Issue 2 (54)

2024

Publication date: 31.03.2025

Description

Digitalizacja i druk czasopisma „Studia Judaica” Vol. 27 (2024) nr 2 (54) oraz redakcja i korekta zostały sfinansowane przez Interdyscyplinarny Ośrodek Studiów Polskich przy Uniwersytecie w Hajfie i Uniwersytet Warszawski.

Licence: CC BY

Editorial team

Editors of the Number Anat Vaturi, Dorota Burda-Fischer

Editor-in-Chief Stefan Gąsiorowski

Issue content

BETWEEN EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY: REFUGE AND ASYLUM IN POLISH-JEWISH HISTORY, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

Between Experience and Memory: Refuge and Asylum in Polish-Jewish History, Politics, and Culture. Introduction

Anat Vaturi, Dorota Burda-Fischer

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 259-260

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.012.21129

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Art as Refuge: Sketches and Insights on the Jewish-Polish Art Scene from a Refugee’s Perspective

Aviv Livnat

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 261-290

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.013.21130

The works of Maurice Gottlieb and Samuel Hirszenberg express corporeal wandering and psychological ambulation characteristic of the refugee condition. The third artistic stratagem emerges in the works of the copper artist Arieh Merzer. His work embodies a liminal form of movement, an elusive dynamism etched into metallic surfaces. This interstitial motion is situated between the external and internal realms, occupying the depth of the relief medium that stands between painting and sculpture, engaging the world while simultaneously withdrawing from it. Merzer’s aesthetic thereby exemplifies the intricate dialectic of the refugee experience, one alternately characterized by an inexorable sense of displacement and entrapment in a Penrose-like perpetual movement that can lead to new creative expressions. His art is an art as refuge.

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The Wandering Jew: Emigrants, Refugees, and Olim in the Twentieth Century

Gur Alroey

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 291-310

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.014.21131

The article seeks to provide a comparative perspective on Jewish emigration to the United States and to Mandatory Palestine during the period spanning World War I and the civil war in Ukraine through the closing of the United States borders to immigrants in 1924. The study consists of three sections. The first offers a typological explication of the concepts of emigration, aliyah, and refugeehood. The second part utilizes this typological discussion to characterize Jewish emigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The third section considers the attitudes exhibited by absorbing societies towards newcomers. The article furnishes a detailed account of the socio-political forces shaping Jewish emigration patterns and their implications for identity and absorption. In addition to a critical examination of the ideological, economic, and social context of Jewish migration, it discusses the hardships of displacement and absorption and traces the characteristics inherent to Jewish emigration.

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Two Homes: From the Carpathians to the World

Dorota Burda-Fischer

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 311-326

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.015.21132

The article delves into the profound meaning of home for refugees, a concept that takes on a new depth when one’s homeland is ravaged by war. It examines the contrasting experiences of the Polish writer Stanisław Vincenz and his Jewish friend Benedykt Liebermann, both from the Eastern Carpathian region. Despite their different paths, both individuals demonstrated remarkable resilience. Vincenz, while in exile, poetically recreated in memory his childhood Carpathian home, which allowed him to continue his writing. For Liebermann, who attempted to build a new home in pre-state Israel after being uprooted, the destruction of Jewish life in his former hometown made recovering a sense of home immensely difficult. The author of the article suggests that philosophies about memory’s role in preserving a home have limits, as the trauma of losing one’s home is a highly personal experience. For Jewish refugees, that rupture severed entire cultural worlds in a way that defied simple remedies.

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Longing for Home: Nostalgia and Anti-nostalgia in Inter-war Polish-Jewish Literature

Eugenia Prokop-Janiec

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 327-344

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.016.21133

This article discusses the significance and enduring presence of nostalgic narrations in works by Polish-Jewish authors that are often accompanied by motifs of anti-nostalgia. They derive from complex relations with spaces categorized as familiar and alien, close and remote, as well as complex, ambivalent experiences of bonds, distance, and loss. The intersection of nostalgia and anti-nostalgia brings together and intertwines Polish and Jewish traditions and discourses of nostalgia. The sources of the article are writings by the outstanding inter-war Polish-Jewish writers Roman Brandstaetter, Anda Eker, Stefan Pomer, and Maurycy Szymel.

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The Aid of the Polish Government-in-Exile to Jewish Refugees in Spain, 1943–1944, as Reflected in the Archive of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Refugees’ Correspondence with Ignacy Schwarzbart

Dorota Choińska

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 345-370

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.017.21134

The article discusses the relations between the Polish government-inexile in England and Polish Jewish refugees stranded in Spain in the years 1943– 1944. The study is based principally on previously unexamined correspondence between Jewish refugees in Spain and Ignacy Schwarzbart, the Jewish representative of the Polish National Council in London, which was preserved at the Yad Vashem Archives, and the records of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that are accessible at the Hoover Institution. This article focuses on three thorny issues related to governmental assistance for Jewish refugees: the recognition of their Polish citizenship, the material relief provided to them, and their evacuation from Spain. Polish decision-makers responded to all problems reported by their Jewish compatriots. However, their actions often left Jewish refugees dissatisfied, and their attitudes were considered callous, unjust, and at times outright antisemitic. The author argues that, while some of the shortcomings can be attributed directly to the work of Polish officials in London, such as the bureaucratic sluggishness of some governmental agendas, others arose from wartime constraints that the Polish government was not entirely able to control or influence, such as the deficient communication with its representatives abroad and the inhospitable stance of the international community towards Jewish refugees. The article not only examines the Polish government’s attempts to address refugee matters in Spain, but also sheds light on the perspective of the Jewish subjects involved in the described events.

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“I stopped liking the country I was born in – the motherland”: Nostalgia and Anti-nostalgia in the Israeli Works of Kalman Segal

Magdalena Ruta

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 371-391

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.019.21135

The subject of reflection in this article is the Israeli period in the work of Polish-Yiddish writer Kalman Segal (1917–1980), who decided to emigrate to Israel after the antisemitic campaign inspired in 1968 by Poland’s Communist authorities. Referring to Przemysław Czapliński’s definition of “nostalgia” (“a narrative manifestation of the [longed for] past, an effort to meticulously reconstruct personal experiences, spaces, people and customs preserved only in memory”), the author analyzes literary texts in which the writer, already a citizen of Israel, continues his life-long mission of nostalgically remembering the “Murdered Shtetl” (as the author calls it), a symbol of Jewish civilization in the Polish lands, and commemorating its Jewish inhabitants murdered in the Holocaust. At the same time, using Jora Vaso’s definition of “anti-nostalgia” (“the emotions of a modern exile who has left his ‘backward’ homeland to live in the modern world, being aware of its shortcomings, as a result of which it becomes an object of recollection, which arouses his harsh criticism and roots him in the past, making obsessive thinking about his former homeland his main preoccupation”), the author tries to show Segal’s difficult process of adaptation to the Israeli reality that was alien to him and how he was disturbed by the suffering and longing accompanying the decision to leave his former homeland. Over time, one can see in Segal’s work a growing acceptance of the new situation and commitment to the new reality. This can be read as overcoming both nostalgia and anti-nostalgia towards Poland. Life experiences lead Segal to believe that being in exile is a universal experience and an existential condition of the Jewish people.

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ARTICLES

Reading the Illegible: A Case Study of the Documentation and Analysis of Matzevot at the Jewish Cemetery in Chrzanów (Lesser Poland)

Jacek Kościuk, Anna Michałowska-Mycielska, Marta Pakowska, Dariusz Rozmus

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 393-412

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.020.21136

This article presents a 3D scanning method used to read the inscriptions on the oldest damaged tombstones at the Jewish cemetery in Chrzanów. To date, the technique has not been used at any other Jewish cemetery in Poland. The authors discuss the techniques and methods used, how the acquired data was processed and analyzed, and what results were obtained. The work presented here is part of a broader project to inventory Jewish cemeteries in the region of Zagłębie and western Małopolska (Lesser Poland).

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Voicing Female Experience in Vilne: The Case of Dveira Dines

Saulė Valiūnaitė

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 413-442

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.021.21137

This article uses microhistory methods to explore the impact of the changes in the first half of the twentieth century and how they are represented in the egodocuments written by women. The research is based on previously unknown and unpublished autobiographies and diaries of seamstress Dveira Dines. Her egodocuments are considered from four perspectives: what were the challenges of being a woman; what can be learned about childrearing and healthcare; whether women’s egodocuments can be a chronicle of their generation; and what can they tell us about life in Vilne (Vilnius) and its people. The analysis of these documents shows that egodocuments written by women can help significantly expand our knowledge about everyday life and, in this case, can also show the historical events of that period from the perspective of an ordinary citizen or participant rather than an organizer or ideologue.

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Niecenzuralny debiut. Ekipa „Antygona” (1963) Henryka Grynberga

Wiktor Gardocki

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 443-460

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.022.21138

The article is devoted to Henryk Grynberg’s debut volume of short stories Ekipa „Antygona” [“The Antigone” Crew]. The collection was examined in the Main Office for the Control of Press, Publications and Public Performances in 1963, where some significant changes to the book were required. The book was printed in fewer copies than originally expected in order to reduce its possible reception; several passages, controversial in the opinion of the censors, were also deleted; and finally, the order of the stories proposed by the author was changed. The purpose of the article is to show in detail the censorship interventions and attempt to answer the question of why they were made to such an extent, as well as to reconstruct the original form of the short story collection before the censorship intrusions were made.

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Contemporary Judeo-Spanish Poetry: Language in Search of a Modern Form

Agnieszka August-Zarębska

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 461 -495

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.023.21139

The article investigates the issue of the status of contemporary Judeo- Spanish literature, principally poetry, and advances the thesis of the postvernacular character of works written in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino). The backing for this conclusion is an analysis of dozens of volumes of poetry published during the arrebivimyento period, between 1975 and the 2020s. This study analyses several characteristic features of these book editions that give evidence of the postvernacular condition of the language and its culture, primarily the multilingualism of the book, the variety of the adopted alphabets and orthographic notation in the Latin alphabet, and the presence of many paratexts. These elements are understood as aimed at supporting the reception of a book written in Ladino by its potential readers—in a situation where the Ladino language itself, classified as endangered, is not “autonomous” enough. The article concludes by offering the metaphor of a nature monument of a tree, protected and upheld in its existence by various “props,” as a figure reflecting both the material and nonmaterial aspects of contemporary Judeo-Spanish literature and books.

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REVIEW ARTICLES

Prześladowanie i zagłada Żydów w dystrykcie lubelskim w ujęciu izraelskiego historyka

Jakub Chmielewski

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 497-515

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.024.21140

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REPORTS

Zjazd naukowy Polskiego Towarzystwa Studiów Żydowskich „Żydowskie peregrynacje, wojaże i turystyka” (Warszawa, 10–12 czerwca 2024). Sprawozdanie

Anna Michałowska-Mycielska

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (54), 2024, pp. 517-521

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.24.025.21141

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Imprint PDF Contents PDF

Słowa kluczowe: copper, refugee, Jewish art, metaloplastics, aliyah, Jewish emigration, refugeehood, absorption, displacement, Zionist thought, Great Migration, lost home, roots, rootedness, belonging, oikology, reconstruction of the lost home, memory as the foundation of a new home, contrasting Jewish and Polish refugee experiences of home loss, Stanisław Vincenz, Benedykt Liebermann, Polish-Jewish literature, nostalgia in Polish-Jewish literature, anti-nostalgia in Polish-Jewish literature, Roman Brandstaetter, Anda Eker, Stefan Pomer, Maurycy Szymel, Polish government-in-exile, Jewish refugees, Spain, World War II, welfare, citizenship, emigration, nostalgia, anti-nostalgia, Kalman Segal, motherland, Polish-Jewish literature, Yiddish literature, antisemitism, Israel, Poland, March 1968, 3D scanning, Jewish cemeteries, Zagłębie, western Małopolska (Lesser Poland), Chrzanów, gender and Jewish women, Vilnius, interwar period, Jewish egodocuments, censorship, People’s Republic of Poland, Holocaust, Henryk Grynberg, Judeo-Spanish poetry, Ladino, postvernacular culture, Ladino book, contemporary Sephardic poetry