In the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century Galician Jews gradually left the isolated world of traditional culture for the open worldwide culture. At the start, they knew only one path of life, based on many centuries of tradition, but at the end it provided many paths to self-realization. Some of them were still devoted, other secular, some of them felt Jews, others felt Poles of Mosaic faith or Germans of Mosaic faith, some were involved in the Zionist movement, others in socialism. Many of them considered Galicia to be their own little motherland and manifested the features of local patriotism. It was possible thanks to the modernization of their lifestyle, and public education turned out to be one of the most important factors in this process. It was possible also thanks to the country authorities creating conditions which encouraged Jews to send their children to public school. Consequently, the majority of Jewish boys and girls completed compulsory education. It was the first step towards the modernization of their life.

The article describes the charitable activities of Jews in Drohobych during the Habsburg monarchy and at the beginning of the Polish state. The associations described, run predominantly by women, worked mainly for the benefit of Jewish orphans and children of impoverished families. The significant presence of Jews among the owners of oil companies largely contributed to the development of charity activities in the form of institutions meeting the needs of specific social groups.

In the areas that became part of the Second Polish Republic, manifestations of antisemitism became more pronounced at the end of World War I and at the beginning of the interwar period. These manifestations often turned into acts of violence against Jews, as became apparent in many towns with Jewish populations. The Lviv pogrom on 22–23 November 1918 was particularly devastating. The Jewish Rescue Committee, established in Lviv at that time, was very active in providing help to the injured, determining the number of casualties and wounded, and in assessing the extent of material damage resulting from the robberies and acts of destruction, including arson. According to the findings of the Jewish Rescue Committee, 73 people died and 443 were wounded as a result of the pogrom. The estimated material damage amounted to 102,986,839 Kr,with a total of 13,375 people affected. The actions taken by the Jewish Rescue Committee to help the victims were extremely important and effective, but they did not fully satisfy the existing social needs.

Caricature journals in the interwar period had a special genre niche, giving the masses, through funny cartoons, a simplified understanding of internal and external political processes. Zyz and Komar were the largest Ukrainian satirical humor journals in interwar Galicia. They mainly covered the internal political life in the Second Polish Republic and international relationships. These journals are primarily intended for people from the countryside, and the editors and owners of these journals used anti-Semitism for the political mobilization of the rural population. I use elements of Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations to track these processes. A key aspect here is how the image of the Rudnytskyi family was shaped on the pages of these journals. The family was of mixed Ukrainian-Jewish origins, and its members became prominent figures in various spheres of Ukrainian social and political life in interwar Galician Ukrainian socjety (in politics, literature, music, and the women’s movement). The behavior of the Rudnytskyi family was explained to the readers through their Jewish origins. Zyz and Komar both created an image of the Rudnytskyis as an integral Jewish group occupying different spheres of Ukrainian life. The study of visual caricature images thus enables us to explore the channels of the formation and spread of anti-Semitic images of Jews and the use of the image of “the Jew” in the Galician Ukrainian society in interwar Poland.

This article proposes a study of the usage of the concept of “Galicia” in the leading Jewish political newspaper of interwar Eastern Galicia (southeastern Poland), the Zionist daily Chwila. The use of “Galicia” is analyzed along with its main concurrent in the public sphere, the term “Małopolska” (Lesser Poland). Each term had its realm of usage, while each was caused by a distinct kind of motivation. “Lesser Poland” dominated the political and common sphere as the name of the former Austrian part of Poland, while “Galicia” was reserved mostly for writing about cultural issues and stereotypes. “Lesser Poland” was supposedly accepted by Galician Zionists as a tool to express their loyalty to the newly restored Polish Republic, while “Galicia” was preserved as an instrument for communication with other Galician Jews abroad and their common Austrian past, as well as an instrument of othering them from the outside. Both terms continued to be used in such a way throughout the entire interwar period.

The fledgling processes of the single-state governmental system of the reborn Polish state in 1920 were intended to deal with many current challenges and historical backgrounds. The article analyses the causes and different contexts and conditions which were forged to initiate the Polish-Jewish negotiations of 1925. The primary attention is focused on the solutions to the economic crisis and its consequences. Also, we consider the in-house situation between different factions in the Jewish Club to better understand all the pros and cons that made the future agreements possible. To provide such analysis of the Polish-Jewish negotiations, we use the Rogers Brubaker’s nationalising  approach, which lets us examine the interactions between the Polish state nationalismand the nationalism of East Galician Zionists. We also apply multiple situational analysis to investigate the ample variety of reasons behind those negotiations. This approach allowed us to consider the 1925 Agreement in the broad geopolitical context in which both sides were interested.

In the period 1935–1939, following the death of head of state Marshal Piłsudski, the  Polish national government adopted a more authoritarian and nationalist stance. Piłsudski had been considered by some Polish Jews as a protector of national and religious minorities. After his death in May 1935, institutional antisemitism experienced a dramatic increase.

In the public sphere, certain newspapers regularly featured antisemitic “news reports,” opinion pieces and cartoons of an extreme nature. The newspaper ABC, for instance, advocated boycotts  of Jewish businesses and shops, listing them by name, and encouraged Jewish emigration. In universities, the increasing discrimination against Jews has been well documented. MostPolish universities instituted restrictions on the number of Jewish students they would admit, or else barred them altogether. The education ministry willingly turned a blind eye to the admission policies of the university authorities. At the beginning of the academic year 1938–1939, for example, only three students in the first year of medical studies in Lwów (less than 1% of the new intake) were Jews, and none in Kraków.

After discussing antisemitism in newspapers and universities in the late 1930s, this article will examine documents held in the State Archive of Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast (DAIFO) concerning relations between the Jewish communities in the Stanisławów region, and the district, provincial and national authorities, including the national Ministry for Religious Denominations and Public Enlightenment. Much of this documentation concerns the town of Dolina. With the backing of the district authorities, an attempt was made to install as assistant rabbi in the town a certain Ksyel Juda Halberstam. This move was strongly opposed by many members of the Dolina Jewish community, as well as by its senior rabbi. The correspondence sheds light on the protracted struggle between the different parties until the assistant rabbi was finally installed in late 1938.

These files on the Dolina episode highlight the desire on the part of the authorities to control the rabbis, and through them the members of their communities. Information was systematically gathered on all the rabbis in the province, with particular emphasis on their moral behaviour, their perceived loyalty to the state, and their fluency in the Polish language. These actions, in turn, reflect an underlying suspicion over the extent of the rabbis’ “Polishness” and a fear, in an era of growing nationalism, of “antinational” behaviour. Such suspicions of loyalty were particularly marked where rabbis were thought to have Zionist links.

The exhibition “Traces of Memory” presents about 150 present-day large-format colour photographs of the Jewish heritage still to be seen in many different towns in that part of Galicia which is today in Poland. The exhibition is innovative in museological terms. It does not present  the Jewish history of Galicia using conventional chronology; nor is it comprehensive. Rather it isdivided into a simple five-part set of ideas intended to help visitors make sense of the complex, conflicting realities relating to Jewish heritage 75 years after the Holocaust: that Polish Galicia is full of the abandoned ruins of the Jewish past; it is also full of surviving fragments of pre-Holocaust times; full of places where the mass atrocities of the Holocaust took place; it is also full of post-war attempts to restore (or to abandon) sites of Jewish significance; and full of individuals, from all walks of life, contributing to a new visibility of Jewish culture in the Polish landscape. But piecing together the present-day evidence into a coherent five-part exhibition, by assigning such socio-cultural meanings to what the photos are deemed to represent, is not a straightforward matter. How “typical” are they as illustrations of one of those five ideas? How far can one generalize on the basis of decontextualised visual evidence - architecturally typical, historically typical, socio-culturally typical? The problem is that a photograph can simultaneously have multiple meanings; and this paper includes numerous examples. Part of that is because of the cultural displacement caused by the Holocaust and its after-effects. Just as a “synagogue” marked on a tourist map may in fact no longer really be a synagogue, so too one strategy of memorialising a devastated Jewish cemetery has often been to turn it into a lapidarium - a collection of surviving tombstones. In other words, when re-presented as heritage, such places may no longer “mean” what they were originally intended to mean. So often the Jewish heritage as presented through photographs is treated as self-evident. But in fact the same place, or the same photo, may mean different things to different people: meaning may thus be a matter of emphasis and interpretation, an ambiguity which is not always made fully explicit.

The article presents types of sources which have thus far not been used, castle court books kept in the archives of the Ukrainian cities of Lviv and Kyiv. The author emphasizes the importance of these sources for research on the history and culture of Polish Jews in the 17th and 18th centuries. He also specifies the types of documents related to Jewish issues authenticated in these books (e.g. manifestations and lawsuits, declarations of the Radom Tribunal), as well as current source publications and internet databases containing selected documents from Ukrainian archives.

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union  is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only  be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s  Eastern Borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile  is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.

The article examines the usefulness of the genealogical method in research on the Kielce pogrom. An analysis of the stories of individual people – victims of the pogrom will reveal a broader background of this tragic event. In the text, we will also try to answer some important research questions. Is the list of victims complete? Does it include the names of people who did not, in fact, perish during the pogrom? In addition, the article presents new research areas within the described issues.

* This text offers a development of the conclusions articulated in Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s book Pod klątwą. Portret społeczny pogromu kieleckiego (Cursed: A social portrait of the Kielce pogrom), and it should be read together with this work. The English translation of Cursed penned by Ewa Wampuszyc will be published next year by Cornell University Press (co-edited by the USHMM).

The third generation survivors of the World War II genocide of the European Jews  withstand, analyse and create literary texts about the Holocaust, a historical event, which was not endured by them directly but experienced through scientific papers and creative literature. Thanks  to Nathalie Skowronek, a novelist living in Brussels, and her publication of Max en apparence (2013) and La Shoah de Monsieur Durand (2015), we can gain some insight into the social and literary reality of Jewish genocide memory and into its intergenerational transmission. Firstly, we will carefully analyse the approach used by this author in the composition of a biographical text about her grandfather’s reconstruction of events. After that, using an intertextual approach, we will analyse formal and moral narrative considerations of the authoress which govern the literary reconstruction grandfather’s biography.