from Thrace and Macedonia during World War II. On the basis of examples from the historiography, textbooks, literature, cinema, museums, memorials and public debate are discussed the difficulties in the construction of one common and indivisible memory on events connected to the theme of responsibility and guilt, throwing the long shadow of the past on the actuality.

Kształtowanie popularnej wiedzy o Holocauście na przykładzie trzech artykułów z polskiej, hebrajskiej i angielskiej Wikipedii

Author(s): Daniel Wolniewicz-Slomka / Language(s): English Issue: 08/2016

The goal of this article is to examine how different events and phenomena related to the Second World War and the Holocaust are framed via Wikipedia articles written in Polish, Hebrew and English. Departing from the pillars of the theory of framing in mass media, the article conducts a content analysis of three articles, in three different languages. The articles under analysis are the following: “Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp”, “The Pogrom in Jedwabne”, and “Righteous Among the Nations”. The analysis will use the four roles of frames as categories, determined by Entman: definition of the problem/phenomenon, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation. Analyzing how the articles fulfill each of the roles in the different languages, the research hypothesis is that the framing of the phenomena will differ between the versions, and each version will follow pillars of the collective memory of the Holocaust in its respective country. Findings, however, are not in complete compliance with this hypothesis.

Историческата памет в контекста на спасяването на евреите по време на Втората световна война. Уводни думи

Author(s): Mateusz Szpytma / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2017

Osobliwe zrządzenie Opatrzności Bożej… Polska pamięć Zagłady w perspektywie katolicko-narodowej

Author(s): Jacek Leociak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

The Jewish Holocaust has a special place in Polish discourses on memory. It would be hard to overestimate its importance in constructing a model of Polish identity. But Leociak points out a weakness in Polish Holocaust memory – one that appears especially in narratives about saving Jews. The rhetoric, poetics and metaphors of these discourses – both private and public – are astonishingly durable, given the changing political context. This article is a preliminary exploration of a certain type of Polish discourse on Holocaust memory, one that has a long tradition but is now gaining prominence. It could be described as a Catholic-national discourse, where both elements have equal weight, affirming its rootedness in the ideology of the prewar Catholic National Democracy formation (also known as ND or ‘Endecja’).

Doświadczenie bez nazwy. „Oświęcim” ≠ Auschwitz

Author(s): Agnieszka Dauksza / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Dauksza examines the status of non-Jewish Polish concentration camp survivors. Their wartime experience and the way in which they functioned after the war has always been and continues to be different from the Jewish experience. Based on empirical studies, Dauksza argues that the problem is that their experience is ‘an experience without a name’: unable to name it, they are also unable to experience what happened to a significant group of Poles during the occupation. The question concerns not only actual former prisoners and their relatives – as the framework of post-memory transfer would suggest – but also individuals who for several years lived in fear of being deported, as well as those who witnessed the deportation of others, including Jews.

Współ-pamięć, pamięć „negatywna” i dylematy przekładu w „wycinkach” z Shoah Clauda Lanzmanna

Author(s): Dorota Głowacka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Głowacka considers three decades of Polish criticism of Lanzmann’s Shoah in the context of recently published outtakes from the documentary. She explores the role of language interpretation in both the film and the outtakes, focusing on statements in Polish and their French and English translations. The testimonies of Poles whom Lanzmann describes as ‘false witnesses,’ Głowacka suggests, ought to be treated as credible accounts that shed light on the complexity of Polish Holocaust memory. But Lanzmann appropriates this memory, framing the Polish language as subordinate to other languages in the film. She also points out sequences in the outtakes where Polish witnesses’ memories coincide with the recollections of Szymon Srebrnik, a survivor of the Chełmno extermination camp. Based on this she proposes to introduce the notion of a co-memory, that is to say a modality of memory that can pose a valuable alternative to the dominant paradigm of conflicting memories.

Żydzi i zagłada w polskich kulturach pamięci: między antagonizmem i agonem

Author(s): Sławomir Kapralski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

25 years ago, Polish gentiles were interviewed on the disappearance of their Jewish neighbours. Kapralski re-examines those interviews in order to revise current attitudes to this kind of memory. He presents memory as a product of current constellations of the remembering subject’s interests, whereby the subject is embroiled in existential efforts to construct mnemonic safety, which in turn is the basis for processes of reconstructing collective memory. These processes were particularly vital in the context of the uncertainty that marked the transformation in the 1990s – a transformation that Kapralski frames in terms of a structural trauma that shapes memories about historical trauma. Such a framing of memories of the Jews means that they have been publicly commemorated in Poland, but they are not remembered within the structures of communicative memory.

Семейство Улма от Маркова. Символ на поляците, екзекутирани за подпомагане на евреи по време на Втората световна война

Author(s): Mateusz Szpytma / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5/2017

The article presents one of the tragic stories that took place during the World War II in occupied Poland. It describes the fate of one rural family playing an important role in Markova and its surroundings by engaging it in various public initiatives. The article describes the situation in occupied Markova, the chronology of the crime against Jews and Poles, the efforts to punish the perpetrators, and the actions aimed at perpetuating the heroic life and death of the Ulma family.

Б. Цеков, З. Кръстева, П. Неделева, М. Манолова, Е. Георгиев, Ал. Салупо. Антиеврейското законодателство в Европа и България. Правни изследвания. С., И-т за модерна политика. Център за еврейски изследвания при СУ „Св. Климент Охридски“, 2015. 232 с.

Author(s): Nikolay Poppetrov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5-6/2016

Book Review

A Case of Successful Transitional Justice

Author(s): Jakub Gortat / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

Germany is an example of a country which has been implementing transitional justice for decades and is still active in this field. What is more, contemporary Germans have recently come to terms with their not-so-distant past and their negligence in this area by showing the falsehood, backwardness, and injustice as negative foundations of the young Federal Republic. This article evokes the person of Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor in the state of Hessen. His struggle for human dignity and the memory of his achievements after his death exemplify an accomplished case of transitional justice and the memory of it. During his lifetime he contributed to bringing to trial numerous Nazi criminals, even at the cost of habitual threats and disregard. Forgotten for a few decades, Bauer and his legacy have been recently rediscovered and studied. Eventually, Bauer became a movie character and was finally brought back to the collective memory of Germans. The belated, but a well-deserved wave of popularity of Fritz Bauer in the German culture memory proves that reflections on the transitional justice are still topical and important.

Темата „Холокост“ – предизвикателство за учителя и учениците

Author(s): Aneta Tumbeva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2018

This work presents didactic games aimed at emphasizing remembrance lessons at school - important, but not so widely used in philosophical cycle and history curricula. The teacher has the freedom to select and adapt similar tasks according to the age of the students and the subject. Our society faces the need to educate young people in more tolerance and mutual support, with the main focus being the examples of history that should not be forgotten. And here is the role of the teacher who helps to form these values by putting the student in front of specific moral dilemmas and opportunities to analyze texts, to make his own conclusions about the lessons learned from historical events.

Католическата църква и антисемитизмът в Хърватия по време на Втората световна война (1941–1945)

Author(s): Irina Ognyanova-Krivoshieva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5-6/2017

Under direct German influence, anti-Semitism and racism were imposed as a state ideology and policy in the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War, and thousands of Jews became victims of that. The lack of political opposition in the country turns the Catholic Church in the only opponent and corrective of the Holocaust. Since it could not protect all Jews whose destiny was decided in Berlin, not in Zagreb, the only realistic program of action of the Catholic Church was to at least champion for the Jews of mixed marriages, those who had adopted Catholicism, the children, the elderly people and others. As a result, many were taken to Dalmatia (in the Italian occupation zone) or outside the country.

The Theme of Rape in Ida Fink’s Aryan Papers and Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class

Author(s): Aránzazu Calderón Puerta / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

The article analyses the ways in which Central European postwar societies produce gen¬dered representations of Holocaust stories. Calderón Puerta shows how sexual violence functions in culture, highlighting the different ways in which it can be represented in literary texts: it can be understood as a symbol of relationships between antagonistic communities of men (what Roland Barthes refers to as mythologization), but it can also be seen to symbolize the continuum of violence in patriarchy (violence against specific women, structural violence and symbolic violence). Calderón Puerta argues that the different ways of understanding the representation of rape are related to the difference between masculine and feminine points of view.

Negative Testimonials. Photographic Representation of Holocaust Memory

Author(s): Adam Mazur / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

An Affective Art History

Author(s): Luiza Nader / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

„Kwestia żydowska” w literaturze religijnej. Analiza treści modlitewnika Machzor li-Jom Kipur

Author(s): Agata Rybińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2018

The analysis of the prayer contained in the Hebrew-Russian prayer book allows to describe the linguistic image of God and his people — Israel/Jews. Appealing to the patriarchs, to the covenant between God and Israel, to the Torah, Jerusalem and temple worship, that is, the centuries-long Jewish religious tradition, are cultural codes, and at the same time key components of Jewish identity. They are a point of reference in considering so called the Jewish question, taking into account primarily the Jewish perspective, not the Christian one.

Prilog istraživanju povijesti Židova u Bjelovaru

Author(s): Mladen Medar / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1/2007

In this work, writing about a topic not explored until the present moment; life, work, and the sufferings of the Jewish population, who were an important part of social, cultural, and economic, especially of commercial and industrial life in Bjelovar, the author for the first time shows in detail and in chronological order a sequence of unpublished details from their past, especially from the lives of distinguished individuals ( paying particular attention to the first Jewish temple in Bjelovar from the year 1882 and the representative synagogue, built from 1913 to 1917) as an undividable part of the general historical problems of Bjelovar in a large range from the 18th to the 20th century, that is from the foundation of the town in the year 1756 to their emigration and sufferings during the Second World War, and particular activities during the years after the war.