Dvora Trachtenberg
Studia Judaica, Issue 1 (53), 2024, pp. 165 - 183
https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.007.19900This article describes two aspects of an exploratory international online study conducted by written questionnaire in the years 2021–2022. One focus of the study was on the personal importance/meaning participants ascribed to their Jewish Lublin roots. A second focus was on the role Lublin stories played in participants’ lives, i.e., the presence/absence of such stories in family life, the age/stage of life when Lublin stories were first heard, the content and tone of these stories, and whether a relationship could be detected between the narratives heard and importance ascribed by the participants to their Lublin roots. The participants were those who, or whose ancestors/families, originated from Lublin but left the city decades ago, mostly during the twentieth century. These participants now live in countries around the world. Preliminary quantitative information and qualitative analyses hinted at differences among the study’s sixty respondents. These differences were most often associated with (a) the period of history during which respondents or their families left Lublin; (b) how closely/directly the lives of those who left had been touched by events of the Holocaust; and (c) how much time had elapsed, and how many generations came, between those who left Lublin and their now-living descendants. Selected results are discussed.