From the first days of WWI, Russian commanders pointed to the alleged evident disloyalty of Russia’s Jewish population, its direct complicity with the enemy and involvement in espionage. The Russian army began to solve the “problem” of Jewish disloyalty by the expulsions of the Jewish population from various localities. The General Headquarters (Stavka) officially adopted these measures in January 1915. No distinction was made between the Jews who were Russian citizens and the Jews in occupied Galicia. As a direct result of the January 1915 declaration, the Russian command made several attempts to carry out a mass deportation of the Jewish population from the frontal zone (in particular, from the Warsaw and Plotsk gubernia and from Galicia). These attempts were unsuccessful as a policy of mass deportations required precise coordination between the military and civil authorities, which the Russian military command was unable to attain. In May 1915, however, about 200,000 Jews were expelled from Kovno and Kurliand gubernias. Gubernias was the sole deportation on such a scale, but for the various ranks of the military command, local expulsions remained a convenient and widely used means of clearing the battle area of the undesirable presence of the Jewish population. The Russian military authorities’ attitude toward the deportations of Jews can be seen as a reflection of the systemic crisis of the Russian empire in its last years of existence.

The article reconstructs the genesis of the order concerning the orga-nization of the Jewish religious community in Poland. It follows the responses of the main political actors involved in the implementation of the ordinance: the German occupation authorities, the Austrian occupation authorities and the organs of Polish home rule that arose in Poland following the November 1916 German-Austrian declaration on the political future of the country. The article concentrate on the main disputes: the community’s denition, responsibilities and spheres of activities and the composition of the board of governors.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jews of the Poznań (Posen) region found themselves between the German and Polish national movements. Every time when the conflict between these movements intensified, the Jews fell victim to it. The following article examines how the German revolution of November 1918 and the Polish national uprising of 1918–1919 affected the Jews of the Poznań province. The “Auswanderung,” a massive and hasty emigration of the Jews, is presented in the broader context of the Jewish emigration from and assimilation in the region during the “long” nineteenth century.

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 signicance of these representations.

 In the Second Polish Republic Jews played a significant role in industry, trade and crafts. As a result, tax matters were one of the most important fields of activity of the representatives of the Jewish minority in the Polish Parliament. Jewish parliamentarians tried to defend the economic interests of the Jewish minority in the years 1919–1939, and their speeches frequently defended all entrepreneurs in Poland as well. Generally speaking, the attitude of Jewish parliamentarians towards Polish tax policy was critical. From the mid-1920s they demanded tax reform. Moreover, they considered the industrial tax as the most harmful, as it hampered economic activities. Despite consistently reported demands, the effectiveness of Jewish politicians in this field was too small, and the decisions taken within the fiscal policy always depended on the will of the Polish majority in the parliament.

Urban legislation dealing with the problems and difficulties of commu-nal living in a town is well documented in the ancient world and during the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods. The towns of Roman and Byzantine Palestine were no exception to this, and they decreed urban regulations of that kind. Regulations that were imposed in the Land of Israel during these periods found their way into halakhic debate and are therefore included in rabbinical sources. A famous baraita in Tractate Baba Qamma of the Babylonian Talmud that enumerated the “Ten special regulations that were applied to Jerusalem” has been identified by a number of scholars as a list of urban laws that were applied in the town of Jerusalem probably dating from the days of the Second Temple. The following paper will focus on the restriction on building kilns in the town that was listed amongst the various regulations in the baraita. This particular restriction can be traced over the course of long periods of time.

The presented memorandum, prepared by the Aliyah Department of the European Office of the World Confederation of General Zionists, concerns the activities of the Aliyah Department during the period between April 15 and November 15, 1947. The document comes from the collections of the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. The report is an important source for research on Aliyah Bet, because it presents the point of view of a party that did not play the key role in this project and criticised the way of organisation of Aliyah Bet by the Mossad le-Aliyah Bet