Charity was an important form of social activity of women in Jewish communities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was also a manifestation of female piety. Charity is also an area—despite a clear distinction between  gender and related social roles—where cooperation between men and women can be observed. Women were involved in charities as community officials, associates or members of charity brotherhoods, as well as acting individually. However, their activities were always largely subordinated and overshadowed by activities of men, and acting within the framework of community structures, they were subject to the regulations and control of men. It is also noticeable that women’s charitable work was less formalized than that of men, which was probably due to the fact that women were less mobile and relied on family and neighborly contacts in their activities.

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.

* Artykuł powstał w ramach projektu Narodowego Centrum Nauki pt. „Religia mojżeszowa” jako przedmiot szkolny w Galicji: programy nauczania, podręczniki, nauczyciele, konkurs „Sonata” (2018/31/D/HS3/03604). Wszystkie autorki są członkiniami zespołu projektowego. Nazwiska autorek podano w kolejności alfabetycznej.

The uprooted hero is one of the leading themes in Hebrew prose at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also occupies a central place in the stories of Isaac Dov Berkowitz. The uproot metaphor reflects the hero’s alienation in many aspects of life. In a broader sense, it is a reaction to the sense of suspension between the traditions of their ancestors and the progressive secularization of their world. The exceptions are stories whose protagonist is an uprooted female figure. This is a unique phenomenon considering the lower hierarchical position of women in Judaism and the limited access to religious and secular literaturęat the time. The female uprooting results from other factors. Women do not follow science or ideology, they want to free themselves from the norms of Jewish customs, escape loneliness and experience individualism. The objective of the paper is to present the image of Berkowitz’s heroines and compare them from the perspective of alienation. The starting point for consideration is the classification of the uprooted and the division of Berkowitz’s heroes according to Nurit Govrin and variants of the uprooting by Simon Halkin.

The article aims at analyzing the role played by Jewish actresses in the development of the Shakespearean Yiddish theater. The paper includes the profiles of artists coming from Poland and/or working in the Polish lands: Bertha Kalisch, Miriam Orleska, and Ester Goldenberg, who contributed to popularization of Shakespeare’s works among the Jewish community. Moreover, the article illustrates their contribution to the changes in the perception of Jewish theater from the “jargon drama” enterprise to an ambitious cultural institution with a Shakespearean repertoire. Among those discussed are the characters of Hamlet performed by Kalisch, Portia (The Merchant of Venice) played by Orleska, Jessica (The Merchant of Venice), and Ariel (The Tempest) interpreted by Goldenberg, and their assessment. The reception of these stage creations of Shakespearean heroes is analyzed on the basis of press materials published in daily newspapers and weeklies in Yiddish, Polish, and English. Some academic studies on the premieres of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest with participation of Jewish female artists have already been conducted, but their authors did not analyze the roles performed by those actresses and did not refer to the sources in Yiddish at all. The article discusses not only the artistic activities of Kalisch, Orleska, and Goldenberg, but also attempts to analyze the reception of the characters created by the latter two artists from the perspective of the social and political relations in the Second Polish Republic. Moreover, efforts were made to show that Jewish actresses, by impersonating heroines and heroes of Shakespeare’s plays, proved with their style of acting, professional preparation, and understanding of the nuances of the performed characters that Yiddish theater definitely deserved to be called a temple of art. Their creations became an inherent part of the history of Jewish, and thus the world’s Shakespearean theater.

The Circle of Jewish Women (“Koło Kobiet Żydowskich”), founded in Lemberg/Lviv in 1908 and active until 1939, played a vital role in the organization of Zionist women in the city and other places in Eastern Galicia. It was founded, among others, by Róża Pomeranc Melcer, one of the pioneers of Zionist women’s associations in Galicia and the first and only Jewish woman parliamentarian in the Second Polish Republic. Nevertheless, the history of the Circle, as well as the work of its many active members—many of whom perished in the Holocaust—has been almost forgotten and is rarely explored. The author of the article argues that this organization not only represents social welfare, but it also embodies elements of social support, cultural work, politicization, and feminism. Therefore, the author emphasizes the role the Circle played in the process of organizing Zionist women in Lviv and Galicia before World War I and especially during the interwar period in the Second Polish Republic, and how it contributed to women’s emancipation. Thus, the history of one of the most important Zionist women’s organizations is reconstructed and its versatile work facets explored in more detail.

* Niniejszy artykuł stanowi poprawionąi skróconą wersję dwóch rozdziałów na temat organizacji syjonistycznej, które zostaną opublikowane w antologii Women Zionists Worldwide, 1897–1945 Miry Yungman (w przygotowaniu). Częściowo powstał także na podstawie prezentacji przedstawionej na konferencji Kobieta żydowska – nowe badania i perspektywy badawcze (Kraków, 26–28 kwietnia 2021).

** Tłumaczenie z języka angielskiego: Anna Nienartowicz

Eleven women belonged to the Kraków Association of Jewish Artists, active in the 1930s. They dealt with painting, graphic art and sculpture. Unfortunately, not much has survived from their achievements. One of the most interesting artistic personalities in this group was Henryka Kernerówna, educated in Vienna. From 1918 on, female artists younger than her could benefit from studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. In the reviews of the exhibitions of the Association, the gender of artists was rarely mentioned, except in some cases. The artists also belonged to other non-Jewish art groups. Most of them survived the war, but none of them remained in Kraków. Three of them were killed.

Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz, a painter, came from a well-off family of Majerowiczs, the owners of opticians’ shops in Łódź. She studied at private painting and drawing schools in Łódźand Warsaw. Before the outbreak of World War II, she was active in the Polish art milieu. In 1933, she became a member of the Trade Union of Polish Artists (Związek Zawodowy Polskich Artystów  Plastyków, ZZPAP) and participated in its exhibitions in Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków,and Lviv. She painted mainly landscapes, still lifes, and—less frequently—portraits. She published her works in the union magazine Forma. In 1940, she was  displaced to the Łódźghetto where she worked as a graphic artist at the Statistics Department. Thanks to this she could obtain art materials. Her clandestine activity was documenting life in the ghetto in paintings and drawings. She survived the liquidation of the ghetto and then was forced to work on cleaning that area. Liberated on 19 January 1945, she returned to her house where some of her prewar works had survived. After 1945 she continued her artistic career and exhibited with the ZZPAP, as well as with the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. In 1957, she emigrated to Israel. Gliksman died in Tel Aviv in 2005. The aim of this article is to verify and describe Sara Gliksman’s biography, to present her activities in the Polish-Jewish artistic community of postwar Poland, as well as to place her works in the context of issues concerning survivors’ memory and artistic attitudes toward the Holocaust, and art as a manifestation of hope for the rebirth of Jewish life and culture in postwar Poland in the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.

The article explores a broad range of social and aid activities of Jewish women in the Warsaw Ghetto under the aegis of the Jewish Organization for Social Care, known as Jewish Social Self-Help (JSS). Due to hard living conditions, those women were forced into increased outside activities, as well as taking protective actions in aid of strangers, individuals, and families alike. They founded women’s clubs in every house, alongside with many public soup kitchens, common rooms, day care centers and so-called children’s corners, the staff of which would consist mainly of women. All these facilities together formed the largest chain of self-help centers, next to the numerous ghetto House Committees.

During the first months following Germany’s attack on Poland, some members of the Jewish community managed to sneak away to the eastern frontiers of the country which had been invaded and annexed by the Red Army in the second half of September 1939. The tragic experiences of these refugees, heretofore somehow neglected by Holocaust scholars, have recently become the subject of profound academic reflection. One of the sources of knowledge about the fate of Jewish refugees from Poland are their memoirs. In this article the author reflects on three autobiographical texts written by Polish Jewish women, female refugees who survived the Holocaust thanks to their stay in Soviet Russia, namely Ola Watowa, Ruth Turkow Kaminska, and Sheyne-Miriam Broderzon. Each of them experienced not only the atrocities of war, but also, most of all, the cruelty of the Communist regime. All three of them suffered persecution by the oppressive Soviet authorities in different ways and at different times. While Ola Watowa experienced (in person, as well as through the fate of her family and friends) the bitter taste of persecution and deportation during WWII, Sheyne-Miriam Broderzon lived a relatively peaceful life in that period (1939–1945), and Ruth Turkow Kaminska even enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle reserved for the privileged members of the establishment, and it was not until the years immediately after the war that the latter two women would face the true image of Communism as its victims. The Wats managed to leave the USSR shortly after the war, whereas for the Broderzons and the Turkows the war would not end until the death of Stalin and their subsequent return to Poland in 1956. According to Mary G. Mason, the immanent feature of women’s autobiographical writings is the self-discovery of one’s own identity through the simultaneous identification of some ‘other.’ It is thanks to the rootedness of one’s own identity through the connection with a certain chosen ‘other’ that women authors can openly write about themselves. The aim of the article is to attempt to determine to what extent this statement remains true for the memoirs of the three Polish Jewish women who, besides sharing the aforementioned historical circumstances, are also linked by the fact that all of them stayed in romantic relationships with outstanding men (i.e. writers Aleksander Wat and Moyshe Broderzon, and jazzman Adi Rosner), which had an enormous impact not only on their lives in general, but also specifically on the creation and style of their autobiographical narratives, giving them the character of a sui generis double portrait.