This article describes two capital cases involving Jews heard in the Lublin castle court at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the case from 1596, a Christian man staying in a Lublin suburb, who posed as a subject of a Princess Zbaraska, was executed for having attempted to murder a Jewish merchant after ten Christian witnesses testified against him. In the second case, which took place ten years later, in 1606, three members of the Lublin Jewish community were accused of murdering and robbing a Jewish convert to Christianity who was the subject of the magnate Janusz Ostrogski. The complaint implicated the Jewish community of Lublin as a whole and referred to the accused as being innately disposed to violence against the Christian faith. Both cases illustrate the complex position of Jews within the evolving legal and social situation in post-Union Lublin, as well as the ways Jews were conceived of by their Christian neighbors.

Previous research regarding the culture and history of the Jewish community in Lublin in the interwar period only to a small extent covered issues related to the nurseries for Jewish children. Since little archival documentary material is available, texts published in Lublin’s Yiddish press in the 1920s and 1930s serve as a valuable source. The article discusses particular aspects regarding the nursery run by the Zionist Association of Jewish Women which had its headquarters at 41 Krawiecka Street, in the middle of the Podzamcze Jewish district of Lublin. Analyzing articles written by Bela Dobrzyńska, a local Zionist activist who was also a co-founder of the nursery, as well as other texts, the author discusses issues regarding educational work carried out by this institution. A broader interpretative and comparative context for the analysis is provided by press articles regarding the orphanage for Jewish children at 11 Grodzka Street run by the Jewish community, as well as by studies on pedagogical ideas developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This article explores the narratives describing the interactions between students of the Catholic University of Lublin and the local Jewish population. It analyzes oral histories from the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” archive using the theoretical framework of intergroup contact theory, intersectionality, and the concept of contact zone. The study presents the accounts thematically, according to the circumstances of the violent behavior, and notes its gendered nature-it was perpetrated mostly by Catholic men. Moreover, it seeks an explanation for these situations and, finally, points to the theory of memory of meanings as a helpful interpretative tool.

The purpose of this article is to present the policy toward Jewish youth carried out by the main Jewish institutions operating in Lublin in the postwar period (until 1968), including the local representation of the Central Committee of Polish Jews (CKŻP) (1945–1950) and the Lublin branch of the Social and Cultural Society of Jews in Poland (TSKŻ), as well as the activities of local Zionist youth organizations. The paper presents the organizational structures of the youth-specialized units operating within the aforementioned institutions, the formal and personal changes within them, as well as the local particularities of their activity. The ideological assumptions of these organizations are analyzed and set in the context of the cultural debate over the possibility of rebuilding Jewish life in Poland: nusekh Poyln and yetsiyes Poyln.

This 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.

The concept of kordiakos appears in the pages of the Talmud and later in rabbinic commentaries, where it is explained as the name of a demon capable of confusing someone who drinks young wine. A disease with a similar sounding name—cordiaca—was known to early modern European medicine. Its occurrence is also recorded in nineteenth-century ethnographic collections, where it is often labelled by auxiliary German terms Herzgespann or Riebkuchen. It can also be found in this form in relatively numerous documents of Jewish provenance. Is it possible to prove a connection between the two afflictions, if this is how one of the most important Jewish medical manuals of the Haskalah era—Marpe la-am (1834–1842)—interprets them?

In 1904, Yitskhok-Dov Berkovitz published the short story “Talush.” This term came to describe the literary portrayal of a man torn from his natural environment—a theme prevalent in Hebrew prose during that era. Talush evolved into a metaphor for Jews from the diaspora navigating the delicate balance between tradition and the progressive secularization of their world. Scholars, including Gershon Shaked and Avraham Holtz, categorize Berkovitz’s protagonists as “uprooted.” This article aims to compare the destinies of protagonists from previously unexamined stories: “Moshkeli-Hazir,” “Mi-Merhakim,” and “Koah ha-dimyon.” The objective of the author is to assess the extent of their rootlessness and alienation, demonstrating that these character types differ. The analysis of the stories proves that not all of them can be classified as talush.