The article presents the process that led to the creation of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) in 1920 in London. The main reason for creating a separate international women’s organization within the Zionist movement was the lack of support for women’s ideas in the male-dominated structures. The trigger for the establishment of a separate women’s group after World War I was a trip to Palestine by three middle-class British Jewish women, the wives of high-ranking clerks in the British Mandate for Palestine. However, the creation of WIZO at that particular time was an outcome of several political and cultural phenomena: the beginnings of emancipation of Jewish women in Eastern Europe during the Haskalah, processes of emancipation of Jews in Western Europe, the development of modern nationalisms and anti-Semitism, and the international recognition of the Zionist movement. These conditions led to the creation of Jewish women’s networks, which were the pre-existing condition for the creation of WIZO.

The article is an attempt to analyze the phenomenon of Jewish football in interwar Kraków. On the basis of books on the topic, newspaper articles and recollections of witnesses, the author describes the significant role of the Jews in the development of football in Poland. The primary focus, however, is the importance of competitive sports for minority representatives, especially in the context of their relationship with the Catholic majority. The main objective of this paper is to present Polish-Jewish relations in interwar Kraków from the perspective of the four competing clubs: Jutrzenka, Maccabi, Wisła and Cracovia. The teams not only battled on the sports field but also represented the entire spectrum of ideological views and attitudes. Differences between the left-wing Jutrzenka, Zionist Maccabi, democratic Cracovia and nationally-oriented Wisła reflected important antagonisms between Poles and Jews, as well as divisions within ethnic groups.

Although the modern stage in the development of Hebrew began in Europe about two hundred years ago, after 1948 the language and its literature became confined for the most part to the state of Israel. The tumultuous course of Jewish history in the past two centuries has by and large emptied the Jewish Diaspora of Hebrew. And yet in the past few decades we are witnessing a growing number of Hebrew writers who are no longer confined by geography. Although they still publish their works in Israel, they write them elsewhere, mainly in the United States and Europe. Increasingly, too, their works reflect their habitat as well as the peoples and cultures of their countries of residence. Are we witnessing the birth of what can perhaps be termed a “post-national Hebrew” era, an era in which Israel remains an inspiring cultural center, but no longer the only location for the creation of original works in Hebrew? This article looks at various Hebrew novels that were written outside of Israel in the last few decades and examines the contours of what may perhaps be a new chapter in the history of modern Hebrew.

The article explores the events known as the “pimp pogrom,” which took place in Warsaw in May 1905, as presented by the Jewish press. The analysis of the sources has provided new insights into the events, which were very complex in their nature. For many years, the Jewish community of Warsaw struggled with a problem of prostitution and white slavery. The inaction of the Russian authorities and police as well as the ineffectiveness of abolitionist organizations provoked the feeling of hopelessness and evoked a rank-and-file initiative of the Jewish working class. The pre-revolutionary turmoil only accelerated the explosion of violence against the marginalized and suspicious elements of the society.

The kabbalistic doctrine of cosmic cycles (shemittot and yovel) or worlds periodically created and returning into the state of chaos has been fully developed in the treatise entitled Sefer ha-Temunah, composed by an anonymous author probably in the mid-fourteenth century within the areas of the Byzantine Empire. The allusive style of the text is balanced by its clear structure, which constitutes the framework for the doctrine of cosmic cycles. This paper investigates the cluster of motifs exposed in the introduction to Sefer ha-Temunah and further developed in the treatise: (a) sefirah Binah and its symbolism, (b) ascension of the vital soul (nefesh) to Binah as a place of its origin, and (c) the concept of primordial Torah (Torah elionah) as a tool by which Binah affects each of the following worlds. The article reveals the relation between these motifs as organized around the notion of sefirah Binah, which is the crucial concept in the process of creation and destruction of worlds presented by the anonymous author of Sefer ha-Temunah.