Alicja Maślak-Maciejewska

The article is devoted to the activities of the Hochstim family: Jewish stonemasons active in the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly in Kraków, but also in other Galician towns and in Warsaw (Kingdom of Poland). Four generations of this family were active in the field of stonemasonry. The highest position was achieved by Fabian Hochstim (1825–1906) who completed prestigious commissions such as the renovation of royal tombstones on Wawel Hill. His enterprise, which for many years was located in Kraków’s main square, specialized in the production of tombstones for both Jewish and Christian cemeteries. Fabian’s son, Adolf, pursued his father’s business and also sold building materials. The Hochstim family employed modern business strategies to establish the corporate identity of their enterprise, such as participation in public exhibitions and marketing campaigns in the press. With success and despite obstacles they achieved a strong market position in an environment that was dominated by traditional guilds. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the family remained faithful to the Jewish tradition.

The article is devoted to so-called “exhortations,” school sermons delivered to Jewish school youth in Galicia since the 1880s by Jewish teachers of religion. The author traces the roots of these sermons by analyzing the legal framework and the realms of Galician school that since the late 1860s became non-confessional. Sermons were part of religious education which in theory should have been provided to all children. The article shows that the Jewish exhortations, while retaining Jewish content, resembled Christian sermons in various ways (sources, length, language, typical features such as brevity, chronology of publication, even frequency of the words). Those affinities and relationship between both traditions are analyzed in the article.

The article describes the activities of Jewish women teaching religion in Galician public schools. The first women performed this profession in the 1870s, in the 1890s they were listed for the first time in the schematisms (the official lists of civil servants), in the next decade the first woman received a permanent teaching position, and in 1913 they were for the first time directly addressed in the job announcement for teachers of religion. Therefore, their position became more established toward the end of the autonomous period, although they still constituted an absolute minority in this professional group. The emergence of female teachers of religion raised protests among the male members of this professional group. They voiced three main arguments against granting women teaching positions: their alleged insufficient qualifications, the tradition of Judaism, and what they understood to be the “social justice” (according to which men deserved permanent teaching contracts more than women). The article discusses the chronology of granting women the positions of teachers of religion, describes the public debate on the subject, and addresses the issue of women’s professional qualifications. It is based on both printed and archival sources and on historical press.

 The article presents the activities of a preacher and teacher Szymon Dankowicz (1834-1910). In the 1860s Dankowicz was active in progressive circles in Warsaw. He had bonds with several institutions such as the Warsaw Rabbinic Seminary, the Lomdei Torah association, and the salon of the young Jewish intelligentsia; he also published in two Polish-Jewish periodicals Jutrzenka and Izraelita. In 1865 he unsuccessfully applied for the preacher position in the Daniłowiczowska Street synagogue. After 1868 he served as a preacher in the Kraków progressive synagogue. There he delivered sermons in the Polish language and manifested his pro-Polish attitude. In this city he also developed extensive pedagogical and charitable work. In later years Dankowicz applied for a preacher position at the Tempel in Lviv (1890) and served for several years in the Tarnopol Tempel (1895-1898). His biography, especially when compared to the biographies of other preachers, is an important example of the activities of a progressive preacher in partitioned Polish lands.

This article concerns the events that occurred in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 1880s and the early 1890s when the position of the Chief Rabbi of Bulgaria was granted to an Ashkenazi rabbi Szymon Dankowicz (1834-1910). Dankowicz was able to obtain this title thanks to the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) which intensified its activities in Bulgaria after the country had been liberated from the Turkish occupation in 1879 and the Principality of Bulgaria had been formed. The main focus of this article is to present the activities of Dankowicz in Bulgaria as well as the relations between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi Jews in that period as they are depicted in the sources stored in the archives of the AIU in Paris.