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"A richly perceptive sociological consideration of the Jewish community as a caste in 19th- and early-20th-century Poland... A book that should be part of any study of modern Polish culture or Diaspora Jewry." --Kirkus Reviews
Jews today tend to associate Poland exclusively with the horrors of the Holocaust. Poland has been called the world s biggest graveyard, because on its soil was where most of the systematic murder of our people during World War II took place. However, it is very shortsighted to view Poland as little more than the darkest corner of Europe into which the Nazis concentrated the Jews before exterminating them.Jews have lived in Poland for over a thousand years. In fact, for centuries, Poland was the most Jew-friendly state in Europe. Countless thousands of persecuted Jews throughout Christian Europe found refuge in Poland. For hundreds of years, Poland was the largest, most significant, most intellectually vibrant Jewish community in all of Europe. In fact, at its peak in the 17th century, the majority of the world s Jews lived in Poland, a land referred to in Latin as, paradisus Iudaeorum: Jewish paradise.JRoots, based in London, was created to empower today s generation of Jews to meaningfully connect with their past through transformational travel and multi-media experiences. JRoots has inspired thousands on its signature trip to Poland. Walking the streets our forebears walked, praying where they prayed, singing where they sang, dancing where they danced touches the soul in a lasting way no book or movie ever could. By weaving a tapestry of life and death made real by the places they visit and the personalities they meet, the trips provide a sense of Jewish context and pride, ensuring participants focus on their commitment to a better tomorrow rather than despair over the tragedies of yesteryear. JRoots produced this guidebook for their own participants as a supplement to be read before, during, and after their trip, to help make their personal journey as meaningful as it could be. It is now available to anyone, in the hope that it will enhance the significance of your own Poland experience, so that you too will return home more deeply motivated to invest in the Jewish people and our future.
Winner of the Montreal Jewish Public Library's J. I. Segal Prize Originally published in 1991. In the eighteenth century, more than half of the world's Jewish population lived in Polish private villages and towns owned by magnate-aristocrats. Furthermore, roughly half of Poland's entire urban population was Jewish. Thus, the study of Jews in private Polish towns is central to both Jewish history and to the history of Poland-Lithuania. The Jews in a Polish Private Town seeks to investigate the social, economic, and political history of Jews in Opatów, a private Polish town, in the context of an increasing power and influence of private towns at the expense of the Polish crown and gentry in the eighteenth century. Hundert recovers an important community from historical obscurity by providing a balanced perspective on the Jewish experience in the Polish Commonwealth and by describing the special dimensions of Jewish life in a private town.
An in-depth look at why non-Jewish Poles are trying to bring Jewish culture back to life in Poland today Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. In Resurrecting the Jew, Geneviève Zubrzycki examines this revival and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only about 10,000 Jews now live. Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Polish Jews, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish revival, Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today. The book shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism, promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, and resist the Far Right government. The book also raises urgent questions, relevant far beyond Poland, about the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriation.
The compelling history of ten Jewish families rebuilding their lives in Warsaw after the Holocaust—“amply illustrated . . . the book reverberates with hope” (Jewish Book Council). Warsaw, Poland, once described as the “Paris of the East,” had been transformed into a landscape of ruin by the ravages of World War II. Among the few areas of the city center that escaped Nazi decimation was Ujazdowskie Avenue, where German officials lived during the occupation. In the late 1940s, while most surviving Polish Jews were making their homes in new countries, ten Jewish families reclaimed a once elegant building at 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue and began reconstructing their lives. These families rebuilt on the rubble of the Polish capital and created new communities as they sought to distance themselves from the memory of a painful past. Based on interviews with family members, extensive archival research, and the families’ personal papers and correspondence, Karen Auerbach presents an engrossing story of loss and rebirth, political faith and disillusionment, and the persistence of Jewishness.
"The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--
The Jews of Poland tells the story of the development and growth of Polish Jewry from its beginnings, around the year 1200, when it numbered a few score people, to about six hundred years later, when it totaled a million or more people. This books records the development of this Jewish community. It attempts to capture the uniqueness of each period in the history of this community. In recounting the saga of Polish Jewry, the book endeavors to see Polish Jews as human beings acting and reacting humanly to the exigencies of life with courage and weakness, high ideals, beliefs, and sacrifices, on one hand, and human frailty, passions, and ambitions, on the other.
The final volume in Richard J. Evans's masterly trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany traces the rise and fall of German military might, the mobilization of a ?people's community? to serve a war of conquest, and Hitler's campaign of racial subjugation and genocide Already hailed as ?a masterpiece? (William Grimes in The New York Times) and ?the most comprehensive history? of the Third Reich? (Ian Kershaw), this epic trilogy reaches its terrifying climax in this volume. Evans interweaves a broad narrative of the war's progress with viscerally affecting personal testimony from a wide range of people'from generals to front-line soldiers, from Hitler Youth activists to middle-class housewives. The Third Reich at War lays bare the dynamics of a nation more deeply immersed in war than any society before or since. Fresh insights into the conflict's great events are here, from the invasion of Poland to the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler's suicide in the bunker. But just as important is the re-creation of the daily experience of ordinary Germans in wartime, staggering under pressure from Allied bombing and their own government's mounting demands upon them. At the center of the book is the Nazi extermination of Europe's Jews, set in the context of Hitler's genocidal plans for the racial restructuring of Europe. Blending narrative, description and analysis, The Third Reich at War creates an engrossing picture'at once sweeping and precise'of a society rushing headlong to self-destruction and taking much of Europe with it. It is the culmination of a historical masterwork that will remain the most authoritative work on Nazi Germany for years to come.
National Jewish Book Award Finalist: “A fresh and delightful portrait of Jewish renewal in Poland . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice Since the end of Communism, Jews from around the world have visited Poland to tour Holocaust-related sites. A few venture further, seeking to learn about their own Polish roots and connect with contemporary Poles. For their part, a growing number of Poles are fascinated by all things Jewish. In this book, Erica T. Lehrer explores the intersection of Polish and Jewish memory projects in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz in Krakow. Her own journey becomes part of the story as she demonstrates that Jews and Poles use spaces, institutions, interpersonal exchanges, and cultural representations to make sense of their historical inheritances.
Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.