Marek Szczepaniak

After Poland’s rise to independence, the process of Jewish emigration from Greater Poland, already noticeable before, increased in intensity. Jews left behind a lot of infrastructure and real estate, as well various material possessions, mostly in houses of worship. Maintaining them turned out to exceed the financial capacity of those members of the Jewish community who stayed there. In 1932, a regulation of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education was published, requiring Jewish religious communities most affected by emigration to be incorporated into larger ones, in order to enable the maintenance of the remaining property. Correspondence between the municipal authorities and the local qahal, kept in the “City of Gniezno Files” archival fond, allows to track the gradual appropriation of property from centers incorporated into the Jewish community in Gniezno. It also makes it possible to list movable and immovable property and assess its value at that time. The sources also reveal some conflicts between Jews from the dissolved communities and those from the Gniezno Jewish religious community.

In 1936, new plans were developed to reorganize the network of Jewish religious communities. These involved the incorporation of the Wągrowiec province into the Gniezno community, or alternatively, incorporation of one of the provinces belonging to the Gniezno community into the Wągrowiec community (in fact, the only one that could be incorporated in this way was the Żnin province). In the end, the national administration withdrew from this idea. Two years later, in connection with a reform introducing a new administrative division in Poland, ideas for a spatial reorganization of Jewish communities appeared again. However, no such changes were made before the Second World War.

The article comprises the first description of the events surrounding secular celebrations of 1000 years of Polish statehood in Gniezno (April 9–April 16, 1966). Poland’s communist authorities intended for these events to be the inauguration of national celebrations and the culmination of long preparations at the local, regional, and national levels. Due to political factors, the celebrations clashed with the celebration of the 1000th anniversary of Poland’s christening, prepared and hosted by the Church authorities. The authors of the article used files from the fonds of the National Archive in Poznań and its branch in Gniezno. Taking into consideration the reports of local authorities, the authors reconstructed (for the first time) the social actions undertaken in villages and towns in the Gniezno region as part of celebrations. It was pointed out that local people were rarely motivated to undertake these actions by ideological considerations. The authors reconstructed the course of events, and therefore were able to demonstrate what the originators’ goals and motivations were when developing the schedules and scenarios of particular events. Digital source data presented in the article also allowed them to demonstrate how elaborate the celebrations were.