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Review: Paweł Wolski, Tadeusz Borowski – Primo Levi. Prze-pisywanie literatury Holocaustu [Tadeusz Borowski – Primo Levi: Trans-Scribing Holocaust Literature], Wydawnictwo IBL, Warszawa 2013.
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Alongside the physically existing town of Radom there is a second borough, visible only to some but, nonetheless, just as real. This is the Radom of material traces and some sort of a ghostly life; in it, the dead continue to pursue their phantom existence. The symbol of this absent presence is not something but naught – emptiness instead of the now windswept former Jewish district. It is also a strange phantom pain that assaults the author from time to time, whenever she thinks about all of them. This is a world next to us and within us, a world that grows deep within, penetrates, becomes part of us, and inflicts wounds.In this world the author’s deceased still live, although she is aware that they all perished at the time of the Holocaust and that the only surviving member of her whole family, Elias Sznajderman, left, never to return, in August 1945, a day after a pogrom carried out in the “Praca” cooperative.
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This is a review of Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri's book,Am supravieţuit Lagărului Morţii(Povestea Evei Mozes, una dintre„gemenele doctorului Mengele” de laAuschwitz), Meteor Publishing,Bucureşti, 2012, 128 p.Keren Levine, Geamantanul Hanei.Din ororile Holocaustului, MeteorPublishing, Bucureşti, 2014, 112 p.
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When I was going to Będzin to meet with Karolina and Piotr Jakoweńko, I did not even think that I would find out things that remained undiscovered. We knew that there were many Jews living in Będzin until the outbreak of World War II, but that there were as many as 30,000 Jews and suddenly they all disappeared – we do not think about it every day.
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The documents kept in the special collections of the Jewish Historical Institute Library contain an extract, purchased in 2010, from Warsaw municipal records, containing the depositions of Jews, noblemen and burghers suspected of taking part in a raid of nobleman Mroczek’a manor at Żebrak near Siedlce on the night of 1 November 1783. This document provides lots of insight into the social transformations taking place in Poland in the second half of the 18th century. It visualizes the internal differentiation of the Jewish population, struggling with increasing poverty. The suspects’ depositions portray Warsaw as a city attracting representatives of various social groups, which integrated irrespective of religious or ethnic differences, cooperated with each other or forming criminal gangs.
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Adolf Hitler’s rise to power was connected with unprecedented bestiality of German state authorities vis-a-vis the Jews. The Polish authorities eagerly jumped at the opportunity presented by this situation. The prosecuted Jews who happened to be Polish citizens turned out to be a perfect tool for exerting pressure on the new Chancellor. The Polish government forced Hitler to revise (at least verbally) his views of Poland. The effectiveness of this move unquestionable from the day-to-day policy perspective but in the long run this did not prevent Poland from an invasion by its western neighbour. Nonetheless, thanks to these cool calculations, Jews who were Polish citizens could have some sense of security that was firmly denied too Jews having German citizenship.
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In this paper I demonstrate the concept of the Jewish godhead as presented in the drama Between Two Worlds: The Dybbuk by S. An-sky (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport), and analyses the phenomenon of a dybbuk, which was very popular in the culture of Hasidim. It should be mentioned that the research subject became the Russian original of the text of An-sky’s drama. The text was found in St Petersburg in 2001. The original differs significantly from its Yiddish and Hebrew versions: the Russian version ofThe Dybbuk is preceded by a long “Prologue”, where the play’s author suggests its most important ideas to the viewers. Thus, the reinterpretation of An-sky’s drama, seen from a philosophical perspective, enables one to justify the thesis that the author was conscious of some incoherency intrinsically present in the realm of the religious beliefs of Hasidic communities, where both the God of Biblical and Talmudic narratives, and the impersonal godhead of Kabbalah were, simultaneously, worshiped. What is more: the author also focuses on the weakness of the godhead, as he or she has been deprived of his or her primordial, male-female, unity. At the same time, while analyzing An-sky’s text, I draw attention to the fact that in this play a dybbuk, an evil spirit existing in a living person’s body, is portrayed as a much better entity: An-sky’s dybbuk is a soul of a man who died prematurely, and who is wandering and missing his earthly lover, similarly to Shekhinah, who is missing her lover in heaven, and is wandering in exile, together with the Jewish nation.
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The article examines the historical relationship between the Jewish people and the Hebrew language and the process that led to the revival of the language within their culture. The author examines the Diaspora of the Jewish people and their retention of three private languages that they used while in Europe. These languages were Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish. Lithuanian intellectual Eliezer Ben-Yehuda played a major part in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. Also discussed are the efforts of French philanthropist Baron Edmond James de Rothschild to construct Zionist settlements in Palestine.
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The review of: Kinga Frojimovics, Géza Komoróczy, Viktória Pusztai, and Andrea Strbik: A zsidó Budapest: Emlékek, szertartások, történelem (Jewish Budapest: Records, Recollections, Rituals); Faces of the City Series Ed. by Géza Komoróczy, Budapest: City Hall/Center of Jewish Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1995, 2 vols., 793 pp., illustrated.
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The Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, former SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel), one of the initiators and executioners of the so-called “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” is rightfully listed among the most important events in Israel’s recent history and regarded as a foundational moment in the dissemination of Holocaust remembrance practices. Whilst its overall importance in enforcing/expanding the memory of wartime Jewish suffering is beyond any question, the trial itself and the specific interpretation of Holocaust it offered, was instrumentally used by incumbent Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Zionist Mapai Party as a political tool in order to strengthen the legitimacy of yet still maturing Israeli statehood and the country’s insufficient recognition within worldwide Jewish community. Analysis of how this trial was perceived (with particular emphasis put on American Diaspora and non-Jewish audience, aspecially the Catholic press) – the essential purpose of this paper – lead to the conclusion that such policy turned out to be rather ineffective at the very beginning but successful in the longer run. Asked whether Israel has the right to try Eichmann, most influential observers, both Jews and non-Jews (Nahum Goldmann, Martin Buber, Yosal Rogat; Karl Jaspers) responded negatively and opted for an international tribunal – however, Ben-Gurion managed to gain several allies, also among the Gentiles (Hugh Trevor-Roper). Simultaneously, in inevitable clash between two specifically understood Jewish identities – Zionist/Israeli and assimilationist/ American, the second one remained dominant. One of most characteristic representatives of the latter “self”, introduced more closely on the following pages, was Hannah Arendt, who skillfully combined its German/Jewish/American components and criticized the trial as American Jewess bound to German culture and language. Nevertheless, beginning with late 1960s and early 1970s, the memory of Holocaust, shaped in result of this trial, has quickly become a vital reference point for successive generation of Jews, in Israel and beyond.
More...Kronika zbrodni; Oczekiwanie; Przeżycie; Ocalenie; Wykonanie; Obserwacja; Zatarcie
Podwileńskie Ponary stają się miejscem systemowej eksterminacji mieszkańców Wileńszczyzny - Żydów, ale i Polaków. Ich śmierć z litewskich rąk na zawsze zmienia społeczny obraz tego regionu.
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W małym mieście II Rzeczpospolitej jak w soczewce skupiają się napięcia społeczne tego czasu. Polacy i Żydzi żyja tuż obok siebie, ale w obcych światach.
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The purpose of this article is to show the Jewish involvement in the toll collection in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The following aspects are explored: the legal position, the financial involvement and conditions of the everyday work of the Jewish toll collectors, as well as the conflicts connected with this profession. The author based her research upon mostly unknown primary sources, including Lithuanian treasury documents and different court acts. Upon examination of those sources it becomes clear that the Jews played a significant role in the tax collection in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in that period. What is more, not only members of the economic elite were involved in the cooperation with the state treasury.
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Review: Kinga Piotrowiak-Junkiert, Świadomość zwrócona przeciwko sobie samej: Imre Kertész wobec Zagłady [Consciousness Turned against Itself: Imre Kertész and the Holocaust], Wydawnictwo IBL, Stowarzyszenie Pro Cultura Litteraria, Warsaw 2014.
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