Focusing on Jews in the Polish borderlands 9781874774693, 9781909821651, 9781874774709

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Note on Place-Names (page xv)
Note on Transliteration (page xvi)
The Sixtieth Anniversary of the Massacre in Jedwabne: Two Speeches Delivered in Jedwabne, 10 July 2001 (page xvii)
PART I: JEWS IN THE POLISH BORDERLANDS
Introduction (ANTONY POLONSKY, page 3)
The Self-Perception of Lithuanian-Belarusian Jewry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (VITAL ZAJKA, page 19)
Jewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia, 1742-1848 (JANUSZ SPYRA, page 31)
The Jewish Community in the Grand Duchy of Poznań under Prussian Rule, 1815-1848 (SOPHIA KEMLEIN, page 49)
Between Germans and Poles: The Jews of Poznań in 1848 (KRZYSZTOF A. MAKOWSKI, page 68)
The Rabbinical Schools as Institutions of Socialization in Tsarist Russia, 1847-1873 (VERENA DOHRN, page 83)
The Zhitomir Rabbinical School: New Materials and Perspectives (EFIM MELAMED, page 105)
Three Documents on Anti-Jewish Violence in the Eastern Kresy during the Polish-Soviet Conflict (SARUNAS LIEKIS, LIDIA MILIAKOVA, and ANTONY POLONSKY, page 116)
The Policies of the Sanacja on the Jewish Minority in Silesia, 1926-1939 (JACEK PIOTROWSKI, page 150)
The Vilna Years of Jakub Rotbaum (ANNA HANNOWA, page 156)
Tsevorfene bleter: The Emergence of Yung Vilne (JUSTIN D. CAMMY, page 170)
Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania: An Interview with Yudl Mark (DOV LEVIN, page 192)
The Transfer of Vilna District into Lithuania, 1939 (SARUNA LIEKIS, page 212)
Jan Kazimierz University 1936-1939: A Memoir (BRONISŁAW WITZ-MARGULIES, page 223)
My First Encounters with Jews and Ukrainians (JACEK KUROŃ, page 237)
Lithuania Honours a Holocaust Rescuer (JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN, page 249)
PART II: NEW VIEWS
Christian Servants Employed by Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (JUDITH KALIK, page 259)
Bolesław Prus and the Dreyfus Case (AGNIESZKA FRIEDRICH, page 271)
Jewish War Cemeteries in Western Galicia (ADAM BARTOSZ, page 281)
New Sources on the History of the Old Town Synagogue in Łódź (KRZYSZTOF STEFAŃSKI, page 286)
A Fish Breaks through the Net: Sven Norrman and the Holocaust (JÓZEF LEWANDOWSKI, page 295)
The Work and Recommendations of the Polish-Israeli Textbooks Committee (SHEVACH EDEN, page 306)
The Image of the Holocaust in Polish Historical Consciousness (FELIKS TYCH, page 315)
PART III: REVIEWS
REVIEW ESSAYS
John Paul II on Jews and Judaism (ROBERT S. WISTRICH, page 329)
Recent Developments in the Historiography of Silesian Jews (MARCIN WODZIŃSKI, page 339)
A Review of Some Recent Issues of the Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (ABRAHAM BRUMBERG, page 352)
Gates of Heaven (ELEONORA BERGMAN, page 358)
Upside-Down History (JERZY TOMASZEWSKI, page 377)
BOOK REVIEWS
Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers (eds.), Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (ALLAN ARKUSH, page 381)
Edward Fram, Ideals Face Reality: Jewish Law and Life in Poland 1550-1665 (MICHAEL BROYDE and ANGELA RICETTI, page 383)
Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (NORMA BAUMEL JOSEPH, page 385)
David Assaf, Derekh hamalkut: r. yisrael miruzhin (GLENN DYNNER, page 387)
Sophia Kemlein, Die Posener Juden 1815-1848. Entwicklungsprozesse einer polnischen Judenheit unter preussischer Herrschaft (JERZY TOMASZEWSKI, page 390)
Leszek Ziątkowski, Ludność żydowska we Wrocławiu w latach 1812-1914 (MARCIN WODZIŃSKI, page 393)
Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (ESTHER FRANK, page 395)
Olaf Bergmann, Narodowa Demokracja wobec problematyki żydowskiej w latach 1918-1929 (SYMON RUDNICKI, page 399)
Helena Bodek, Jak tropione zwierzęta (JOANNA ROSTROPOWICZ CLARKE, page 403)
Rafael F. Scharf, Poland, What have I to Do with Thee...Essays without Prejudice (SEAN MARTIN, page 406)
Michał Głowiński, Czarne sezony (GILBERT C. RAPPAPORT, page 408)
Daniel Tollet (ed.), Les Vérités des uns et celles des autres: Points de vue de juifs et de chrétiens sur la Shoah en Pologne (JEFFREY HAUS, page 414)
Irena F. Karafilly, Ashes and Miracles: A Polish Journey (KATARZYNA WIĘCŁAWSKA, page 416)
OBITUARIES
Andrzej Szczypiorski (RAFAEL SCHARF, page 423)
Jerzy Turowicz (ANTONY POLONSKY, page 426)
Notes on the Contributors (page 429)
Glossary (page 435)
Index (page 439)

Citation preview

THE INSTITUTE FOR POLISH—-JEWISH STUDIES The Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies in Oxford and its sister organization, the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, which publish Po/in, are learned societies which were established in 1984, following the First International Conference on Polish—Jewish

Studies, held in Oxford. The Institute is an associated institute of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and the American Association is linked with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. Both the Institute and the American Association aim to promote understanding of the Polish—Jewish past. They have no building or library of their own and no paid staff; they achieve their aims by encouraging scholarly research and facilitating its publication, and by creating forums for people with a scholarly interest in Polish Jewish topics, both in the past

and in the present.

To this end, the Institute and the American Association help organize lectures and international conferences. Venues for these activities have included Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Institute for the Study of Human Sciences in Vienna, King’s College in London, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the University of L6dz, University College London, and the Polish Cultural Centre and the Polish Embassy in London. They have encouraged academic exchanges between Israel, Poland, the United States, and western Europe. In particular they seek to aid in training a new generation of scholars, in Poland as well as elsewhere, to study the culture and history of the Jews in Poland. Each year since 1987, the Institute has published a volume of scholarly papers in this

series Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, under the general editorship of Professor Antony Polonsky of Brandeis University. Since 1994 the series has been published on its behalf by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, and since 1998 the publication has been linked with the American Association as well. In March 2000 the entire series was honoured with a National Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council in the United States. More than twenty other works on Polish—Jewish topics have also been published with the Institute’s

assistance. , For further information on the Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies or the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, contact .

THE LITTMAN LIBRARY OF JEWISH CIVILIZATION MANAGING EDITOR Connie Webber

Dedicated to the memory of

Louis THOMAS SIDNEY LITTMAN who founded the Littman Library for the love of God and as an act of charity in memory of his father

JOSEPH AARON LITTMAN

Jina oD sm

‘Get wisdom, get understanding: Forsake her not and she shall preserve thee’ PROV. 4: 5

The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization ts a registered UK charity Registered charity no. 1000784

STUDIES IN POLISH JEWRY

| VOLUME FOURTEEN Focusing on fews in the Polish Borderlands Edited by

ANTONY POLONSKY

: and

Published for

| The Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies The American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies

Oxford - Portland, Oregon

The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2001

The Littman Library of Fewish Civilization

P.O. Box 645 Oxford Ox2 6AS, UK

Published in the United States and Canada by The Littman Library of fewish Civilization

c/o ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo Street Portland, Oregon 97213-3644 © in this collection Institute for Polish—fewish Studies 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of The Littman Library of Jewish Civihzation The paperback edition of this book ts sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which itis published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISSN 0268 1056

ISBN 1-874774-69-2 ISBN 1-874774-70-6 (pbk.) Publishing co-ordinator: Janet Moth Production: John Saunders Copy-editing: Laurien Berkeley Proof-reading: George Tulloch

Index: Bonnie Blackburn | Design: Pete Russell, Faringdon, Oxon Typeset by Footnote Graphics, Warminster, Wilts. Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn, www. biddles.co.uk

Articles appearing in this publication are abstracted and indexed in Mistorical Abstracts and America: History and Life

In loving memory of ANDREW STEPHEN COREN ARUN SHULAN BEN GERSHON BEN ZWI 1951—1976 (London)

The publication of this volume of POLIN was made possible by grants from the

LUCIUS N. LITTAUER FOUNDATION and the

CENTER FOR GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES AT BRANDEIS UNIVERSTY

Editors and Advisers

| EDITORS Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Lublin Israel Bartal, Jerusalem Antony Polonsky (Chair), Waltham, Mass. Michael Steinlauf, Philadelphia Jerzy Tomaszewski, Warsaw

, REVIEW EDITORS ChaeRan Freeze, Waltham, Mass.

, Joshua Zimmerman, New York , EDITORIAL BOARD

Chimen Abramsky, London | Elchanan Reiner, 7e/ Aviv David Assaf, Tel Aviv Jehuda Reinharz, Waltham, Mass. Wtadystaw T. Bartoszewski, Warsaw Moshe Rosman, Te/ Aviv Stanislaus Blejywas, New Britain, Conn. Henryk Samsonowicz, Warsaw

David Engel, New York Rafael Scharf, London

David Fishman, New York Robert Shapiro, New York

Jozef Gierowski, Krakow Adam Teller, Haifa Jacob Goldberg, Jerusalem Daniel Tollet, Paris

Yisrael Gutman, Jerusalem Piotr S. Wandycz, New Haven

Jerzy Ktoczowski, Lublin Jonathan Webber, Oxford

Ezra Mendelsohn, ferusalem Steven Zipperstein, Stanford, Calif. — ADVISORY BOARD

Wiadystaw Bartoszewski, Warsaw Lucjan Lewitter, Cambridge, Mass.

Jan Btonski, Krakow Stanistaw Litak, Lublin

Abraham Brumberg, Washington Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, Heidelberg

Andrzej Chojnowski, Warsaw Emanuel Meltzer, Te/ Aviv Tadeusz Chrzanowski, Krakow Czestaw Mitosz (Hon. Chair), Berkeley

Andrzej Ciechanowiecki, London Shlomo Netzer, Te/ Aviv

Norman Davies, London David Patterson, Oxford

Victor Erlich, New Haven Zbigniew Petczynski, Oxford Frank Golczewski, Hamburg Szymon Rudnicki, Warsaw Olga Goldberg, ferusalem Alexander Schenker, New Haven

Feliks Gross, New York David Sorkin, Madison

Czestaw Hernas, Wroctaw Edward Stankiewicz, New Haven

Maurycy Horn, Warsaw Norman Stone, Ankara Jerzy Jedlicki, Warsaw Shmuel Werses, Jerusalem

Andrzej Kaminski, Washington Jacek Wozniakowski, Lublin

Hillel Levine, Boston Piotr Wrobel, 7oronto

Preface Polin is sponsored by the Institute of Polish—Jewish Studies, Oxford, an associated institute of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and by the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, which is linked with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University. As with earlier issues, this volume could not have appeared without the untiring assistance of many individuals. In particular, we should like to express our gratitude to Dr Jonathan Webber, treasurer of the Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies, to Professor Jehuda Reinharz, president of Brandeis University, and Mrs Irene Pipes, president of the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies. As was the case with earlier volumes, this one could not have been published without the constant assistance and supervision of Connie Webber, managing editor of the Littman Library, Janet Moth, publishing co-ordinator, and the tireless copy-editing of Laurien Berkeley, Claire Rosenson, and Ben Greenberg. Plans for future volumes of Polin are well advanced. Volume 15 will feature a cluster of articles on Jewish religious life between 1550 and 1goo. We are also planning volumes on Jews in smaller Polish towns, on Polish—Jewish relations in the United States, on Jewish popular culture in Poland, and on Jewish women in eastern Europe. We should welcome articles for these issues, as well as for our section ‘New Views’. We should also welcome any suggestions or criticisms. In particular, we should be very grateful for assistance in extending our coverage to the areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, both in the period in which these countries were part of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth and subsequently. Finally, we should like to express our sadness at the passing of Jan Karski, a great

man and a tireless fighter for Polish—Jewish understanding, of Adam Ulam, a member of our editorial advisory board, and of the distinguished writer Andrzej Szczypiorski, a consistent opponent of national chauvinism of all sorts.

BLANK PAGE |

POLIN SERCO ory esa HEH HOO WO Gentle Polin (Poland), ancient land of Torah and learning From the day Ephraim first departed from Judah From a selihah by Rabbi Moshe Katz Geral of the exiles of Poland, head of the Beth Din of the Holy Congregation of Metz

We did not know, but our fathers told us how the exiles of Israel came to the land of Polin (Poland).

When Israel saw how its sufferings were constantly renewed, oppressions increased, persecutions multiplied, and how the evil authorities piled decree on decree and followed expulsion with expulsion, so that there was no way to escape the enemies of Israel, they went out on the road and sought an answer from the paths of the wide world: which is the correct road to traverse to find rest for the soul. Then a piece of paper fell from heaven, and on it the words: Go to Polantya (Poland).

So they came to the land of Polin and they gave a mountain of gold to the king,

and he received them with great honour. And God had mercy on them, so that they found favour from the king and the nobles. And the king gave them permission to reside in all the lands of his kingdom, to trade over its length and breadth and to serve God according to the precepts of their religion. And the king protected them against every foe and enemy.

And Israel lived in Polin in tranquillity for a long time. They devoted themselves to trade and handicrafts. And God sent a blessing on them so that they were

blessed in the land, and their name was exalted among the peoples. And they traded with the surrounding countries and they also struck coins with inscriptions in the holy language and the language of the country. These are the coins which have on them a lion rampant towards the right. And on the coins are the words ‘Mieszko, King of Poland’ or ‘Mieszko, Krol of Poland’. The Poles call their king ‘Krol’.

When they came from the land of the Franks, they found a wood in the land and on every tree, one tractate of the Talmud was incised. This is the forest of

X Polin Kaweczyn, which is near Lublin. And every man said to his neighbour, ‘We have come to the land where our ancestors dwelt before the Torah and revelation were granted.’ And those who seek for names say: “This is why it is called Polin. For thus spoke Israel when they came to the land, “Here rest for the night [Po /im].” And this means that we shall rest here until we are all gathered into the Land of Israel.’ Since this is the tradition, we accept it as such. S. Y. AGNON, 1916

Contents

Note on Place-Names XV Note on Transliteration XVI The Sixtieth Anniversary of the Massacre in fedwabne: Two Speeches

Delivered in fedwabne, 10 fuly 2001 , XV PART I

Introduction 3 JEWS IN THE POLISH BORDERLANDS

ANTONY POLONSKY |

and Nineteenth Centuries 1g

The Self-Perception of Lithuanian—Belarusian Jewry in the Eighteenth VITAL ZAJKA

Jewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia, 1742-1848 31 JANUSZ SPYRA

The Jewish Community in the Grand Duchy of Poznan under

Prussian Rule, 1815-1848 49 SOPHIA KEMLEIN

Between Germans and Poles: The Jews of Poznan in 1848 68 KRZYSZTOF A. MAKOWSKI

Russia, 1847-1873 83

The Rabbinical Schools as Institutions of Socialization in Tsarist VERENA DOHRN

The Zhitomir Rabbinical School: New Materials and Perspectives 105 EFIM MELAMED

Three Documents on Anti-Jewish Violence in the Eastern Kresy during

the Polish—Soviet Conflict 116

SARUNAS LIEKIS, LIDIA MILIAKOVA, and ANTONY POLONSKY

The Policies of the Sanacja on the Jewish Minority in Silesia, 1926-1939 ~=—-150 JACEK PIOTROWSKI

The Vilna Years of Jakub Rotbaum 156 ANNA HANNOWA

, XU Contents Tsevorfene bleter: ‘The Emergence of Yung Vilne 170 JUSTIN D. CAMMY

Jewish Autonomy in [nter-War Lithuania: An Interview with Yudl Mark 192 DOV LEVIN

The Transfer of Vilna District into Lithuania, 1939 212 SARUNAS LIEKIS

Jan Kazimierz University 1936-1939: A Memoir 223 BRONISEAWA WITZ-MARGULIES

My First Encounters with Jews and Ukrainians 237 JACEK KURON

Lithuania Honours a Holocaust Rescuer 249 JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

PART II

NEW VIEWS Christian Servants Employed by Jews in the Polish—Lithuanian

Commonwealth in the Seventeenth and Fighteenth Centuries 259 JUDITH KALIK

Bolestaw Prus and the Dreyfus Case 271 AGNIESZKA FRIEDRICH

Jewish War Cemeteries in Western Galicia 281 ADAM BARTOSZ

New Sources on the History of the Old Town Synagogue in Lodz 286 KRZYSZTOF STEFANSKI

A Fish Breaks through the Net: Sven Norrman and the Holocaust 295

Committee 306

JOZEF LEWANDOWSKI

The Work and Recommendations of the Polish—Israeli Textbooks SHEVACH EDEN

The Image of the Holocaust in Polish Historical Consciousness 315 FELIKS TYCH

PART ITI

REVIEWS REVIEW ESSAYS

John Paul IT on Jews and Judaism 329 ROBERT S. WISTRICH

Contents X1il Recent Developments in the Historiography of Silesian Jews 339 MARCIN WODZINSKI

Fistorycznego 352

A Review of Some Recent Issues of the Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu

Gates of Heaven 358 ABRAHAM BRUMBERG

ELEONORA BERGMAN

Upside-Down History 377 JERZY TOMASZEWSKI

BOOK REVIEWS

Yerushalmi 381

Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers (eds.),

Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim ALLAN ARKUSH

1550-1665 383

Edward Fram, [deals Face Reality: fewish Law and Life in Poland MICHAEL BROYDE and ANGELA RICETTI

Modern Jewish Women 385

Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early NORMA BAUMEL JOSEPH

David Assaf, Derekh hamalkut: r. yisrael miruzhin 387 GLENN DYNNER

Sophia Kemlein, Die Posener fJfuden 1815-1848. Entmicklungsprozesse

einer polnischen fJudenheit unter preussischer Herrschaft 390

IS12-1914 393

JERZY TOMASZEWSKI

Leszek Ziatkowski, Ludnosé zydowska we Wroctawiu w latach MARCIN WODZINSKI

Hebrew and Yiddish 395 w latach 1918-1929 399

Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of ESTHER FRANK

Olaf Bergmann, Narodowa Demokracja wobec problematyki zydowskie SZYMON RUDNICKI

Helena Bodek, Jak tropione zmierzeta 403 JOANNA ROSTROPOWICZ CLARKE

XIV | Contents

Prejudice 406

Rafael F. Scharf, Poland, What have I to Do with Thee... Essays without SEAN MARTIN

Michat Gtowinski, Czarne sezony 408 GILBERT C. RAPPAPORT Daniel Tollet (ed.), Les Verités des uns et celles des autres: Points de vue de

jutfs et de chrétiens sur la Shoah en Pologne 414 JEFFREY HAUS

Irena F’. Karafilly, Ashes and Miracles: A Polish fourney 416 KATARZYNA WIECLAWSKA

OBITUARIES

Andrzej Szczypiorski 423

Jerzy Turowicz 426 RAFAEL SCHARF

ANTONY POLONSKY

Glossary 435 Index 439

Notes on the Contributors A29

Note on Place-Names POLITICAL connotations accrue to words, names, and spellings with an alacrity unfortunate for those who would like to maintain neutrality. It seems reasonable to honour the choices of a population on the name of its city or town, but what is one to do when the people have no consensus on their name, or when the town changes its name, and the name its spelling,

again and again over time? The politician may always opt for the latest version, but the hapless historian must reckon with them all. This note, then, will be our brief reckoning; in consideration for our readers we will hereafter generally use only one designation for each

city.

There is no problem with places that have accepted English names, such as Warsaw. But every other place-name in east-central Europe raises serious problems. A good example is Wilno, Vilna, Vilnius. There are clear objections to all of these. Up to 1944 the majority of the population was Polish. It is today in Lithuania. ‘Vilna’, though raising the least problems, is an artificial construct. In this volume we have adopted the following guidelines, although we are aware that they are not wholly consistent.

1. ‘Towns that have a form which is acceptable in English will be given in that form. Some examples are Warsaw, Kiev, Moscow, St Petersburg, Munich.

2. ‘Towns that up to 1939 were clearly part of a particular state and shared the majority nationality of that state will be given in a form which reflects that situation. Some examples are Breslau, Danzig, Rzeszow, Przemysl. Where this nationality changed after 1944, we use the new form in articles dealing with this period. In Polish, Krakéw has always been spelled as such. In English it has more often appeared as Cracow, but the current trend of English follows the local language as much as possible. In keeping with this trend to local deter-

, -munation, then, we shall maintain the Polish spelling. 3. Towns that are in mixed areas should take the form in which they are known today and which reflects their present situation. Examples are Poznan, Torun, Kaunas, L’viv. This applies also to bibliographical references. We have made one exception to this rule, using the common English form for Vilna until its first incorporation into Lithuania in October 1939 and using Vilnius thereafter. Galicia’s most diversely named city, and one of its most important, boasts four variants: the Polish Lwow, the German Lemberg, the Russian Lvov, and the Ukrainian L’viv. As this city currently lives under Ukrainian rule, and most of its current residents speak Ukrainian, we shall follow the Ukrainian spelling.

4. Some place-names have different forms in Yiddish. Occasionally the subject-matter dictates that the Yiddish place-name should be the prime form, in which case the corresponding Polish (Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian) name is given in parenthesis at first mention.

Note on Transliteration HEBREW An attempt has been made to achieve consistency in the transliteration of Hebrew words. The following are the key distinguishing features of the system that has been adopted:

1. No distinction is made between the aleph and ayin; both are represented by an apostrophe, and only when they appear in an intervocalic position. 2. Vettis written v; het is written 4; yod 1s written y when it functions as a consonant and 2 when it occurs as a vowel; khafis written kh; tsadi is written ts; kof is written k. 3. The dagesh hazak, represented in some transliteration systems by doubling the letter, is not represented, except in words that have more or less acquired normative English spellings that include doubling, such as Hallel, kabbalah, kaddish, rabbi, Sukkot, and Yom Kippur.

4. The sheva na is represented by ane. 5. Hebrew prefixes, prepositions, and conjunctions are not followed by hyphens when they are transliterated; thus betoledot ha’am hayehudu.

6. Capital letters are not used in the transliteration of Hebrew except for the first word in the titles of books and the names of people, places, institutions, and generally as in the conventions of the English language. 7. ‘The names of individuals are transliterated following the above rules unless the individual concerned followed a different usage.

YIDDISH Transliteration follows the YIVO system except for the names of people, where the spellings they themselves used have been retained.

RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN The Library of Congress system has been used, except that we are not employing character modifiers or indicating soft and hard signs.

The Sixtieth Anniversary of the Massacre in Jedwabne: ‘I’'wo Speeches Delivered in Jedwabne, to July 2001 The texts that follow are the official translations, as distributed in Jedwabne, of two speeches made at the ceremonies marking the anniversary; the original speeches were delivered in Polish in the town square.

ADDRESS DELIVERED BY

THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF POLAND MR ALEKSANDER KWASNIEWSKI Dear Ambassador of Israel, Dear Rabbi Baker, Dear Representatives of fewish Milteus, Dear Mr Mayor, Dear Residents of fedwabne, Dear Ladtes and Gentlemen, Fellow Countrymen!

Sixty years ago on 10 July 1941, crime was committed against Jews on this land at that time conquered and occupied by the Nazi Germany. This was a dreadful day. Day of hatred and cruelty.

We know much about this crime, though not yet everything. Maybe we will never learn the whole truth. But this has not prevented us from being here today. To speak in an open voice. We know enough to stand here in truth—facing pain, cries and suffering of those who were murdered here; face to face with the victims’ families who are here today; before the judgement of own conscience. This was a particularly cruel crime. It is justified by nothing. Among the victims, among the burned there were women, there were children. Petrifying cry of people closed in the barn and burned alive—continues to haunt the memory of those who witnessed the crime.

The victims were helpless and defenceless. ‘The criminals had a sense of being unpunished since German occupants incited them to such acts.

XVi11 Speeches at fedwabne, 10 fuly 2001 We know with all the certainty that Poles were among the oppressors and assassins. We cannot have any doubts—here in Jedwabne citizens of the Republic of Poland died from the hands of other citizens of the Republic of Poland. It is people to people, neighbours to neighbours who forged such destiny. Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

At that time—sixty years ago—Poland was to be wiped out from the map of Europe. There were no Polish authorities in Jedwabne. The Polish state was unable

to protect its citizens against the crime committed with the Nazi permission, at Nazi inspiration. But the Republic of Poland should persist in the Polish hearts and minds. And the standards of a civilised state, the state with ages-old traditions of

tolerance and amicable co-existence of nations and religions were binding and should be binding on its citizens. Those who took part in the deed set, beat, killed and set fire—committed crime not only against their Jewish neighbours. They are also guilty towards the Republic of Poland, its great history and glorious traditions.

| Ladtes and Gentlemen, Weare standing on a tormented land. The name Jedwabne, by a tragic ordain of fate had become for its today’s citizens a byword recalling to human memory the ghosts of fratricide.

It is not only in Jedwabne that superstitious prejudice was enkindled into the murderous flame of hatred in the ‘furnace era’.

Death, grief and suffering of the Jews from Jedwabne, from Radzitow and other localities, all these painful events which lay a gloomy shadow on Poland’s history are the responsibility of the perpetrators and instigators. We cannot speak of collective responsibility burdening with guilt the citizens of any other locality or the entire nation. Every man is responsible only for his own acts. ‘The sons do not inherit the sins of the fathers. But can we say: that was long ago, they were different?

The nation is a community. Community of individuals, community of generations. And this is why we have to look the truth into the eyes. Any truth. And say: it was; it happened. Our conscience will be clear if memories of those days will for ever evoke awe and moral indignation. Weare here to make a collective self-examination. We are paying tribute to the victims and we are saying—never again.

Let us all be the citizens of Jedwabne today. Let us feel what they feel! Let us remain with them in a common sense of grievance, despair, shame and solidarity. Cain could have killed Abel anywhere. Any community could have been tried in the

Speeches at fedwabne, 10 Fuly 2001 X1X same way. The trial of evil, but also of good. Of meanness and nobility. Righteous 1s the one who was able to demonstrate compassion in face of human suffering. How many Poles—also inhabitants of the neighbourhood also residents of Jedwabne— deserve to be called righteous! Let us recall all of them today with greatest gratitude and with highest respect. Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thanks to the great nationwide debate regarding this crime committed in 1941, much has changed in our lives in the year 2001, the first year of the new millennium.

Today’s Poland has courage to look into the eyes of the truth about a nightmare which gloomed one of the chapters in its history. | We have become aware of the responsibility for our attitude towards the dark pages

in our history. We have understood that bad service is done to the nation by those who impelling to renounce that past. Such attitude leads to a moral selfdestruction. We, who have gathered here, with all the people in our country who have clear and sensitive conscience, with the lay and religious moral authorities consolidating our adherence to basic values, paying homage to the memory of the murdered and most deeply deploring the despicable perpetrators of the crime, give expression to our pain and shame, we manifest our determination to learn the truth, courage to over-

come the evil past, firm will of understanding and agreement. For this crime we | should beg the souls of the dead and their families for forgiveness. This is why today, as the citizen and as the President of the Republic of Poland, I beg pardon. I beg pardon in my own name and in the name of those Poles whose conscience is shattered by that crime.

In the name of those who believe that one cannot be proud of the glory of Polish history without feeling, at the same time, pain and shame for the evil done by Poles to others. Dear Gathered,

I wish with all my heart that the name of this village bring the memories of not only the crime but that it become the sign of the great self-examination, that it become the venue of reconciliation.

Polish bishops prayed on 27 May ‘for all those who cherished anxiety and resentment towards the Jewish nation, that they accept the grace of a change in their hearts’. These words express only too well the feelings of a great part of the Poles. May, then, this change occur. Let us spare not effort for it! The tragedy which took place here cannot be annihilated. Evil cannot be wiped out; suffering cannot be forgotten. ‘The truth about what happen will not redress what

XX Speeches at fedwabne, ro Fuly 2001 happened. The truth is not so potent. But only truth—even the most aching and painful—will allow to purify the wounds of the memory. This is the hope that we cherish. This is what we are here for today. We are saying today the words of sorrow and pain, not only because this is the must of human

decency. And not only because others expect us to. Not because they will be a

, compensation for the murdered. Not because the world is listening. We are saying these words because this 1s what we feel. Because we ourselves need them most of all. We doing it to be better, stronger with moral strength, free from prejudice, animosities and hatred. ‘To respect and to love men. To turn the wrong into the right.

THE SPEECH OF PROF. SHEVACH WEISS, AMBASSADOR OF ISRAEL TO POLAND The Honourable President, The Honourable Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Close your eyes, and try and imagine this place as it was more than sixty years ago: the market square, the carriages tied to the horses and the children playing in the marketplace. Jedwabne—this beautiful town, where Poles and Jews lived together. Jedwabne was so typical of the Poland of those days—a colourful and alluring world, and a place where Polish and Yiddish were almost interchangeable. This reality—this era of Jewish life came to an abrupt and shocking end, on a tragic summer’s day, exactly sixty years ago. People who lived together with the Jews of Jedwabne, these people, who knew them by name and were friendly with them—these same people set upon their Jewish neighbours, dragging them to the local barn, before slaughtering and burning them alive. It is this fact which makes this event so utterly brutal, shocking, painful and distressing. I, Professor Shevach Weiss, Israel’s Ambassador to Poland, was brought up in this country, and was fortunate to get to know other neighbours. ‘Thanks to these people, my family and I were able to survive the Holocaust. Thanks to these people, I am standing here before you today. I know also of other barns where Jews were hidden away. For the sake of a better future for us all, I feel the need to state this fact here and now. I have come here on behalf of the State of Israel—a country which represents rebirth and renewal as well as a reflection of the fortitude of the Jewish People. Living among us also are Holocaust survivors whose lives were saved as

a result of the brave actions of their Polish neighbours—courageous and noble people.

I have come here to this valley of tears in order to severely condemn this evil massacre, and in order to emphasize the fact that no one will be able to bring our

Speeches at fedwabne, 10 Fuly 2001 XXi victims back to life. I know, that there are many courageous Poles who, out of a sense of historic justice, have taken it upon themselves to research this appalling event. I am certain that when the research and investigation process is completed, the memorial stone here will contain the full truth of what happened in Jedwabne, terrible though it may be. In this way, justice will finally be done for the victims of Jedwabne. In this very place and at this particular time, I would like to make an appeal to all fair-minded and decent people throughout the world, and, especially to the young

generation of Poland and Jedwabne, specifically: let us campaign together and act with determination against any manifestation of anti-semitism, racism, xenophobia, evil and cruelty. In this way, we will be able to build a better world, where the sanctity of life and individual freedom are sacrosanct. May God help us in this noble mission.

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PART I

Jews in the Polish Borderlands

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Introduction ANTONY POLONSKY Still, as in childhood days, a nightingale is swaying On some bough in the far-off land of the Niemen, A canopy of hazel twigs above him, or a lilac cluster, Sprigs, mayhap, of jasmine, just as then... Sing ever more and more, O bird, sing out the full confessional Of all who choke their longing back in sobs, for all Who left the wilderness—themselves the wilderness’s own— Whose ways are foreign to the cringe of sycophant. Sing for the ones who grit their teeth in curses, Yet who pray—for all my people, and for me, O nightingale

Of Lithuania: for us all, for ravaged boundaries, for us all, | Thou heart of us, O nightingale beloved! KAZIMIERA ILLAKOWICZOWNA,

‘The Lithuanian Nightingale’

THE Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth was a dual state, created in 1569 by the

union of the kingdom of Poland with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was extremely heterogeneous in character. The dominant social stratum, the landed nobility (the sz/achta), was the principal focus of Polishness, although modern concepts of nationality were largely inchoate at this time. It comprised a much larger section of the population than similar groups in western Europe (perhaps as much

as 8 per cent) and although it was predominantly Catholic and became more so with the success of the Counter-Reformation, the principle of religious toleration, enshrined in 1570, meant that it included a significant number of Protestants and a smaller number of adherents of the Orthodox faith. The peasantry, for the most part unfree, was Polish-speaking in the central parts

of the Commonwealth, while in the eastern areas it spoke mostly Lithuanian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian, although these were not yet modern developed languages. In the north of this region the majority of the population was Roman Catholic and in the south was Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox. In the west there were substantial pockets of rural German and Protestant settlement. Nearly half of the urban population (perhaps ro per cent of the total) was Jewish, and in the towns there were also significant numbers of Germans, Italians, Armenians, and Scots.

4 Antony Polonsky The partition of Poland—Lithuania at the end of the eighteenth century and the struggle to regain Polish independence in the nineteenth century raised the questions of who was a Pole and what should be the boundaries of the future Polish state. For the Polish political élite, both those among its members who sought to advance the Polish cause by co-operation with the states that had partitioned the country and those who believed that independence could only be regained by armed insurrection, there was no question that the goal was the reconstitution of the country within its 1772 frontiers. This created a new interest in documenting the ‘Polishness’ of the borderlands (‘kresy’) of the former Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. The term ‘kresy’ seems to have been popularized in the first half of the nineteenth century by writer Wincenty Pol (1807-72), the Polonized son of an Austrian official in Galicia and author of a number of works dealing with the history of the south_ eastern borderlands of the Polish republic. Of these the best known are Presn 0 z1emi

naszejy (‘A Song about our Land’, 1835) and the extremely popular verse epic Mohort (1852), an idealized account of the military service on the south-eastern frontier of a brave, religious, and humble soldier-nobleman. Pol used the term to refer only to what is today Ukraine, writing in Mohort, Where in the kresy (na kresach) the national armies Already stood, starting where the river Rosa flows into the Dnieper .. .'

In his prose writing he was more specific: The last military garrison, Ksawery [Krasicki] told me, he found in Kamenets-Podolsk, when he ventured into the Ukrainian borderlands (kresy). After that the army was no more to be found, until again in the Ukrainian kresy six light cavalry regiments guarded the border from the outflow of the Rosa into the Dnieper down to the mouth of the Siniukha. The term ‘kresy’ then meant in fact the military border with the Cossacks and the Tatar hordes, who were then located on the mouth of the Dnieper and the lower Dniester.”

In the course of the nineteenth century the term was extended to the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (and later to the southern and western frontier districts) and was used to stress the organic link of this area with the rest of Poland.? Indeed, Pol, who was also one of the first Polish geographers, argued that this area had a natural geographic unity. In his Historyczny obszar Polski (‘Poland’s Historical Territory’), written in the 1860s, he asserted: The historical territory of Poland is situated between the Oder, Dnieper, the Dvina and the Dniester . . . This historical area is home to the ramifications of its seven main rivers—the ' W. Pol, Dziela, wierszem 1 prozq, to vols. (L’ viv, 1875-8), iil. 13. 2 Quoted in J. Kolbuszewski, Kresy (Wroclaw, 1996), 18. * On the evolution of the term, see J. Kolbuszewski, ‘Kresy jako kategoria aksjologiczna’, Przeglqd Powszechny, 11 (1987), 179-93; S. Kieniewicz, ‘Problem Litwy i Rusi w dobie porozbiorowej’, Tygodnik

Powszechny, 46 (1989), 46; id., “‘Kresy: przemiany terminologiczne w perspektywie dziejowe)’, Przeglad Wschodni, 1 (1991), 3-13; D. Beauvois, Polacy na Ukraine: szlachta polska na Wolyniu, Podolu 1 Kyowszczyznie (Paris, 1987); id. (ed.), Les Confins de l’ancienne Pologne: Ukraine, Lituante, Biélorussie

XVie-XXe stécles (Lille, 1988). |

Introduction 5 Warta and the Noteé are linked to the Oder, the Bug and Narew to the Vistula, the Wilia to the Niemen, the Przype¢ and Berezyna to the Dnieper; the Stryj, the San and the Wisiok complete the list of rivers on the historical territory of Poland. From the centre of this territory of Poland, Ruthenia, and Lithuania life flows to the seven main rivers. It constitutes a unity from the point of view of Nature . . . The confluence of rivers in the area of Kostrzyn and Czarnobyl is a natural reflection of the flowing together of Poland, Lithuania, and Ruthenia in one society. Just as the waters in a given area flow together, so must the different ethnic groups in an area, who according to natural laws take their character from the rivers, which define and limit the area.*

His views were almost universally held by the Polish political leadership. Thus in the Manifesto of the Poles in Belgium of 1836 we read: “Che Ukrainian, the Kashube, the Ruthene, the inhabitant of Great and of Little Poland, the Lithuanian, the Podolian, the inhabitant of Zmudz, the Mazur, the Volynian, and any other son of the former Rzeczpospolita is a Pole and in this name alone do we see our unified character (catos¢c).’? Similarly, the Manifesto of the Polish Democratic Society of December 1836, described by Robert Leslie as ‘the most influential document in the history of Poland in the nineteenth century’,° called for the re-establishment of

Poland ‘from the Oder and the Carpathian mountains to beyond the Dnieper and the Dvina, from the Baltic to the Black Sea...’. The kresy were imbued with a special significance in Polish consciousness and were closely linked with the idea of the Polish national mission and the idea that the

country had for many centuries acted as ‘antemuralae Christianitatis’ (‘the ramparts of Christianity’) and had defended the West from the incursions of the ‘Turks

and Tatars.’ With the increasing dominance of Romantic modes of thinking in Polish literature, the significance of the area in Polish consciousness increased. The first to stress the importance of local folklore and of its organic link with the Polish

national identity was Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz. According to Jan Stanistaw Bystron, he treated Poland asa whole, in its pre-partition borders; he linked the present with the historical traditions. He renounced nothing—he travelled in Ukraine, in Lithuania, in Pomerania, in Red Ruthenia as if they were Polish lands and imbued his large circle of readers with the conviction that the borders of the Congress Kingdom were not the borders of Poland. ‘The impor-

tunate old man, once many years before a deputy to the Four Years’ Sejm, remained throughout his life a citizen of a single, undivided, and independent Poland.® * Pol, Dziela, wierszem i prozq, X. 45, 47. ° R. Wapinski, Polska i mate ojczyzny Polakéw: z dziejéw ksztattowania sie Swiadomosci narodowe w XIX1XX wieku po wybuchu I wojny swiatowes (Wroclaw, 1994), 16. © R.F. Leslie, Reform and Insurrection in Russian Poland (London, 1956), 12; the document is repr.

in full in B. Baczko (ed.), Towarzystwo Demokratyczne Polskie: dokumenty 1 pisma (Warsaw, 1954), 85-96; this quotation 1s on p. 89. ” On this, see J. Tazbir, Polskie przedmurze chrzescyanskiey Europy: mity 1 rzeczywistosé historyczna (Warsaw, 1987). S J.S. Bystron, Dzieje obyczajow w dawne Polsce (Warsaw, 1930); quoted in Kolbuszewski, Kresy, 63.

6 Antony Polonsky For the Romantics, local folklore and local places were of crucial significance. As Jacek Kolbuszewski, the author of an important study, Kresy (Wroclaw, 1996), has pointed out, there were two different aspects to the literary mythologization of the

kresy. On the one hand, there was the mythologization of the countryside as an embodiment of authentic national values. For Maurycy Gostawski (1802-34), who participated in the 1830 uprising and died in an Austrian prison, this authenticity was to be found in Podolia, for Mickiewicz it was in his ‘Lithuanian fatherland’ with its primeval forests, its lake Switez, and its ‘local river’, the Niemen, and for Stowacki in the ‘blue fields of Ukraine’ and in the River I[kwa. On the other, there was a typical Romantic interest in the local population and its folklore, most clearly to be seen in Mickiewicz’s use of Lithuanian and Belarusian folk motifs, as in his

play Dztady (‘Forefathers’ Eve’) and in his poem ‘Switezianka’ (‘The Water Nymph’).? There were also Polish sites in the kresy, the /ieux de mémoire of Pierre Nora.?° In the first place there was the Polish manor house, both enormous palaces, like that of

the Branickis in Biatystok, that of the Radziwitts at NieSwiez, or those of the Potockis at Krystynopol and Zofidwka,*' and the small ‘dwo6r’ of the ordinary szlachetc, immortalized by Mickiewicz: Amid such fields, long ago, by the side ofa brook Ona low hill, ina birch grove There stood a nobleman’s house, of wood, but ona stone foundation; The whitewashed walls shone from afar, The whiter since they stood out against the dark green Of the poplars that sheltered it against the winds of autumn.

The small towns of the area, created by the local nobility, who from 1539 had complete control over their administration, towns like Mohilev, Lutsk, ‘Ternopil, Terebovlia, Zhovkva, and many others, were also centres of Polishness. This aspect of their character has been well caught by Ksawery Pruszynski. Describing one of these towns, Kremenets (Krzemieniec) in Volynia, he wrote: Here it stands before me, Krzemieniec the jewel, the most beautiful of Polish towns, and how Polish it is! In the depths of the ravine, former noblemen’s houses, bulging and white, with columns and with dark eyes for windows; in the crush of streets converge the Jewish houses

with fringed porches around them, like the inn in Pan Tadeusz. There are two types of Polish towns, those from the Piast period and those from the Jagiellonian period, the western and the eastern towns. The former were built by Germans and Italians, the latter by the % M. Bielanka-Luftowa, ‘Znaczenie terytorium w tak zwanej szkole ukrainskiey’, Pamuietnik Literackt, 2 (1936), 113-24; N. Taylor, ‘Dziedzictwo Wielkiego Ksiestwa Litewskiego w literaturze emigracyjnej’, Kultura (Paris, 1986), 10; id., ‘Kresy w literaturze emigracyjnej’, Wied (1988), 15 M. Jackiewiecz, Literatura polska na Litwie XVI-XX mteku (Olsztyn, 1993).

10 On this, see P. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: /es lieux de mémotre’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7-25. 11 On these and other noble mansions in the kresy, see R. Aftanazy, Dzieje rezydencjt na dawnych kresach Rzeczypospolites, 6 vols. (Wroclaw, 1994).

Introduction 7 nobleman and the Jew. Krzemieniec is the purest example of the latter. One’s step clatters over the pavestones, one’s glance looks for Stowacki’s mother, the Ikwa, the river of the poet’s childhood, flows as it did then through a green carpet of meadows. As then the school bell of the Lyceum rings. There is the huge mound of Bona’s hill, the moonlit night 1s as dark as a votive plate at the Orthodox shrine of Pochayiv, with a deeply shining piece of silver set in it. From the ruins of Krzywonos’s castle already the steppe begins, one’s gaze wanders and finds no object on which to fix itself. . 1”

Then there were the major urban centres in the area, Vilna and L’viv. Vilna had a special place in the Polish imagination, with its baroque churches, of which St Anne’s and St Peter and St Paul’s were the most beautiful; its cemetery at Rossa,

wonderfully situated on a hill overlooking the city, where Pilsudski’s heart was buried in the grave of his mother; with its university; and with its many sites recalling the early poetic creativity of Mickiewicz, including the room on Zautek Zamkowy where he wrote Grazyna. Vilna was, indeed, the cradle of Polish Romantic literature. It was here in 1822 that Mickiewicz (who never visited either Warsaw or Krakow) published his first book of poetry, and where Stowacki studied. Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski chronicled the history of the city, while Wtadystaw Syrokomla wrote his most important works here.!? Equally important in the Polish mind was L’viv, the bastion, semper fidelis, which had never surrendered and had always defended Poland—Lithuania against ‘Tatars, ‘Turks, and Cossacks. Here there was Jan Sobieski’s residence, the Bernardine church, the Lyczakowski cemetery, and the graves of those who defended the city against the Ukrainians in 1918 and 19109, for which the town was collectively awarded the decoration Virtuti Militari by Pitsudski on 22 November 1920. Here too there was a special type of person, the

Lvovian batiar, the tough man of the streets, with his characteristic mode of speech. ‘+

There were also sacred sites, which above all reflected the strength in Polish Catholicism here of the cult of Mary, the ‘Queen of Poland’. Mickiewicz placed the image of the Virgin ‘who shines brightly at Ostra Brama’ alongside that at Czestochowa. Similar sites of pilgrimage were the shrine of the Virgin at Troki, at Krewo, which was miraculously transported from the palace of its noble owners to the woods where the Basilians built a church in 1691, at Braslav, at Zboriv, in the parish church at Nowogrddek (also praised by Mickiewicz), and many others. The late nineteenth century, which saw a continual intensification of the Polish— German conflict in western Poland, also saw an increasing stress on the importance 12K. Pruszynski, Podréz po Polsce (Warsaw, 1937). ‘3 On this, see S. Cywinski, Literatura w Wilnie i Wilno w literaturze (Vilna, 1937); C. Mitosz, Native Realm (London, 1981); E. Feliksiak, M. Skorko, and P. Waszak (eds.), Tobie Wilno: antologia poetycka (Bialystok, 1992); E. Feliksiak (ed.), Wilno-Wilenszczyzna jako krajobraz 1 Srodowisko wielu kultur, 4 vols. (Bialystok, 1992); M. Jackiewicz, Wilenska Rossa: przewodnik po cmentarzu (Olsztyn, 1993). 14 On L’viv, see J. Wereszyca (ed.), Semper fidelis—wiersze 0 Lwowie (Warsaw, 1986); S. S. Nicieja,

Cmentarz Lyczakowski we Lwowie w latach 1786-1986 (Wroclaw, 1988); id., Cmentarz Obroncow Lwowa (Wroclaw, 1990).

8 Antony Polonsky of the ‘western kresy’. Already in 1867 the hero of Jan Zachariasiewicz’s Na kresach had proclaimed, ‘Our kresy have changed. From the Dnieper and the steppes of Ukraine they have been transported to the Warta and Note¢. Here we must stand and defend our holdings.’’® The first Polish ethnographic journal, Wista, founded in 1887, and its principal contributors, Oskar Kolberg and Jan Kartowicz, stressed the Polish character of Poznania and Pomerania and regularly printed accounts of the policies of the German government, with maps and diagrams detailing the expansion of the German school system and the colonization of

Polish land. This interest in the ‘western kresy’ extended to areas like Upper Silesia, which though they may have once been ruled by the Piasts had not been part of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. And yet, for all the importance of the kresy in Polish thinking, the Poles were not the only actors here. The partitioning powers were determined to make permanent their conquests by fully integrating the lands they had annexed. Thus the Prussian state attempted to strengthen the German element in Prussian Poland as a means of

permanently incorporating the area into Prussia and subsequently Germany. In Austrian Galicia, at least until the granting of autonomy to the province in the 1860s, the Habsburgs encouraged the development of a Ukrainian (first called Ruthenian) consciousness as a counterweight to the dominant Polish nobility. The areas incorporated by Russia were divided into two parts. One, the kingdom of Poland, enjoyed substantial autonomy, which was almost entirely done away with in the course of the nineteenth century. The remaining areas were treated as integral parts of the tsarist monarchy, and attempts were made to strengthen the Orthodox and Russian elements in the area. From the second half of the nineteenth century the Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and toa lesser extent Belarusian national movements became significant forces in the area. All of these groups also had their own lieux de mémoire in the area. Initially these were mostly religious. For the Lithuanians, who shared the Roman Catholic faith of the Poles and for whom the process of developing a conscious modern national identity only really began after the failure of the 1863 uprising, these were mostly sites that they shared with the Poles, like the shrine to the Virgin at Ostra Brama

in Vilna. But from the late nineteenth century arguments over the language of the hymns to be sung in the churches of the area (Polish or Lithuanian) and the national identity of the parish priest became increasingly bitter. Thus in 1908 the Russian governor of the largely Lithuanian province of Suwatki in the Congress

Kingdom reported: |

The hatred that has accumulated over the years [between Poles and Lithuanians] has already overflowed . . . into bloody battles in Churches. Since the nineties of the past century, such conflicts have become chronic.1° ‘© J. Zachariasiewicz, Na kresach (L’ viv, 1867), 335.

‘6 Quoted in T. R. Weeks, ‘Lithuanians, Poles and the Russian Imperial Government at the Turn of the Century’, fournal of Baltic Studies, 25/4 (1994), 297.

Introduction 9 From Suwatki province this conflict spread first to the Kovno province and from there to the Vilna province. In the words of a Lithuanian priest, Father Zilinskas: In the Suvalki and the Kaunas provinces . . . the removal of the Polish language from the Lithuanian churches along with the growth of mass consciousness began only at the turn of this century and in Vilnius province this process was not yet completed by the outbreak of the Great War."”

Within the tsarist empire the Greek Catholic Church, the product of the union of 1596, was done away with in 1839 and the adherents of this church forcibly reunited with Orthodoxy. Orthodox religious shrines developed a strong following among the Ukrainians and Belarusians. Perhaps the most significant of these was the monastery at Pochayiv, some 30 kilometres east of Kremenets, which was sometimes described as an ‘Orthodox Czestochowa’. Here the Virgin had appeared to some shepherds in the thirteenth century, and a miracle-working spring had begun to flow from the mark of her footstep. From 1713 it had been Greek Catholic, but

under Russian rule in 1831 it was again made into a Greek Orthodox shrine. Another important Greek Catholic shrine later taken over by the Orthodox was that at Zhuravichi (Zyrowice, near Slonim). In Galicia the Austrians had introduced the principle of religious toleration after they took over the province in 1772. This was of enormous significance for the previously oppressed Greek Catholic population here. ‘The Austrians now referred to the confession as ‘Greek Catholic’ rather than as ‘Uniate’, hoping in this way to raise its status. In 1784 they established a university in L’viv and created an institute (the Studium Ruthenum) to train Greek Catholic priests, which originally used as its language of instruction a combination of Church Slavonic and the Ukrainian vernacular. In 1808 they re-established the Greek Catholic metropolitanate of St George in L’ viv, divided into two eparchies based in L’ viv and Przemysl. The monastery of St George, ona hill overlooking the town, became a central shrine for Greek Catholics. Another important site of pilgrimage was the miraculous image of the Virgin to be found in the Greek Catholic Church in Kamianka (Kamionka Strumitowa). The Jews also had their religious sites in the area. Hasidism had originated in Podolia, as a small circle of disciples around the charismatic Israel ben Eliezer (the Ba’al Shem Tov, or Besht) in Medzhybizh. After the Besht’s death the centre of gravity of the movement moved to Mezerich in Volynia, where the key figure was Dov Ber, the Maggid (preacher) of Mezerich. He sent his followers over the whole area of the former Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth: Rebbe Menahem Mendel to Vitebsk, Rebbe Shneur Zalman to Liady, and Rebbe Levi Yitshok to Berdichev. It was at this time that two major hasidic dynasties became established 1n Galicia, that linked with the court of Rebbe Elimelekh (died 1787), and that of the Ruzhiner tsadikim founded by Rebbe Israel Friedman of Ruzhin in Podolia, and who moved 17 Quoted in N. Udrenas, ‘Book, Bread, Cross and Whip: Imperial Russia and the Construction of Lithuanian Identity’, Brandeis University Ph.D. thesis, 1999, 456.

10 Antony Polonsky in the late 1830s to Galicia. In the northern part of the eastern kresy, there was considerable resistance to hasidism, first from the Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Solomon, whose adherents were described as mitnagedim (opponents—of hasidism), and then under his disciple Haim, who founded the yeshiva at Volozhin. The religious life of Jewish Lithuania was dominated by this more austere and intellectual school, while in Ukraine the more populist hasidic faith, with its charismatic rebbes, was more widespread. As is clear from the observations of Ksawery Pruszynski, the Jews were a major element in the smaller noble towns in the area, in many of which they constituted the majority and felt for the most part secure and comfortable. These are the shtetls often mythologized and idealized in Jewish folk memory. We have a good description of what they were like from the pen of Israel Aksenfeld, the Yiddish writer, in his novel The Headband: Anyone familiar with our Russian Poland knows what Jews mean by a small shtet/, a little town.

A small shtetl has a few cabins, and a fair every other Sunday. The Jews deal in liquor, grain, burlap, or tar. Usually, there’s a man striving to be a Hasidic rebbe. A shtot, on the other hand, contains several hundred wooden homes (that’s what they call a house: a home) and a row of brick shops. There are: a very rich man (a parvenu), several well-to-do storekeepers, a few dealers in fields, hareskins, wax, honey, some big moneylenders, who use cash belonging either to the rich man, going halves on the profits, or to the tenant farmers and tenant innkeepers in the surrounding area. Such a town has a Polish landowner (the porits) with his manor. He owns the town and some ten villages, this entire district being known as a sh/is/. Some prominent Jew, who is held in esteem at the manor, leases the entire town or even the entire district. Such a town also has a Jewish VIP, who is a big shot with the district police chief. Such a town has an intriguer, who is always litigating with the town and the Jewish communal administration, even on the level of the provincial government. In such a town, the landowner tries to get a Hasidic rebbe to take up residence, because if Jews come to him from all over, you can sell them vodka, ale, and mead. All these goods belong to the landowner, and so up goes his income.

| Such a town has a winehouse keeper, a watchmaker, and a doctor, a past cantor and a present cantor, a broker, a madman, and an abandoned wife (an agunah), community beadles, and a caterer. Such a town has a tailors’ association, a burial association, a Talmud association, and a free-loan association. Such a town has various kinds of synagogues: a shu/ (mainly for the Sabbath and holidays), a bes-medresh (the house of study, for everyday use), and sometimes even a k/aiz/ (a smaller house of worship) or a shiibl (a small hasidic synagogue). God forbid that anyone should accidentally blurt out the wrong word and call the town a shtetl. He'd instantly be branded as the local smartass or madman. A town is called a big town if there are a couple of thousand householders and a few brick buildings aside from the wooden homes. This is a horse of a different colour. Here, everyone boasts that he greeted someone from the next street because he mistook him for an out-oftowner. After all: In such a big town as this, how can you tell if'a stranger is a local? There are tons of people whom you don’t know from Adam.?® ‘8 Dos Shterntikhl. The description later says that the events take place in 1812~13. There is an English translation of the novel in The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, ed.

Introduction II The Jews also had a considerable presence in the larger towns of the area, whether in eastern Poland, in Vilna and L’viv, or in western Poland, in Poznan and

Leszno. Vilna was a town particularly dear to Jews. Abraham Joshua Heschel described the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’ in the following way: How has the city of Vilna acquired such a sacred name? Have enchanting lights glittered through the windows of stately palaces of Jewish kings there? Because of high and imposing buildings of Jewish ministers and the multitude of their functionaries? Because of the magnificent building of the Sanhedrin, financed by the Rothschilds of the Maccabean period? Was the Mount of the House with its Sanctuary there, whose mysterious sanctity of High Priests strengthened and purified the spirits of Jews the world over? No, the Sanctuary was not there. But there were times when the sorrow and agony over the destruction of the Sanctuary built a Temple not of stones but of Jewish tears and the Divine Presence abandoned exile and found a home in the hearts of a Jewish community. Royal palaces were not seen there even in a dream. There palaces were erected of mind. Homes were appointed with a mastery of the Talmud or proficiency in grammar. There towers were erected of acumen with the aid of countless brilliant minds, who came to refresh the spirit in the labyrinth of the Babylonian Talmud. _ There were no High Priests there. But there were poor people there whose souls and virtues shone like the breastplate and ephod on the High Priest. Other Jewish communities too were rich in creative personalities—trabbis, heads of yeshivas, scholars, authors, artists, cantors, preachers—and in philanthropic, political and cultural institutions, yeshivas and modern schools. But all of these combined—such color, such diversity of colors, such scope—in this respect Vilna ranks above all other communities. Vilna is a cradle nurturing brilliant scholars, intransigent misnagdim, caustic maskilim, the city is rich in such unusual personalities as Rabbi Moses, author of Helkat Mehokek; Rabbi Sabbatai, the Shakh; Rabbi Aaron Samuel Koydonover, author of Birkat Hatsevah; Rabbi Moses Rivkis, author of Beer Hagolah,a commentary on the Shulhan Arukh; the Gaon of Vilna; his son Rabbi Abraham; Rabbi Abraham Danzig, author of Haye adam; for a while Rabbi Israel Salanter resided in Vilna; there withdrawn from the world lived AbrahamIsaiah Korelitz, the author of Hazon ish, and there Rabbi Khaim Oyzer Grodzenski was active. Moreover Vilna could boast of such writers and scholars as Ayzik Meir Dick, Adam Hakohen, and Micha Joseph Lebenson, Yehuda Leib Gordon, Isaac ben Yaakov, author of ‘Ozar hasfarim’, and the saintly Khaykl Lunski... And a remarkable thing 1s not only Vilna Jewry, but also Vilna as a city is an image that radiates Jewishness, devotion, sincerity, a beauty that enchants not with external dazzle but with soul, not with boast but simplicity. You area Psalter spelled in clay and iron. A prayer is every stone, amelody—every wall.

Thus sings the poet Moyshe Kulbak. Only he who has been privileged to behold Jewish Vilna will grasp the full sense of Kulbak’s words. Jewish Vilna was an environment whose and trans. J. Neugroschel (New York, 1989). Two important scholarly accounts of Jewish life in such towns are M. Rosman, The Lord’s Jews: Magnate—fewish Relations in the Polish—Lithuantan Common-

wealth during the 18th Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), and G. D. Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatow in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1992).

12 Antony Polonsky walls, corners and cellars breathed memories of gigantic intellects, reminiscences of self-sacrifice for Jewishness, reverence of God and man, of charity and the thirst for knowledge. . .1%

L’viv was also a major Jewish centre. Just as the strength of hasidism lay in small towns and townlets, so those who sought to reform Jewish life and respond to the demand that the Jews transform themselves from a religious and cultural community transcending national boundaries into citizens of their respective countries—

‘Germans or Poles of the Jewish religion’.—were strongest in large towns, like L’viv. The conflict between the supporters and opponents of Jewish integration was very bitter here since, alongside a Westernized minority, the town also had a large Orthodox and hasidic population. Conflicts raged primarily over the school system. In 1831, after a number of objections from the provincial authorities, following Josef Perl’s intervention with Metternich, the emperor gave permission for the establishment in the town of a Society for Spreading Useful Crafts among Israelites. In addition, many Jewish youths also attended German primary and secondary schools, much to the disgust of the Orthodox. In 1844 a modern synagogue, the Tempel, was set up. Its first rabbi, Abraham Kohn, died tragically in 1848 when he was poisoned by an Orthodox fanatic. The integrationists were also divided among themselves over whether to favour

a German or a Polish orientation. Until the 1860s the German orientation, represented by the organization Shomer Yisrael, was dominant. It was only with the establishment of provincial autonomy under Polish control that the pro-Polish or1entation of Agudat Ahim gained ground. The principal organ for the expression of assimilationist and pro-Polish ideas was now the weekly Oyczyzna. In Poznan the German orientation was not challenged by a Polish one. The Jews

were here successfully integrated into German culture, though they remained socially separate. There was a significant division in the town, however, between those who favoured a reform of the Jewish religion and those who adhered to the modern Orthodoxy of Samson Raphael Hirsch. Of the city’s two synagogues, one

was controlled by the Orthodox and the other by adherents of the Liberal (Reformed) orientation. The Jewish communal council was also equally divided between these two orientations. ‘The Jews in the area were for the most part politically liberal. As the national conflict in the province intensified and the German nationalists became increasingly antisemitic, many Jews migrated to the more congenial atmosphere of Berlin and western Germany. Others intensified their liberal convictions, while some came to a Zionist position, arguing that the growing hostility to Jewish integration in Germany demonstrated that the Jews could never be fully integrated into German society.”° 9 L. Ran (ed.), Jerusalem of Lithuania, 2 vols. (New York, 1974), vol. i, p. Xx1. 20 On these developments, see W. W. Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-191 4 (Chicago, 1980).

Introduction 13 One of the central processes in the development of the Polish lands from the end of the eighteenth century has been the erosion and eventual end of the political, social, and economic hegemony of the sz/achta and the emergence on the territory of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth of the modern Polish nation and of the

other national groups which were to contest Polish control of the kresy, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, and the Belarusians. This process was accompanied by the development of new forms of Jewish identity on these lands. The integrationist process was largely failing by the end of the nineteenth century. In Prussian

Poland the Jews had been for the most part transformed into ‘Germans of the Mosaic faith’ and both Polonization and Russification had made some progress among the Jewish élite. But from the beginning of the twentieth century most Jews in this area came to see themselves and came to be seen by the surrounding popula‘tions as an ethnic or national group, rather than a religious community. The chapters in this volume of Po/in deal with different aspects of the history of the Jews in these borderland areas of former Poland—Lithuania and also in territories in the west, like Silesia, which were part of the medieval Polish state. They investigate how the specific features of life in these areas affected the Jews and the nature of their relations with the Polish sz/achta and the other groups who lived here, and seek to investigate aspects of the triangular relationship between Poles, Jews, and Germans in western Poland and between the different national groups in what are today Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine from the eighteenth century to the present day. Vital Zajka investigates the phenomenon of the ‘Litvaks’, Jews from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with their specific religious and intellectual tradition, way of speaking Yiddish, and self-perception. Janusz Spyra analyses the policies pursued towards the Jews by the Austrian government from the middle of

the eighteenth century until 1848 in the Duchy of Cieszyn, one of the areas of Silesia which remained under Habsburg rule after the bulk of the province was seized by Prussia in 1740. Sophia Kemlein and Krzysztof Makowski examine different aspects of the position of the Jews in the Grand Duchy of Poznan (Posen) between the re-establishment of Prussian rule at the Congress of Vienna and the revolution of 1848. Chapters by Verena Dohrn and Efim Melamed discuss the nature of the rabbinical schools created by Sergei Uvarov, the Russian minister of national enlightenment, with the aim of creating a group of ‘enlightened Jews’ who could effect the transformation of the Jews of the tsarist empire into useful subjects of the tsar. The First World War led to the collapse of the three empires which had effected the partition of Poland and gave to the Poles the opportunity to re-establish an independent state. It also raised the question of what should be the frontiers of this state, a matter of bitter dispute among Polish political figures. Roman Dmowski, the principal exponent of Polish integral nationalism and the dominant figure in the Polish delegation at the Versailles peace conference, wanted to create a national

State, including in it only those areas (which he defined extremely broadly) which |

14 Antony Polonsky were essential for Polish security and which could be Polonized. His chief rival, Jozef Pitsudski, who was to dominate the political life of independent Poland, wanted rather to re-establish the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth in a modernized form as a federation between Poland and the states emerging to the country’s east, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Though Poland was to be the dominant element in this structure, Pitsudski was almost certainly sincere in asserting that he wished to respect the national identities of these nations and of other groups, most notably the Jews. He saw in Soviet Russia’s weakness following the civil war an opportunity to dislodge Belarus, and especially Ukraine, from Russia and link them with Poland, believing that in this way he could finally ensure the security of the country’s independence. As he asked rhetorically, was Poland ‘to be a state equal to the great world powers or a little state in need of the protection of the mighty? .. . [It is vital that Poland] should be the greatest power not only militarily, but also culturally, in the East.’2" It can be questioned whether this was a goal which Poland had the resources to undertake and also whether it took into account sufficiently conditions in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Certainly, where national sentiment was

strongest (as in Lithuania), it was primarily directed against Polish influence. In Belarus and Ukraine peasant land-hunger was also focused in the first instance on the still largely Polish landholding class of these areas. Piotr Wandycz’s assessment of Polish policy in 1920 is worth quoting: One can perhaps blame Pitsudski for undertaking, largely on his own, a most dangerous operation, which Poland was not strong enough to carry through. Undoubtedly, the Kievan expedition was a gamble, but if Pitsudski had overestimated Polish capabilities and Soviet weaknesses, the temptation to reverse the course of the last 200 years of history was overwhelming. Indeed, only a realization of this great eastern design might have made Poland sufficiently powerful to withstand external pressures. With the Peace of Riga in 1921, Poland became a middle-size state too large to be anyone’s satellite, but too small and too weak to be a great power. Many of the subsequent problems of Polish diplomacy stemmed from this half-way house position.”

This judicious and measured assessment fails to take into account the damage to inter-ethnic relations caused by the Polish attempt to establish control of the mixed areas east of the Polish ethnic heartland. Pitsudski’s respect for the national identity of the other groups in the area was not shared by many local Poles. This is how Kazimiera Saysse- Tobiczyk defended the position of the Poles in L’viv 1n 1919: Lwow, that old and steadfast fortress, stands firm and steadfast in the conflagration of a war between brothers. Lwow through the centuries has had one fate, with hardened breast to defend Ruthenian, Polish and Lithuanian land from the invasion of enemy Cossack hordes and a rabble of Wallachians, Turks and Tartars. And to you who have abandoned the Union

and our common past and old culture and the hand which has been extended to you in 21 J. Pilsudski, Pisma zbiorowe (Warsaw, 1937-8), V. 137-8. 22 P. Wandycz, Polish Diplomacy 1914-1945: Aims and Achievements (London, 1988), 16.

Introduction 15 brotherhood, we reply, convinced of the justice of our cause: We will not abandon this land, made fertile by our blood, linked over centuries with Poland, to which many generations have been faithful. It may be that you are more numerous than us, but all that is spirit and culture in these Carpathian lands is ours exclusively. Towns and manor houses, industry and mining, literature, art and science, the civilization of the spirit and of the body, all these are part of a culture deeply Polish and linked with this land over centuries by an unbreakable bond. This is the state of affairs which we have created. And the Polish character of Carpathian Ruthenia will not be rooted out for centuries!°

The position of the Jews in the conflicts in these areas was also difficult. The desire of the Jews to remain neutral (as in east Galicia) or to take the Lithuantan side (as in the dispute over Vilna) was seen by many Poles as disloyal if not treasonous. To many Poles, fearful of the Bolshevik revolution, the Jews were also responsible for the excesses of the communists. The result was a wave of anti-Jewish violence, in which at least 500 Jews lost their lives. It was on a smaller scale than similar developments in Ukraine, but was deeply shocking none the less. Some aspects of this

violence are described in a series of documents found in Lithuanian and Russian archives. The newly independent Polish state only finally achieved peace in the second half of 1920. When its frontiers were given international recognition, it turned out that more than a third of its population was made up of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Germans, Jews, and Lithuanians. In the last analysis the Polish state was unable to handle this problem successfully, and all the minorities were seriously disaffected by the second half of the 1930s. But independence also created a freer social atmosphere, which allowed artistic and social experimentation. Two chapters, by Anna Hannowa and Justin Cammy, investigate aspects of the vibrant Yiddish cultural scene in Vilna, while an interview with Yudl Mark by Dov Levin examines some aspects of the failed attempt by the Lithuanian government, which also established its independence in the aftermath of the First World War, to establish a very broad form of Jewish political autonomy after 1918. The growing chauvinism at the University of L’viv and how it affected Jewish students is the theme of Bronistawa

Witz-Margulies’s memoir. , Because of space limitations we have deliberately avoided dealing in detail with the highly complex question of the impact of the war on the ‘eastern kresy’, which

has already been partially examined in volume 13 and which would repay further , investigation. Sarunas Liekis describes the consequences of the incorporation of Vilna for Jewish communal organization in the town, while Jonathan Goldstein describes the attempts of Jan Zwartendiyk, the honorary Dutch consul in Kaunas, to aid Jews trying to flee the Nazis. Jacek Kuron, in another memoir, recounts his

recollections of the triangular relationship of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians in L’viv. 23 Quoted in Kolbuszewski, Kresy, 236.

16 Antony Polonsky The multi-ethnic kresy have been one of the many casualties of the twentieth century. The process by which the coexistence of the different national and religious groups of the area, with all its positive and negative aspects, was destroyed was indeed tragic. ‘The Soviet invasion was followed not only by the rigid imposition of the communist system and the expropriation of the previously dominant strata but by much spontaneous popular violence directed against symbols of authority like manor houses. This has been graphically described by Wtodzimierz Odojewski in his novel Zasypie wszystko, zamiee ... (“Everything is being covered up, blown away ...’), published in 1973: He watched: the gate into the manor cracked, groaned and fell, and they surged forward, forming a tight-knit group in the alley, as if someone had opened a dike. There they found the body of the bailiff Waskowski. One youngster stopped for a moment, pulled out an old watch from his waistcoat and immediately ran after the rest. The crowd first moved in the direction of the farm. The wheelwright Hanczar, clenching his fists, stood in their way in the courtyard, breathing rapidly. His aged head trembled and his eyes were full of tears. They had already reached the middle of the park. Women hung about on the sides in the paths and on the lawns and incited them vociferously. Wasow jumped forward, pulled off his military shirt and cried ‘Death to them all!’ His father tottered behind him, wearing a quilted jacket and trousers made of sackcloth. He carried a sack. The peasants, streaming forward in a mass, had already pushed over the fence. Children in the orchard tore off branches and took nuts from them. ‘The Orthodox Church elder Filipko cut down the old plum tree by the

wall.

The face of the wheel wright Hanczar was swollen and red. His eyes opened and closed, as if he was trying to swallow something hard. He could not find his voice. And then he stood in front of them and they also stood still. Stones whistled through the air. Pawet heard a light, muffled crack. A first, a second, a tenth. Hanczar’s face was covered with blood. But he still did not fall. He stood wiping off the huge tears from his cheeks, and, finally finding his voice, began to shout, ‘People, people!’ And with a whirr of stones flying towards him again, he doubled over, grabbed his chest and could not look at them any more. At that moment they

all leapt towards him and piled on top of him. The earth seethed; it became quiet and the crowd moved on, leaving the old wheelwright Hanczar trampled into the mud, subsiding

like a sack filled with crushed pumpkins. ,

The men’s throats gave out a sour, aged smell of spirits. They had already ripped up the gates to the stables and cowsheds. Whips, stirrups and spurs were strewn everywhere. The frightened neighing of horses could be heard. Pigs groaned under blows from clubs. Then there remained at the farm only old stout women, loading onto their shoulders what they could take. Youngsters loaded up booty onto carts. Boys galloped around on horses, beating their flanks with bars and chains. A round was heard from an automatic weapon. A crash of glass from the clock on the porch resounded. The crowd converged in a tight mass on the manor. But before they entered it and did what they later did, they stopped in front of it and shouted something to the windows with their drawn curtains. After a while, however, they broke into the building. They surged forward; those at the sides pushed forward so tightly against the wall that plaster came off on them, and then they took out his mother, grey, bent over, her face white like linen, but looking at them without fear. They took her out, holding

Introduction 17 her by her arms, holding her up, since she certainly had not strength to walk on her own. The crowd withdrew a little to the side, making space for those carrying her, her feet dragging in the gravel. Only then did young Wasow move quietly behind her and poke her with a stake in the back, so that she immediately fell, or rather knelt, supporting herself with her hands. The two parts of the crowd immediately converged, closing around her tightly. Pawet heard the hard, hollow banging of stakes and clubs, and the shouting and laughter of the mass. The crowd suddenly grew silent. It withdrew, forming a ring, and she, his mother, lay there in front of them. Bent over, broken, as if in two, with her knees under her chin and her arms folded defensively in front of her chest. But Wasow said something. ‘Those standing nearest lifted her and dragged her into the alley. Through the gravel and the mass of fallen autumn leaves to the courtyard of the farm building and the stable. There they also grabbed her legs. With mutually encouraging shouts they swung her high and threw her into the cesspit. The turbid, greenish liquid gave way, overflowing the sides. Then it flowed back, covering her body. And he could still see her for a long time, although the liquid had long stopped moving and its surface was again flat and undisturbed. Afterwards he did not want to see; he couldn’t. He saw only how the setting sun illuminated the clouds and the air was filled with yellow reflected light. There was still a smashing of doors, windows, and floors. They still threw into the courtyard gilded furniture; flames burst out in the flowerbeds and pictures and books were thrown into the flames. They were quarrelling among themselves over goods and bedding, hastily loading up wagons. Already the young ones had drunk the wine found in the cellars. He saw old women peeing contemptuously into porcelain vases. An older man, pulling ona shirt, tried to protect the housemaid Roza. The groom Buczany hit him on the ear and took the girl. And then how the clatter and crash increased. One could smell burning, and everywhere there was black smoke. He heard the bells of the Orthodox church start to peal, but they stopped at once. The peasants streamed out of the manor house, jumping out of the windows and breaking down the doors. Flames poured from inside the house, creeping up along the dry vines to the roof. ‘Then the framework of the first floor shook on the left side, and with a creaking of nails leaned over, and after a moment fell inwards, covering the area with grey soot and dust. He saw how the loaded wagons passing over the lawns began to return to the village, crossing the park. How the old women in the gesticulating, excited crowd chattered to each other. And the drunken peasants sang ‘By the pond a guelder-rose stood and there Taras Bulba’s men made merry’. Then it began to pour with rain. But they still shouted and sang. And he saw their white, opaque eyes, gleaming in the gloom and the red reflections of the flames. And their hands. And it came back. The swinging movements of their hands, and he saw the body of his mother. How thrown in the air it fell back, like a stone. And he saw the greenish liquid flow back and return over her, making wavelets, for an interminable time wavelets he could not quieten or make smooth. And again. The throwing movement of their hands, the fall of the body, and the bubbling of the cesspit. And again. As if this image would repeat itself for all eternity.”* 24 ‘W. Odojewski, Zasypie wszystko, zawieje .. . (Paris, 1973). For a critical discussion of this novel, see M. Inglot, ‘Zasypie wszystko, zawieje... Wtodzimierza Odojewskiego. Rzecz ob utracie Kresow’, in L. Ludorowski (ed.), Powiesé polska XIX 1 XX wieku (Lublin, 1993). On the wider issue of the kresy in contemporary Polish literature, see J. R. Krzyzanowski, ‘A Paradise Lost? The Image of the “Kresy” in Contemporary Polish Literature’, in American Contributions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists (Columbus, Ohio, 1978), ii; B. Hadaczek, Kresy w lteraturze polskie] XX mieku: szkice (Szczecin, 1983).

18 Antony Polonsky The impact of Nazi rule was even more devastating. It led to the continuation of conditions of civil war in the east and to the mass murder of most of the Jewish population of the entire area. In its aftermath the whole region was subjected to a process of ethnic cleansing which made the different areas almost entirely nationally homogeneous and also led to the expulsion of the Germans, not only from the

areas which had been part of Poland in 1939 but from areas which had been Germanized in the Middle Ages. ‘The multi-ethnic character of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine and its brutal end in the mid-twentieth century was a taboo topic in Poland and in the Soviet Union until the collapse of communism. In recent years it has become an important area of investigation in Poland and toa lesser degree in the

other countries of the area. It still arouses bitter disputes and mutual recriminations. One encouraging aspect has been the willingness of some Polish historians to look more critically at the Polish past in these areas. In Jacek Kolbuszewski’s words: The viewing of the kresy in a mythologized fashion was in the end the source of a great nation-

al tragedy which began on 17 September 1939 and which accelerated rapidly, ultimately taking apocalyptic dimensions. ‘The truth of this formulation is not altered by the fact that the blow which made this possible came from outside.”°

An even harsher judgement is that of Leszek Szaruga: The myth of the kresy is a myth founded in many respects on the sentimental self-delusion of the Poles. The mechanism whereby that self-delusion operated is understandable, but that does not mean that it has to be fully accepted.”°

Yet, it may be that these judgements are too harsh. Something has remained of the Polish past in these areas. So too have remnants of the considerable Jewish presence. This volume is an attempt to document the complex nature of inter-ethnic relations here, as also in the western borderlands. It is part of a larger process, the reconfiguration of the past of the different nations of the area taking into account the heterogeneous elements in their history, which 1s vitally necessary for the construction of a civil society. This volume aims to foster a greater mutual understand-

ing and the dissipation of long-held national stereotypes. It is a long-overdue recognition of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious character of the region, and an - indication that national strife need not be an inevitable outcome of the collapse of the communist empire. While this volume was going to press, in the summer of 2001, we received a copy of the important speeches made by the president of the Republic of Poland, Mr

Alexander Kwasniewski, and by the Israeli ambassador to Poland, Professor Shevach Weiss, at the ceremonies held in Jedwabne on Io July 2001 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre of the Jews there. The official English translations of these texts, as distributed in Jedwabne to those attending the ceremonies on the day, are reproduced on pp. xvii—xxi.

, 25 Kolbuszewski, Kresy, 206. 26 L,. Szaruga, W Polsce czyli nigdzie (Berlin, 1987), quoted in Kolbuszewski, Kresy, 208.

The Self-Perception of Lithuanian—Belarusian Jewry in the

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries VITAL ZAJKA | FROM the earliest times of their settlement in the easternmost Slavonic and Baltic territories the Jews have been aware of their special status, first as discoverers of lands beyond the limits of the Jewish world of that time, and then as a distinct part of that world. Potential economic and social opportunities and freedom of religious practice and self-government, combined with the benevolence of rulers and the relative tolerance of the surrounding population, gave rise to the distinctiveness of Lithuanian—Belarusian Jews in relation to the rest of Ashkenaz. The term ‘Lithuanian—Belarusian Jewry’ refers to the Jews who lived in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, including the protectorate of Kurland, after the Union of Lublin in 1569. In Yiddish the land was referred to as Liteh and its Jews referred to themselves as Litvaks. Jewish Liteh also included the region of Podlasie that

became a part of the Polish crown territories (the ethnically Polish part of the Commonwealth) as a result of the Union of Lublin. The borders of the Grand Duchy were remarkable in that they played a role in the formation not only of the Litvak ethnie within the European Jewish continuum, but also of the Belarusian ethnie, whose members sometimes were called Litviny, within the East Slavic continuum. The borders of the two ethnies correlate remarkably (see map) in the west, south, and east and their inner linguistic boundaries also have some correlation.1 The term ‘Belarusian’ in reference to the Jews reflects the historical geography of the early modern period as well as the modern geography of the region. The vagueness of geographical definitions in most scholarly works on Lithuanian—Belarusian Jewry is the understandable result of the existence of several systems of naming counties and provinces as well as ethnonyms, and the frequent fluctuation of state and provin-

cial borders during the period under consideration. For the sake of brevity, in this chapter the terms ‘Lithuania’ and ‘Lithuanian’ will be used interchangeably with the terms ‘Liteh’ and ‘Litvak’, to denote Lithuanian—Belarusian Jewry as a whole. 1 U. Weinreich, “The Geographic Makeup of Belorussian Yiddish’, in M. I. Herzog, W. Ravid, and U. Weinreich (eds.), The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, 3rd collection (The Hague, 1969), 82—5.

20 Vital Zajka HISTORICAL BOUNDARIES IN THE LITHUANIAN~—BELARUSIAN LANDS 18STH-—20TH CENTURIES

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Lithuanian—Belarusian Jewry, 1Sth—19th Centuries 21 According to recent scholarly consensus, Jewish settlement in the Polish and Lithuanian—Belarusian lands was predominantly made up of Jews emigrating from west-central Europe in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.” The Jewish popula-

tion of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is believed to have constituted a quarter of the entire Jewish population of the Polish—

Lithuanian Commonwealth.? Freedom of migration led to a constant influx of refugees from the west who were eager to seize the opportunities presented by the social and economic situation in the Grand Duchy. This conglomeration of immigrants quite soon began to shape itself into a distinct entity within the Jewry of the Commonwealth, largely as a result of the administrative evolution culminating in

the creation of the Va’ad Lita (Council of Lithuania). The establishment of the Va’ad Lita reflected the self-perception of the Jews in the Grand Duchy as a separate entity within the Jewish people.* From the very beginnings of Jewish communal autonomy in the Grand Duchy, Lithuanian Jews had faced challenges quite different from those faced by their co-religionists in the Crown lands of Poland.° In Lithuania the Jews were freer to apply their entrepreneurial skills, and for quite some time only Jews were artisans, tax farmers, moneylenders, and middlemen between lord and peasant. Jewish settlement was put under the control of the major communities of Lithuania. New Jewish settlements were, in a sense, colonies of the larger communities, which fully benefited from the eastern and north-eastern expansion. At the same time Lithuanian Jewry was developing an oligarchic system of local self-govern-

ment, more centralized and less democratic than its counterpart in the Polish Crown lands. With time the conflict between the major communities and the more recent settlements became more profound, resulting first in the admission of Vilna and later of Slutsk into the Va’ad Lita, and then in the rebellion of smaller communities, the erosion of the Va’ad Lita’s power over them, tensions with the Va’ad

| Arba Aratsot (Council of Four Lands), stagnation, and, finally, the liquidation of both Va’adim in 1764. It is highly probable that the experience of the Va’ad created a sense of surrogate independence among Lithuanian Jewry and played an important role in the creation of the term ‘Jewish Liteh’ and its adoption by the Jews themselves.

In the sixteenth century, when Lithuanian Jewry began to acquire its distinctive characteristics, all the Jews in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth were experi-

encing a golden age. The earliest reports on Lithuanian Jews as separate from ‘Polish’ Jewry come from Jewish and non-Jewish travellers in the area and from 2 G. C. Bacon, ‘Unchanging View: Polish Jewry as Seen in Recent One-Volume Histories of the Jews’, Polin, 4 (1989), 391-2.

3S. Stampfer, ‘Some Implications of Jewish Population Patterns in Pre-Partition Lithuania’, Scripta Mierosolymitana, 38 (1998), 189-90. 4 J. Katz, Tradition in Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York, 1993), 103, 112.

° H.H. Ben-Sasson, Hagut vehanhaga (Jerusalem, 1959), 138-0.

22 Vital Zajka chroniclers such as Maciej of Miechéw.® The Jews in that area were considered enthusiastic in taking advantage of economic opportunity and eager to obtain knowledge beyond traditional scholarly rabbinic discourse. At first they did not seem to excel in rabbinic studies, and before the sixteenth century they produced only one scholar of any fame: R. Moses ben Jacob of Kiev (also known as Moses Hagoleh, 1449—c.1520), who was reportedly born in either Seduva or Tarov in the Lithuanian—Belarusian lands.’ With the expansion of Jewish colonization and the growth of the Jewish population in the towns and villages of the Grand Duchy, these lands began to produce increasing numbers of traditional Jewish scholars and figures of renowned rabbinic authority. The period from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the first half of seventeenth century was characterized by a remarkable exchange of people and ideas, a favourable international climate, and tolerance within the realm. The new land was considered to be akhsantyah shel torah (‘an asylum of the Law’), and some were even of the opinion that ‘it is preferable by far to dwell in the land of Rus’ [Raisn, Belarus] and promote the study of ‘Torah in Israel than in the Land of Israel’. The foundations of what would later be known as Jewish Lithuania, or Liteh, and Jewish White Russia (Belarus) as an integral part of

it, were laid in that period. The main factors in the emergence of the Lithuanian phenomenon were internal developments within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, its relations with the Polish part of the dual realm, changing economic and social conditions, religious autonomy, and Jewish communal organization. The tolerance and ethno-religious diversity of the Grand Duchy, together with its geographical position on the main trade and communication routes of eastern Europe, made Lithuania a hotbed of intellectual activity and the propagation of secular knowledge and mores. The uniqueness of the situation lay in the weakness of the non-Jewish burgher class, which ruled out assimilation of the Western type. Instead, a wealthy and numerous Jewish bourgeoisie began to emerge, with its own behaviours and traits. It borrowed extensively from local culture, manners, and knowledge, but preserved its religious and cultural identity—which by that time was supported by | the already highly developed local traditions, dialect, and pioneering ethos. The combination of adherence to tradition on the one hand and the need for more flexible applications of the Jewish law in line with changing conditions on the other led to developments in halakhic thought and the establishment of the Jewish communal authorities’ right to issue legally binding enactments.'° As a result there emerged a quite powerful, self-sufficient community, spread over a vast territory and still growing, defending its rights (with varying success) before non-Jewish 6 J. Raisin, The Haskalah Movement in Russia (Philadelphia, 1913), 28-0. ? §. Tsinberg, ‘Avraam Krymskii i Moisei Kievskii’, Evreiskatia starina, 11 (1924), 279. 8 Raisin, The Haskalah Movement in Russia, 32.

9 H. H. Ben-Sasson, ‘Lithuania: The Structure and Trends of its Culture’, Encyclopaedia Judaica Yearbook (Jerusalem, 1973), 28-0. 10 E. Fram, Ideas Face Reality: Jewish Law and Life in Poland 1550-1655 (Cincinnati, 1997), 26.

Iithuanian—Belarustan Jewry, 13th—19th Centuries 23 rulers and the Jewish structures of the Crown, and conscious of its somewhat separate interests. It considered itself a community of pioneers, exploiting the expanding opportunities of a state which for some time had been the largest and possibly most powerful in contemporary Europe—the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,

Samogitia, and Ruthenia. Initially, because of the relatively low level of both economic rivalry with non-Jews and hostile attention from the Christian Church, it was less bound by considerations of non-Jewish attitudes and of the possible repercussions of interaction with them. In light of the largely favourable position of the rulers, the community proceeded to exercise its economic, social, and sometimes even political mastery of the developing lands in the east and north of the country. A distinct Lithuanian Jewish identity had been formed most probably by the end

of the eighteenth century, the time of the partitions of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth and rise of the hasidic movement. By that time the demographic explosion of the Jewish population, the declining authority of Jewish and nonJewish ruling bodies, and worsening economic conditions had left the generation of that period relatively less well off than their parents or grandparents. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries the Jews of Lithuania and Belarus found themselves on the vast territory from Vitebsk to Brest-Litovsk and from Daugavpils (Dvinsk) to Homel, united by common memories of belonging to the same Jewish and non-Jewish governing units (the Va’ad Lita and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), and by speaking the same dialect of Yiddish and using the same pronunciation of Hebrew and Aramaic in liturgy and religious studies. Lithuanian Jewry was a Separate entity in terms of ethnological features such as food, utensils, clothing, dwellings, folklore, patterns of behaviour, and local ethos. There seems also to have been a separate physical type ascribed to Lithuanian Jewry, as reflected in the stereotype of the Litvak as black-haired, dark-eyed, and relatively tall. The concentration of Jews in the market towns, where they outnumbered the non-Jewish population, their visible presence in the main cities of the area, and the relatively low level of antisemitism among the majority of the non-Jewish population (Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Tatar) led them to have quite a low level of ‘exile consciousness’. Jews’ involvement in large-scale trade, especially in timber

and grain, gave them first-hand knowledge of the situation in the surrounding countries and their Jewish communities.

The most important changes setting Lithuanian Jews apart from their coreligionists in the rest of Europe took place in the sphere of spiritual life. After 1772

Lithuania and Belarus were the scene of one of the fiercest religious struggles to take place among European Jews. The rise of hasidism and its rapid spread throughout the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth provoked the opposition of the Lithuanian rabbinic authorities. Their reaction deeply influenced the whole of the Lithuanian Jewish community, giving it a new distinguishing feature: a religious

system of its own. This more rigid social system of Lithuanian Jewry, with its

24 Vital Zajka tendency to centralize religious authority, resulted in more effective control over society than in the rest of the former Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. The mitnagdic response, opposing the new religious movement of hasidism, was closely connected with the name of the Vilna Gaon. ‘The movement developed further into a coherent body of religious writings presented in the works of such figures as R. Hayim ben Isaac Volozhiner, R. Abraham ben Solomon of Vilna, and Pinhas ben Judah, the Maggid of Polotsk.’’ The mitnagedim also created a system of yeshivas, which made the names of towns in Jewish Lithuania, such as Volozhin, Novaredok (Nowogroédek), Slobodka, and Telz (TelSiai), famous throughout the -

Jewish world. Repelling the hasidic onslaught and preserving the old religious order became the mission of the administrative and intellectual élite of Jewish Lithuania. This reaction against innovative religious and secular trends shaped an Orthodox movement a number of whose characteristics became synonymous with the word ‘Litvak’. Among these characteristics are rationalist religious study, an educational system centred around yeshivas, and interest in secular topics of study.

In the nineteenth century the rise of the yeshivas and the writings of prominent rabbis brought fame and recognition to Lithuania and created in Lithuanian Jewry a self-perception as a chosen tribe of pious scholars with moral authority, poor but proud toilers, intellectually superior to the rest of the world Jewry. Their liturgy, which went back to Hasidei Ashkenaz and existed before the rise of hasidism, began to be called nusah lita in recognition, or rather self-recognition, of Lithuania’s role in preserving tradition.

After the partitioning of the Commonwealth, Liteh found itself within the borders of absolutist Russia. The introduction of Russian authority, with its deep suspicion of Jews, was felt throughout Jewish traditional society. Even the FrancoRussian war of 1812, though it brought with it the devastation of many communi-

ties, did not have such long-lasting influence on Lithuanian Jewry. The most significant changes were connected with the ban on the Jewish liquor trade and the expulsion of the Jews from the villages in the 1820s. ‘Together these changes brought about the pauperization of a significant number of people and the reassertion of control by traditional structures whose grip had become somewhat looser in the relative independence of village life on noble estates. From then on, the dual pressure of maintaining the old ways while facing social changes and persecutions (gzeires) at the hands of the Russian authorities became all too strong. ‘There began an emigration into the unpopulated lands of New Russia, which later became a steady if not consistently strong trend. At the same time the influence of the Haskalah also gained momentum. Many a Lithuanian scholar was prepared to accept the seeds of the Haskalah, and some were already cultivating them. It is necessary to

mention that the maskilim in Liteh used the Jewish languages—Hebrew and Yiddish—almost exclusively, while in Ukraine, for example, especially in Odessa 11 A. Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore, 1997), 8.

Lithuanian—Belarusian Jewry, 15th—19th Centuries 25 and the south, they used mostly Russian. The traditional Lithuanian rationalism, which had been tested and strengthened during the stormy years of anti-hasidic struggle, was searching for new ways of dealing with the realities of modernity. Some leaned towards assimilation, some towards Haskalah, but the main trend was towards working out the consolidating principles of efforts to preserve the traditional ways: the formation of Orthodoxy. The Lithuanian (Litvish) dialect of the Yiddish language became one of the primary distinguishing features of the Lithuanian community. Some scholars believe that the dialect emerged in the sixteenth century, though there is no linguistic evidence so far which can be traced to that period.’* It is more likely that the dialect emerged before the end of the eighteenth century,'* and was consolidated both as the language of the opponents of hasidism during that great controversy, and as the vernacular of scholars and rationalists. The real flowering of Litvish Yiddish took place during the nineteenth century, when the yeshivas and other institutions of Jewish learning, including the secular ones, made Lithuanian Yid-

| dish known to students from outside Liteh, and its rabbis, teachers, scholars, and preachers brought the Litvish phonology and language structure to the ears and hearts of the broader Jewish public throughout Ashkenaz. The development of Yiddish literature and of the Jewish socialist movement, the Bund, whose key figures and the bulk of whose activists were Litvaks, greatly influenced the acceptance of a modified Lithuanian variant of Yiddish as the basis for standardization of literary Yiddish.'* In 1866, in a polemic with Aleksander T’sederbaum on Litvaks and their language, Perets Smolenskin pointed out that, contrary to accusations, Lithuanian Yiddish was not ‘spoiled’ by some dialect characteristics, but in fact rendered the pronunciation of letters correctly. Smolenskin proposed a theory explaining why differences in dialects occurred, and stated that the peculiarities of Litvish in terms of its grammar and lexicon were no greater or more ridiculous than those of other dialects. He also stated that the hostility and coldness of Litvaks towards Polish Jews was the result of the decline of Jewish learning in ‘Poyln’ (the Polish lands of the former Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth).!° The Lithuanian contribution to religious thought lay in the creation of what

is sometimes called ‘mitnagdic Judaism’, which included rationalism in the 12D. Fishman, ‘Introduction’, in H. Abramovicz, Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War IT, trans. E. Z. Dobkin (Detroit, 1999), 12. 13M. Weinreich, ‘On the Dynamics of Yiddish Dialect Formation’, and J. Joffe, ‘Dating the Origin of Yiddish Dialects’, both in U. Weinreich (ed.), The Field of Yiddish, 2nd collection (The Hague, 1965). 14 _H.-D. Katz, ‘Naye gilgulim fun alte makhloykesn: di litvishe norme un di sikhsukhim vos arum

ir’ (“New Metaphorphoses of the Old Disputes: The Lithuanian Norm in Yiddish and the Quarrels Surrounding It’), Y7VO Dleter, 2 (1994), 200-9. 15 M. Weinreich, ‘A polemik tsvishn tsederboymen un perets smolenskinen vegn yidishe dialektn’

(‘Polemic between Tsederbaum and Perets Smolenskin about Yiddish Dialects’), YIVO bleter, 5/3 (1933), 401-3.

26 Vital Zajka interpretation of sacred texts, the search for their actual meaning, and the principle

of study for the sake of perfection in performing Torah commandments. In the words of Solomon Maimon, “The study of ‘Talmud is the chief object of higher edu-

cation among our people. . . . among them no merit is superior to that of a good Talmudist. . . . He is director of ordinary men’s conscience, their lawgiver, and their judge.’'© The mitnagdic system also included the musar movement, which , involved striving for moral perfection, and the yeshiva movement for developing and transmitting traditional rabbinic values. The printing presses in Grodno and Vilna served to disseminate the ideas of mitnagdic rabbis. Books in general were highly valued even among common people in Lithuania, and many spent a fortune to collect a library; some had as many as 5,000 volumes. The library of Solomon Maimon’s father, who was a mid-eighteenth-century lease farmer in a remote Lithuanian village, contained secular works on astronomy and history and 7Tsemah david by David Gans. Small towns in Belarus, part of Jewish Lithuania, had subscribers to maskilic periodicals in numbers equalling or exceeding those in the great Jewish cultural centres. *’ The main reason for the emergence of the mitnagdic school of thought was the

drive to preserve the traditional religious system in the face of the expansion of hasidism and the trend towards modernization. In the end it both influenced and was influenced by the opposing movements. Hasidism in the Lithuanian— Belarusian lands was transformed into a more rationalistic system of thought under the name of Habad, with a body of scholarly writings of its own, and with more moderate applications of the Beshtian ideas. After the more radical anti-rationalist faction headed by R. Abraham Kalisker was defeated in its earliest days, Habad was headed by R. Shneur Zalman of Liady, whose ‘style of leadership [ was] less charismatic and more conventionally rabbinic than that of other Hasidic masters’.*® That rationalistic component caused many fellow hasidim to doubt the hasidic nature of the Habad movement. The Karlin—Stolin and Indura (Amdur)—Koidanovo (Koidenov) branches also demonstrated a rather reserved and rationalized kind of hasidism,

undoubtedly reflecting the influence of the mitnagdic approach. In their turn, according to some scholarly opinions, the mitnagdic thinkers were likewise subject

, to the influence of hasidism, and above all Habad. This influence resulted not in fundamental changes in mitnagdic theology, but in new approaches to methodology and the principles of polemics.'? The musar movement was dedicated to moral improvement, fulfilment of all the biblical commandments, and serving the people of Israel. It was aided by an asceticism that was widespread and valued among the Jews of the Lithuanian—Belarusian 16 S. Maimon, Autobiography (London, 1955), 16. 17 TI. Barzilay, ‘The Life of Menashe of Ilya (1767—1831)’, Proceedings of the American Academy of

Jewish Research, 50 (1983), 15, 18.

18 T). Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews: The fews of Shklov (New York, 1995), 17. 19 Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim, 2-4.

Lithuanian—Belarusian fewry, 18th—19th Centuries 27 lands. Later it paved the way to more active service of the people of Israel in the form of organization of and participation in Jewish socialist and nationalist movements. The introduction of the new network of yeshivas as a way of enhancing the transmission of traditional rabbinic knowledge was based on principles of financial independence from local Jewish structures and independent study of the Gemara with the limited guidance of an expert Talmud scholar. The system honed the analytical and intellectual skills of yeshiva students, who were prepared both for spiritual leadership in Jewish communities and for further study (including secular study which would prepare them to join the growing Jewish modernizing class). Despite the poverty and hardships, the impetus towards learning was very strong: ‘Although the Ma/ariv service at eight or nine o’clock officially concludes the day’s

work, students usually remain at their books until ten or twelve. Most of the students sleep in the school.’?° Jewish Lithuania had very high intellectual potential owing to its reverence for

study, its proximity to the main intellectual centres of east-central Europe, the concentration of its own scholarly resources, freedom of movement, and the free exchange of ideas. The positive, though cautious and discriminating, approach to secular knowledge was enhanced by the Vilna Gaon’s view of the sciences as a means for the clarification of halakhic issues. The statement that ‘All secular wisdom 1s essential for our holy Torah and is included in it’ is ascribed to the Gaon himself.*! The modernization of the surrounding non-Jewish society, the influence

of the German Haskalah, and the development of trade and crafts led to an increased interest in the secular sciences, which in turn produced quite a number of prominent Jewish scholars in Lithuania. People like Manasseh ben Joseph of Ilia and R. Baruch Schick of Shklov, who were the precursors of the Haskalah and in some cases activists in its cause, changed the intellectual landscape of their land and greatly influenced what was later to become known as Russian Jewry.7” For the Litvaks, learning was always valued above material wealth. The writer Sholem Abramovich (Mendele Mokher Seforim) described attitudes towards the wealthy like this: In Lithuania of old—perhaps it is no longer the case—Torah knowledge was held in higher esteem than wealth. An ignoramus, no matter how rich, was nothing more than an ignoramus. Asa popular saying goes, ‘Out of a pig’s tail you cannot make a shtraiml [fur hat]. Such a person might push himself to the fore and have a say in things, and it was often necessary to 20 L. Mendelshtam, ‘Iz zapisok pervogo evreia-studenta v Rossii’ (‘From the Notes of the First Jewish University Student in Russia’), Perezhitoe, 1 (1909), 25.

21S. Leyman, ‘Rabbinic Openness to General Culture in the Early Modern Period in Western and Central Europe’, in J. J. Schachter (ed.), Judaism’s Encounter with Other Cultures: Rejection or Integration? (Northvale, NJ, 1997), 149. 22 Barzilay, ‘The Life of Menashe of Ilya’; D. Fishman, ‘A Polish Rabbi Meets the Berlin Haskalah: The Case of R. Barukh Schick’, Association for fewish Studies Review, 12/1 (Spring 1987), 95-121.

28 Vital Zajka look on and be silent. But never would such a person be voluntarily accorded a place of honour or listened to or liked. Oh no, it cannot be! To be worthy of that, one had to be a good and pious learned man, and come from a good family. Prestige and respect depended not on bags of money but on the mind and the heart.??

Nevertheless, the aptitude for learning no doubt contributed to the entrepreneurial success of many Litvaks. The families of a number of leading financial magnates and bankers in the Russian empire in the nineteenth century, like the Gunzburgs, Abram Zak, Samuil Poliakov, Kalman Vysotsky, and the Fridland brothers, originated in Jewish Lithuania. Aiding the formation of a reverent attitude towards knowledge and scholarship were the dominance of the rabbinic élite, patterns of parenting, and the tradition of preaching. This attitude, sanctified by the names of the great sages and above all the Gaon of Vilna, was the foundation of self-perception and pride. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when Lithuanian Jews had acquired a separate identity and a pride in themselves as guardians of Torah tradition, the increased mobility of

the population brought many non-Litvaks into Lithuania and an even greater number into the neighbouring regions of the Russian empire. The mutual opinions that emerged asa result of these contacts are partly revealed in negative stereotypes. For their part, the Litvaks perceived the hasidim, especially those in the south, in Volynia and Podolia, as limited, gullible, and always optimistic ignoramuses, among whom a mediocre student from Lithuania could be considered a great scholar. Lithuanians abhorred the cult of the tsadikim and mocked what they viewed as the credulousness and ignorance of the hasidim.** Very often the differences were not just in the language, but in appearance as well. In the mid-nineteenth century the custom among Litvaks was to wear long hair, with beards and sidelocks shorn, while non-Litvaks (hasidim) had long sidecurls, beards, and short hair. There were also differences in clothing and headwear. In popular belief the typical Lithuanian had black hair and black eyes, while the typical Jew from Volynia was red-haired, and the Jews in the rest of Ukraine were even fairer.” Hasidim considered Lithuanians to be cold, restrained, and insincere, and though they acknowledged Litvaks’ achievements in Torah study and their high level of education, they believed that Litvaks studied 1n order to gain material benefits. It was widely believed among the hasidim that the cold rationalism and emotional restraint of the Litvaks bordered on atheism and conversion; hence the nicknames ‘treyfener Litvak’ (unkosher Litvak) or ‘tseylem kop’ (Christian head).”° According to the opinion of enlightened Lithuanians, 23M. M. Seforim, ‘Istoriia odnoi zhizni (Shlomo Reb-Khaims): Vospominaniia pisatelia’, Evreiskii mir, I (Jan. 1909), 10. 24 N. Pruzhanskii, ‘Perezhitoe’, Knizhki Voskhoda, 1 (1904), 16. 25 G. Sliozberg, Dela davno minuvshikh dnei, 1 (Paris, 1933), 30; B. Vishnevskii, ‘K antropologii evreev Rossu’, Evretskata starina, 11 (1924), 284-5. 26 Ben-Ami (M. Rabinovich), ‘Detstvo’, Knizhki Voskhoda, 1 (1904), 18.

Lithuanian—Belarusian Jewry, 1Sth—19th Centuries 29 whatever shortcomings rabbinism might have, at least it has scholarship in the foreground, and... whatever the scholarship might be, it has something to do with logic, which 1s far better than complete ignorance. And what did hasidism provide in the place of the overthrown rabbinic scholarship? Complete ignorance, for all the vague, barren ideals of hasidism that its leaders may have cannot be comprehensible to the mob.?’

For all their restraint and rationalism, Lithuanians were no less pious and observant than the hasidim. As Pauline Wengeroff of Minsk wrote in her memotrs, ‘in

the morning [my father] strictly observed the prohibition against walking four cubits without first washing his hands. Before taking the first bite, he recited the introductory morning prayers, and afterwards he would go to his study.’*° Study of Torah was considered one of the most fundamental commandments, surpassing all _ the other precepts: A Jew of Kopy] [a shtet/in the heart of Jewish Lithuania] would spare nothing for the education of his children. It was not rare for a poor man to sell his last candlestick or his only pillow to pay the melamed. With the single exception of Meyerke the Fool, who was both stoker

in the bathhouse and water-carrier, there were no ignoramuses in Kopyl. And even this moronic water-carrier somehow knew the prayers and could quite satisfactorily recite the

blessings overthe Torah.2? Not least among the contributing factors to Lithuania’s achievement was the nature of the non-Jewish population among whom the Jews lived for centuries. ‘The vast majority of the non-Jewish population was Belarusian, generally considered to _

be among the groups most kindly disposed towards the Jews in east-central Europe.°° The ability to study Torah more or less safely was one of the factors that caused Liteh to become known as akhsaniyah shel torah. The concentration of Jews in the Lithuanian population was among the highest in the world. Haim Zhitlowsky wrote: if | had not known, theoretically, that we Jews live in exile... I would have had a right to say that I live in a Jewish land; so little reminded were we of exile in our region, in Raisn. .. . It seemed as if the land long ago belonged to the Goy, but we Jews took it with our gun and sword, as often happens in history, and became, as is natural in such cases, a master race, if not in the political sense, then definitely in the economic, national, and cultural sense.**

There was even some similarity between Jewish and non-Jewish residents of those lands: The Lithuanian peasant, then, was a depressed, worried creature; when he sang it was of want and hunger. His brother from Ukraine was well fed and carefree, and he sang of joy. 27 N. Pruzhanskii, ‘Perezhitoe’, 17. 28 P. Wengeroff, Memoiren einer Grossmutter. Bilder aus der Kulturgeschichte der Jfuden Russlands im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1908), 5. 29 A. Paperna, ‘Iz nikolaevskoi epokhi’ (‘From the Nicholas I Era’), Perezhitoe, 2 (1910), 31-2.

30 M. Mishkinski, ‘Regional Factors in the Formation of the Jewish Labor Movement in Czarist Russia’, YIVO Annual, 14 (1969), 47-8. 31 LH. Zhitlovsky, Zikhronoth fun mayn lebn (“Memories of my Life’) (New York, 1935), 110.

30 Vital Zajka The difference between these great peasant groups was reflected in the Jewish communities. The Lithuanian Jew was a pessimist, his brother in Ukraine an optimist. The former sought refuge in speculations on a world to come; the latter found joy in this world.*2

Later, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the Litvak self-image acquired a number of new features thanks to the new social and religious trends whose founders and activists were the Jews of Lithuania: Jewish socialism, Zionism, the Mizrahi movement, and autonomism. 32 S$. Levin, Forward from Exile: The Autobiography of Shmarya Levin (Philadelphia, 1967), 288.

Jewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia, 1742-1848 JANUSZ SPYRA CIESZYN SILESIA, which encompasses the southern part of Silesia, is a historical area based on the Duchy of Cieszyn. The duchy came into being in 1290 and was ruled by the local Piast dynasty until 1653. Then, until 1918, it was ruled by the Habsburgs, as the kings of Bohemia, and their relatives. In 1920 Cieszyn Silesia was divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia along the River Olza.! Before Jewish emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century a limited number of Jews were tolerated in the province in exchange for certain services. From 1742 to 1848 the number of Jews and their rights were determined by complicated legislation called the Jewish incolate. There are records of Jews being in Silesia by the twelfth century, but they appear in Cieszyn Silesia much later. The first confirmed mention is of a Jew named Jacob who in 1531 purchased a house in Cieszyn. There are also records of Jews who in the first half of the sixteenth century were in Frystat (Frysztat, Freistadt, today part

of the town of Karvina) and Polish Ostrawa. After 1557 Emperor Ferdinand | ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Czech lands. The Silesian estates, unlike those of Moravia and Bohemia, ignored the ban; still, before the mid-seventeenth century Jews resided in the area of Cieszyn Silesia only sporadically.2 This changed during the Thirty Years War, when the impoverished rulers were constantly in need of money. Emperor Ferdinand II relaxed the legislation concerning Jews, and leasing tolls, customs tariffs, taxes, and the right to produce and sell alcohol, above

all spirits, to Jews became a vital source of cash for the feudal lords. The last duchess of Cieszyn from the Piast family, Elzbieta Lukrecja (1625-53), employed Jews as toll-collectors from 1626. In 1631 this office was held by Jakub Singer of _ Ivan¢ice, near Brno, in Moravia. He settled in Cieszyn and became engaged in a broad range of economic activity. He received many privileges from the duchess, ' G. Biermann, Geschichte des Herzogthum Teschen (Teschen, 1894); F. Popiotek, Studia z dziejéw Slgska Cieszynskiego (Katowice, 1958); Nastin déjin Tésinska (Ostrava—Praha, 1992), pub. in Polish as Larys dzvejow Slgska Cieszynskiego (Ostrawa—Praga, 1992).

2 J. Spyra, ‘Die Juden im Teschener Schlesien (bis Anfang des 18. Jh.)’, Oberschlesisches Jahrbuch, 9

(Berlin, 1993), 41-66. The tradition which persists until today, that a Jewish cemetery has existed in Cieszyn since the Middle Ages, is not correct (J. Spyra (ed.), ‘Cieszyn: Historia cmentarza’, in M. Wodzinski, Hebrajskie inskrypcje na Slgsku X1I—XVII wieku (Wroclaw, 1996), 273-4).

32 Janusz Spyra including the right to trade in the town, the freedom to profess the Mosaic faith, and permission to establish a private cemetery. Despite prohibitions, he also owned a house in the town. This became the foundation of the Singers’ extraordinary position in Cieszyn Silesia. In 1661 these prerogatives were confirmed by Emperor Leopold I in privileges granted to Samuel Singer, Jakub’s son, and they were extended to other Singer descendants. In the second half of the seventeenth century Jewish toll-collectors and vodka producers were active in the cities of Frydek (Frydek, Friedeck), Frystat, Bielsko (Bielitz), and Bohumin (Bogumin, Oderberg) and in several villages in Cieszyn Silesia.° In 1713 Emperor Charles VI issued a toleration edict that permitted the Jews of Silesia and their families to reside there and conduct their affairs in exchange for

paying a special toleration tax. All Jews over 15 years of age had also to pay the so-called ‘Jewish excise’ (fudenpersonal-Accis) in the sum of thirty Kreuzer per month. Initially the taxes were collected by ‘toleration officers’, and, from 1721, by private leaseholders called jiidische Steuerkollektoren (‘Jewish tax-collectors’). By 1725 forty to fifty Jewish families lived in Cieszyn Silesia.* This increase in the — number of Jewish families in Silesia made the emperor anxious, and the ‘Wegen der Juden’ (‘Jewish Conduct’) patent published on his instructions on 21 October 1726 outlined principles intended to secure control over the growth of the Jewish population. Henceforth only one son in each family could marry in Silesia, and only he had the right of an zacola (‘inhabitant of the country’) to residency. All others had to

leave the country upon coming of age. Jews were prohibited from (among other things) settling in places where there had previously been no Jews, working in crafts, employing Christians as servants, and leasing tolls, taxes, and any industrial buildings except distilleries (the prohibition on estate ownership by Jews was also still in force). Jews were free only to produce and sell vodka and to trade in certain other merchandise.” Although these prohibitions were often bypassed, including those on estate ownership, the Wegen der Juden patent slowed the increase in the Jewish population in Silesia, and by about 1737 some sixty Jewish families lived in Cieszyn Silesia.© The majority were not rich. They were dispersed, and, because of this, no religious structures developed in the area. The only prayer house recognized by the 3 J. Spyra, ‘Ksiazece i cesarskie przywileje dla zydowskiej rodziny Singeréw z Cieszyna’, Pamietnik cleszynski, 7 (Cieszyn, 1993), 112-24; id., ‘Die Juden im Teschener Schlesien’, 48-56, 65-6. 4 I. Rabin, Beitrage zur Rechts- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Schlesien im 18. Fahrhundert, i: Der rechtliche Zustand (1713-1740) (Breslau, 1932), 3-4, 22-3, 40, 46-7; J. Spyra, ‘Juden im Teschener Schlesien unter der Herrschaft Karls VI. (1711—1740)’, Oberschlesisches Jahrbuch, 10 (Berlin, 1994), 28.

> Ibid. 26; K. Orzechowski, “Sprawy ludnosci zydowskiej w slaskich drukowanych zbiorach prawnych (do polowy XVIII w.)’, Slgski kwartalnik historyczny Sobotka, 44 (Wroclaw, 1989), 45-54.

6 In the first half of the 18th cent., in addition to the Singers (who all considered themselves the coowners of the house in Cieszyn), Jews also owned houses in Bohumin and Frydek (B. Brilling, “Zur Geschichte der Juden in Osterreichisch-Schlesien 1640-1737’, Judaica Bohemiae, 4 (Prague, 1968), 114-16), and in Frystat as a pawn (Zemsky Archiv v Opavé (ZAO), Kralovsky Urad v Opavé (KU), label 11/6a, box 467).

Jewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia 33 authorities was in Cieszyn and was the private property of the Singers, as was the only cemetery in the area.’ It was also for this reason that the Singers occupied such a prominent position among the Jews of Cieszyn Silesia. In 1738 Charles VI ordered all Jews who did not have special privileges to be expelled from Silesia. However, they were left alone, partly because feudal lords resisted the order, and partly because of the emperor’s death. Shortly afterwards the Silesian wars started, in which Charles VI’s daughter Maria Theresa lost most of Silesia to Prussia. Only the southern sections of the province were left with the Habsburgs, including the whole Duchy of Cieszyn, together with the estate principalities (Minderherrschaften) on its peripheries: Bielsko, Frydek, Frystat, Roy, Reichwaldau, Némecka Lutyné (Niemiecka Lutynia, Deutschleuten). From them the empress created a separate province, Austrian Silesia. It was governed by the royal office in Opava, with officials called stars: krajom: (‘land elders’) under its rule. Jewish affairs were within their jurisdiction.®

Maria Theresa hated the Jews, and at the end of 1744 ordered their expulsion from the Czech lands; on 7 January 1745 this was extended to Austrian Silesia. By an Act of August 1746 the deportation was to be implemented over six years.’ Local nobility who leased out arendas to Jews at inflated rates opposed their expulsion, and so did the government of the new province, which saw them as potential taxpayers. At the end of 1746 the royal office in Opava restored the Jewish excise and the next year started collecting property tax from the Jews. The Jewish collectors

appointed by the Cieszyn land elder collected the sum of 1,121 gulden (fl.) 6 Kreuzer (Kr.), and in 1748, 1,080 fl. 1 Kr., though the Jews had no right of residence. The so called decenal decree (Decennal recess) of 30 June 1748 that regulated the monarchy’s tax system permitted Jews to live in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia for a period of ten years in exchange for their paying a high annual premium. For Austrian Silesia it was set at 1,300 fl., the same amount as was collected from the Jews before. In August 1748 the royal office ordered the Jews to elect permanent representatives—whose main duty would be to collect the dues. These were the Jewish elders, more often called the juidische Kollektoren (‘Jewish tax-collectors’). The first to be elected to this post was Jakub Hirschl, the richest of the local Jews, a relative of the Singers and the lessee of a small vodka concession in Cieszyn. He was helped by two assistants (Beisitzer, ‘licensed clerks’). In 1749 a seven-person-strong department was also elected to set tax rates.’° 7 Brilling, ‘Zur Geschichte der Juden in Osterreichisch-Schlesien’, 109-10; Spyra, ‘Juden im Teschener Schlesien (1711—1740)’, 28-9, 43-5. 8 C. d’Elvert, Die Verfassung und Verwaltung von Oesterreichisch-Schlesien in thren historischen

Aushildung (Brno, 1854); S. Grodziski, ‘Ustr6j polityczno-prawny Slaska Austriackiego w latach 1742-1848 (Proba syntezy)’, Studia historyczne, 10/ 1-2 (Krakow, 1967), 5-21. ; 2 C. d’Elvert, Zur Geschichte der Jfuden in Mahren und Osterreichisch-Schlesien mit Ricksicht auf Osterreich-Ungarn und die Nachbarlander (Brno, 1895), 191-2. W. O. McCagg Jr. (ed.), A History of Habsburg Jews 1670-1918 (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 19. 10 J. Spyra, ‘Juden im Herzogtum Teschen unter der Herrschaft von Maria Theresia (1740—-1780)’,

Oberschlesisches Jahrbuch, 11 (Berlin, 1995), 68—70.

34 Janusz Spyra In July 1751 the empress turned to the provincial authorities in Opava for their opinion on whether the Jews should be expelled or allowed to stay in the country. The land elder of Cieszyn, Ernest von Mitrowski, responded on 15 August 1751, resolutely supporting the latter option. He stated that if the Jews were expelled, the

state treasury would lose income from many taxes, local industry and trade— underdeveloped as they were—would suffer, and local landlords would incur losses. The authorities in Opava were of a similar opinion. Asaresult, on 15 April 1752 the empress signed in Vienna the Edict of Tolerance for the Jews of Austrian Silesia. It

became effective on the day of its proclamation by the authorities in Opava on 17 April 1752.'’ The edict opened with a declaration of the empress’s intention to settle a limited number of Jewish families permanently in Austrian Silesia, eightyeight of whom were in Cieszyn Silesia.‘* By this law Jews remained and were tolerated, but they did not become citizens of the state. The edict abolished all previous privileges granted to the Jews, who could live only in the places where they were

already settled. From then on each family constituted a ‘family unit’ (tolerated Jewish family) headed by the paterfamilias. As before, only the eldest son could be recognized as the zmcola; only he could obtain a permit to marry within the country and then to take over the family’s tolerated place. The remaining sons were to leave the country; daughters could either marry outside the country or not at all. Families without sons were to be regarded as discontinued. The edict barred Jews from all leases except vodka-related ones, from maintaining Christian servants, and from peddling. Breaking the marriage prohibition was punished by flogging and expulsion, and the landlord or the town authorities had to pay a penalty of 1,000 fl. The Edict of Tolerance stated explicitly that its main purpose was to limit the number of Jews. The clause regarding the vacating of places by Jews who died without male descendants clearly indicates that the authorities counted on a gradual dying out of the Jewish population in Austrian Silesia. At the same time, however, the edict finally revoked the orders of expulsion from 1745 that in 1748 were only

suspended. It essentially repeated the anti-Jewish regulations from the era of Charles VI, especially those of the Wegen der Juden edict of 21 October 1726.!° The scattered and not always coherent regulations of Charles VI are collected here in one document providing the basis for the system of Jewish incolate (jiidische Inkolat) which was law in Austrian Silesia for almost a century. The dues to the 11 ZAO, KU, label 11/1, box 458. This edict was published as a circular. Spyra, ‘Juden im Herzogtum ‘Teschen’, 70-3.

2 A total of 119 families were allowed to reside in Austrian Silesia (twenty-three families in the Duchy of Opava and Krnov and eight in Vidnava). This agrees with the number of families registered in this area at the turn of 1751 and 1752. Their list, approved by the authorities in Opava in Mar. 1752, became the official register of tolerated Jews in Austrian Silesia.

'3 It also uses the edict of g Oct. 1725 prohibiting the Jews from keeping Christian servants, the edicts of 5 Dec. 1725 and 3 Jan. 1726 prohibiting peddling, and the edict of 27 Sept. 1725 prohibiting Jews from holding any leases except the vodka arenda.

Jewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia 35 state from the Cieszyn Silesia Jews were increased to 1,200 fl. ‘This tax was most often called ‘the regular Jewish toleration tax’.'* The complex reality was that the authorities in Opava responsible for implementing the edict needed two years to apply its regulations.*° At first, places emptied because of death or emigration were not filled; by January 1753 eight places were

empty and the remaining Jews had to pay the greatly increased toleration tax. Yielding to the pleas of the Jewish collectors from the Duchy of Cieszyn, Maria Theresa agreed on 1 September 1753 to constant updating of the list of tolerated families, which prevented the danger of their dying out.'© Earlier, the empress had agreed that the eldest daughter of Josef Goldschmied of Cieszyn could marry and

remain with her father, she as a cook and her husband as a servant, until Goldschmied’s under-age son reached adulthood. Maria Theresa’s permit for the marriage of Bernard, son of Natan Munk of Frydek, is also important. His father saw him as his successor, even though he had older sons in Moravia who were already married. Although the other sons could not come to Austrian Silesia, the regulation of the edict had been altered so that any son could succeed (with the authorities’ approval) as long as he was the only one to do so. After several months of discussion, the authorities also decided that eldest sons could marry during their father’s lifetime but could not create separate families; instead they were included in the father’s family. Finally, Maria Theresa’s decree of 30 November 1754 permitted the Silesian authorities to accept among tolerated families Jews from outside

Austrian Silesia.’ |

Maria Theresa’s amendment of the Edict of Tolerance in 1753-4 created the basis for local authorities to apply the Jewish incolate in Austrian Silesia. From then on they followed two principles: maintaining the number of families and securing prompt collection of Jewish taxes. The most important decisions concerned granting the status of tolerated Jew and granting permits to marry.’® Jews had to apply for tolerated status in writing to the authorities in Opava through the Jewish collectors, who attached their opinion of the candidate, his parentage, and his property. Even the eldest sons of tolerated Jews had to apply to fill their father’s place officially after his death, and for permission to marry. According to the interpretation of the authorities in 1753, eldest sons, their wives, and offspring were considered ‘4 For the ‘grace of being tolerated’, the Jews had to pay an additional 510 fl. to the emperor’s treasury. 15 On 8 July 1752 the empress granted the royal office the right to issue permissions for Jewish mar-

riages, though she set the fees for this (ZAO, KU, label 11/1, box 458). ‘6 ZAO, KU, label 11/1, box 458; label 11/5, box 462, fos. 394, 401-4; Spyra, ‘Juden im Herzogtum Teschen’, 73-5; 1” ZAO, KU, label 11/1, box 458; label 11/6a, box 465.

8 On the status of the tolerated Jew, see ZAO, KU, label 11/4a, box 461, fos. 362, 500; H. von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung der im Betreff der Jfuden in Mahren und im k. k. Antheile Schlesiens erlassenen Gesetze und V. erordnungen (Brno, 1835), 85. A similar system was introduced in Moravia and

Bohemia (T. Pékny, Historie Zidu v Cechach a na Moravé (Prague, 1993), 76-7, 84-5). In Austria Jews were allowed to travel only if they had written permission.

36 Janusz Spyra tolerated Jews. ‘This formula concealed the fact that from the beginning the number of Jewish families who had legal right of residence in Cieszyn Silesia was greater

than eighty-eight.'? Most often, sons-in-law and younger sons of tolerated Jews applied for a tolerated place. The authorities often granted the status to sons-inlaw, although they declared that there was no possibility of inheritance via daughters. Also, younger sons of tolerated Jews and actual or prospective sons-in-law often applied for a temporary permit to stay with their parents or in-laws. The reason given was usually a desire to help their old or sick parents or in-laws, which the authorities accepted on several occasions. Granting the right of incolate to Jews who were complete outsiders was rare.”° Among those applying to the authorities for a permit to marry, the most numer-

ous were the eldest sons of tolerated Jews who hoped to secure their place while their father was living. Sometimes younger sons and daughters of tolerated Jews obtained permission to marry even though this was prohibited by the edict. Jews in Cieszyn Silesia most often married people from local tolerated families, and after that from Prussian Silesia and Moravia. There are a few examples (six cases) of permission being granted for marriage to Jews from Polish lands.?' The reason for the relatively liberal application by the authorities in Opava of the rules of the Jewish incolate was that after 1752 there were not that many eligible taxpaying candidates for the tolerated places in Austrian Silesia: many Jews emigrated to Prussian Silesia or Hungary. To prevent problems with collecting the assigned

sum of taxes, the authorities granted tolerated status even to the younger sons of tolerated Jews if they were the only ones who had applied. A few rich Jews from Cieszyn Silesia secured places for several sons.22 From 1773 there was increasing interest among Jews in settling in Cieszyn Silesia related to the incorporation of Matopolska (Lesser Poland) into Austria. The Jews themselves tried to mitigate the harshness of the anti-Jewish legislation. Often after the death of a tolerated Jew his family paid the taxes until the eldest son came of age and could apply for his father’s place. Sometimes tolerated Jews resided permanently outside Cieszyn Silesia, leaving a son there, or just paying taxes.?° ‘9 In 1780, in addition to official ‘Jewish families’, there were also twenty-one families of their sons or sons-in-law regarded by the authorities as families of tolerated Jews (ZAO, KU, label 11/3, box 459, fos. 575-84). 20 One of the rare exceptions was Izaak Mojzesz Polack from Hamburg, and later his brother Jakub.

I rely on analysis of the (incomplete) records of granting the rights of tolerated Jews for the years 1752-82 (ZAO, KU, label 11/6a, boxes 465-70). 21 Including two cases concerning people from Biala, near Bielsko in Galicia. The Jews were expelled from there in 1765 (J. Polak, ‘Najdawniejsze dzieje Zydow w Biatej (do 1765 r.)’, in J. Polak and J. Spyra (eds.), Zydzi w Bielsku, Biatej 1 okolicy (Bielsko-Biala, 1996) ).

22 The record belonged to Ferdinand Ziffer of Frystat, whose five sons became tolerated Jews. 23 For example, Baruch Munk was active for over twenty years in Frydek instead of his father, who resided permanently in Hungary. When, in 1779, Baruch’s son Abraham applied for a marriage permit, the authorities requested that Baruch first apply for the status of tolerated Jew; only after that could his son apply to marry (ZAO, KU, label 11/6a, box 469).

Jewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia 37 Jews increasingly treated their status of tolerated Jew as a personal privilege at their own disposal, i.e. as transferable to other people. The authorities officially prohibited this, but they often conceded in practice. In addition, the feudal landlords in

Cieszyn Silesia ignored the anti-Jewish legislation, especially the prohibition against the settlement of Jews in places where they had not previously lived.** The empress herself breached the Austrian Silesia quota of 119 tolerated fami-

lies. In 1764 the tobacco trade in the empire, at that time a state monopoly, was leased to a group of rich Viennese Jews in an agreement that allowed the company to settle its employees in any town. From 1766 the company representatives in Cieszyn Silesia were Hirschel Mojzesz Singer and his aunt Endel Oppenheim of Cieszyn, who leased the local warehouse. They distributed tobacco using sublessees and sellers called 7abaktrafikanten. In 1776 the Singers oversaw the network of fifty-seven Jewish sub-lessees and 7abaktrafikanten, of whom sixteen were not

from local tolerated families. The authorities in Opava tried to limit the circle of people involved in this business to tolerated Jews, but to no avail.?° This situation made the rigorous implementation of the rules of Jewish incolate

complicated. Their effectiveness can be evaluated by comparing the number of tolerated families in Cieszyn Silesia and the results of population surveys organized by military and civil authorities. ‘The former, based on existing lists of tolerated Jews, are shown in Table 1; however, these data must be regarded as estimates. ‘The table shows that the number of Jews in tolerated families grew over thirty years by about 20 per cent, ostensibly as a result of the increase in the number of children (in 1752, 4.66 people per family; in 1769, 6.2; and in 1780, 5.7). In fact, the increase was the result of the growing number of families established by the eldest sons of tolerated Jews with the approval of the authorities. ‘Together with their wives and chil-

dren they were included in their fathers’ families. The number of people in tolerated families was supposed to be the same as the actual number of Jews in Cieszyn Silesia. But by 1754 there were more Jews than members of tolerated families (Table 2), and the 1770—1 survey indicates over 100 people in excess of the Table 1. Estimated number of tolerated Jews in Cieszyn Silesia, 1752—1780 , 1752, «1754 = =61760)—S 1761S ss«d1762—Sss«d1763)—Sss«1764)=—S ss s«d1765—Ss«d1769 ~——s:1780

~ Men 213 184 220 229 229 243 253 260 281 270

Women 196 181? 232 230 243 232 252 246 290 225 TOTAL 409 365 452 459 472 475 505 506 571 495

* In 1754 married women were not recorded, so their number has been estimated. Source: Records of tolerated Jews, Zemsky Archiv v Opavé, Kralovsky Uiad v Opavée, label 11/1, box 358; label 11/3, box 459.

** Spyra, ‘Juden im Herzogtum Teschen’, 75-6. 2° ZAO, KU, label 11/3, box 459, fos. 482-97; label 11/4a, box 461, fos. 712-13, 718-19.

38 , Janusz Spyra Table 2. The Jewish population of Cieszyn Silesia, 1754—1773

1754 «1770-1 361772) ~—s1773

Men 197 332 276 292

Women 194 348 317 326 TOTAL 391 680 593 618 Source: Based on official population surveys; Notizenblatt der historisch-statistischen Section der KaiserlichKonighchen mahnsch-schlesischen Gesellschaft zur Beforderung des Ackerbaues, der Natur- und Landes-

kunde (Brno, 1859), no. 9 (app.); F. Dvoracek, Soupisy obyvatelstva v Cechach, na Moravé a ve Slezsku v letech 1754-192] (Prague, 1926), tables 3, 4, 77; J. Radimsky, ‘Vyvoj obyvatelstva ve Slezsku 1754-1930’, Slezsky sbornik, 45 (Opava, 1947), 1-4.

number of tolerated Jews in the 1769 survey. Those from outside the circle of tolerated families were mainly the Jewish 7abaktrafikanten (in 1776 seventy-seven people, who included wives and children). ‘The estimated number of Jews in 1754 was 400; in the 1770s it increased to over 600.7° Nevertheless, the system of the Jewish incolate achieved its principal goals. It

enabled the authorities to limit the increase in the number of Jews in Cieszyn Silesia, and it secured the collection of large sums from the tolerated Jews as direct and indirect taxes and other fees. It forced the Jews to relinquish the real estate they had owned,”’ and it had a very deep impact on all spheres of life within the local Jewish community. Above all, it affected the means of livelihood open to Jews.

Most of the tolerated Jews (two-thirds, on average) supported themselves from leased alcohol arendas, and the majority leased not very profitable rural arendas. Another principal source of livelihood was trade. One in four tolerated Jews supported himself by trade, but only a few of them on a large scale. Most other Jews earned their living from crafts such as glazing, bookbinding, coppersmithing, and musical performance; some were gravediggers, ritual slaughterers, and teachers. 28 Not only did the legislation restrict the number of trades available to Jews; it also imposed special taxes applicable only to them—most importantly the toleration tax. The toleration tax was collected annually by Jewish collectors; its rates were set by the Jewish Department according to the wealth of each family, and they also had to pay all the taxes collected from the general population. These tax payments were 26 For detailed statistics, see Spyra, ‘Juden im Herzogtum Teschen’, 78; J. Spyra (ed.), ‘Glowne kierunki rozwoju demograficznego ludnosci zydowskiej na Slasku Cieszynskim (do 1939 r.)’, Prace Eistoryczno-Archiwalne, 5 (Rzeszow, 1997), 191-3. 27 In 1773 only the house in Cieszyn owned by the Singers through imperial privilege remained in

Jewish hands (ZAO, KU, label 11/1, box 458). 28 Spyra, ‘Juden im Herzogtum Teschen’, 79-83.

Jewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia 39 one of the reasons why the community of tolerated Jews in Cieszyn Silesia was not rich. In 1752 the median value of property owned by one family was 206 fl.; the wealth of only nine individuals was valued at more than 500 fl. Later this community became deeply stratified: in 1769 half of tolerated families had no property, while the median for the rest was 350 f.*° Jewish communal institutions were formed in response to the legislation adopt-

ed to deal with the situation of the Jews in Cieszyn Silesia. During the reign of Maria Theresa Jewish settlement was scattered over the whole area. Only in Cieszyn and Bielsko were there groups of more than thirty Jews; in other towns (Skoczéw (Skotschau), Bohumin, Frystat, and Frydek) there were groups of a dozen or so, and in the villages a single family or two. The largest Jewish centre was Cieszyn, with its sixteen tolerated families (eighty-two people) registered in 1780, and Singer’s prayer house became too small to accommodate more than the members of his family. Some kind of communal religious activity may have taken place

there, but we have no information about it. In Bielsko there were seven tolerated families (forty people) in 1780, and a few non-tolerated Jews lived on the outskirts. One Bielsko Jew was an ordained rabbi, but he soon left for Lipnik in Moravia. Thus in the time of Maria Theresa local Jewish structures did not develop, and the religious life of the Jews in Cieszyn Silesia was limited to gatherings of a few families for prayers in private houses during most of the important Jewish holidays.°° However, the legislation that subjected them to common limitations and, above all, forced them to pay taxes as a collective entity forced the Jews of Cieszyn Silesia to see themselves as a collective body with common interests.?! This structure was confirmed by the Edict of Tolerance, although the institutions of a permanent Jewish elder and the Jewish Department were created even earlier by the Austrian authorities. The Jews were represented before the authorities by the Jewish elder, whose more common appellation, ‘tax-collector’, underlines the government’s view of the Jews as above all a source of money. Throughout the reign of Maria Theresa the function of tax-collector was performed by members of privileged families from Cieszyn related to the Singers. The collector had two assistants, the Geschworene (‘sworn clerks’) or Subkollektoren (‘collectors’), one of whom permanently represented the interests of the Bielsko Jews.** The range of their duties was gradually

29 Ibid. 83—7.

°° Report of the Royal Office of 1781 (ZAO, KU, label 11/1, box 458); J. Spyra (ed.), ‘Materiaty do dziejow Zydow w Bielsku i panstwie bielskim (do 1780 r.)’, Brelsko-Bialskie Studia Muzealne, 1 (Bielsko-Biala, 1993), 78-95; J. Spyra, “Zarys dziejow ludnosci zydowskiej w Cieszynie 1 okolicy’, in - Spyra (ed.), Zydowskie zabytki Cieszyna1 Czeskiego Cieszyna (Cieszyn, 1999), 12-14. °" It is not by chance that the term gmina zydowska (‘Jewish community’) appeared for the first time in 1748 in the context of the election of Jewish collectors (ZAO, KU, label 11/5, box 462, fo. 183).

32 After Jakub Hirschl’s death in 1752 his half-brother Josef Goldschmied became the collector; then, from about 1760, Jakub Oppenheim, son-in-law of Lea Singer (Jakub Hirschl’s sister), was the collector, and from 1766 his brother-in-law Hirschl Moses Singer, who died in 1773. After his death Oppenheim’s son-in-law Zachariasz Gerson Lazarus became the Jewish elder. He held this office until 1780 (Spyra, ‘Juden im Herzogtum Teschen’, 89-90).

40 Janusz Spyra broadened to include attaching their opinions to the requests for tolerated places or marriage permits and representing the Jews in their affairs. For example, in 1780 the representatives of the Cieszyn Jews requested that the empress grant vacant

tolerated places to their second sons, something which, if granted, would have broken the principle of the Edict of Tolerance.*°

The authorities increasingly referred to this infrastructure or corporation of tolerated families in Cieszyn Silesia as Juden-Gemeinde (‘Jewish kehilah’), and the term was taken up by the Jews themselves, even though they were aware that their corporations, created on the initiative of the authorities, differed from traditional Jewish kehilot. None the less, these corporations contributed significantly to the sense of unity among the Jews living in Cieszyn Silesia. On the other hand, although authorities often referred to a Juden-Gemeinde, the official stance was that there

7 were no separate Jewish kefi/ot in Austrian Silesia (unlike Moravia or Galicia), only a disparate body of Cieszyn Jewry (Teschner Judenschaft).*4 The reforms of Joseph II also affected people of Jewish origin. Joseph intended

to transform them into citizens of the state by enlightening and educating young Jews and broadening the range of occupations available to older ones. ‘The new

Edict of Tolerance affecting the Jews in Austrian Silesia issued on 15 December 1781 officially permitted them to practise their religion, albeit without their own synagogues and rabbis. It maintained the system of the incolate, keeping the limit on the number of families tolerated in Cieszyn Silesia at eighty-eight. The edict officially empowered the local authorities to fill vacant tolerated places in order to secure full payment of taxes.*° Henceforth, decisions in this matter, like most of the | decisions concerning the Jews, fell within the jurisdiction of the Gubernium in Brno. In 1783 Austrian Silesia was unified with Moravia into a Moravian—Silesian Gubernium consisting of eight districts (Kreise). The Cieszyn district, governed by the district office, encompassed the whole of historical Cieszyn Silesia, together with the estate principalities on its territory. The situation of the Jews of Cieszyn Silesia and the sources of their livelihood

were not significantly altered by the reforms of Joseph I. Jews were not successful 83 ZAO, KU, label 11/6a, box 469. 34 Von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung, 5, 8. For example, in 1752 the representatives of the

Jews, acting as ‘Jiidische Gemeinde in Fiirstentum Teschen’, argued that because of the lack of an ‘ordentliche Juden-Gemeinde’, or a community of Jews gathered in one place, the employment of Christian servants was a necessity (Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv in , Wien (AVAW), Alter Kultus (Israeliten), box 5). Likewise in 1791 (Moravsky Zemsky Archiv v Brné (MZAB), Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, box 639). 35 The edict appeared as a printed circular (ZAO, Patenty a cirkulafe 1700-1850, label 11), and was published in J. Bernardt, Handbuch der provinziellen Gesetzkunde von Mahren und Schlesten (Olmutz, 1848), 461-2. On Joseph II’s Jewish policy, see L. Singer, ‘Zur Geschichte der Toleranzpatente in den Sudetenlandern’, Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft fiir Geschichte der Jfuden in der Tschechoslovakischen Repubhik,

5 (Prague, 1933), 235-311; J. Karniel, ‘Zur Auswirkung der Toleranzpatente fiir die Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie im josephinischen Jahrzehnt’, in P. F. Barton (ed.), [m Zeichen der Toleranz (Vienna, 1981), 203-4.

Fewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia AI at establishing factories, though the emperor permitted Jewish manufacturers to settle outside the incolate system. On the other hand, the local Jews quickly learned German because, according to the emperor’s injunction of 15 April 1786, being educated in German was a condition for being granted permission to marry. In the following month marriage permissions were delegated to district offices, but with

the standard clause that the number of tolerated Jews could not be exceeded. In 1787 all Jews had to assume German first and last names.”° In the first half of the - nineteenth century knowledge of German among the Jews in Cieszyn Silesia was

widespread; in addition, the younger generations adopted German dress and customs. This caused a split in the local Jewish population because Jews living in villages for a long time resisted secularization and the adoption of Western styles of dress and behaviour.*’ In this respect, the Jews of Cieszyn Silesia fell between those of Galicia, who strongly maintained traditional attitudes, and the Jews of the Czech lands, the majority of whom adjusted to the new currents and ideas. In applying the law of Jewish incolate, the authorities’ attitude towards the Jews did not change initially—though after 1783 the records on granting tolerated places are not detailed. Although the Jews openly treated their places as a personal privilege, if the eldest son made a written declaration of his intention to leave Silesia, tolerated places were transferred to younger sons or even to strangers for a sum of money.°®° These transfers were often, but not always, confirmed by the authorities. Sometimes several Jews competed for one tolerated place, and it would be granted to the richest: the poor were gradually pushed out of the circle of tolerated families. This was supported by Jewish collectors in order to avoid potential problems with collecting taxes.°? The collectors were now also responsible for the registration of births (which was introduced for the Jewish population by the patent of 20 February 1784) and for the cemetery. By the emperor’s approval, in 1785 the community of eighty-eight tolerated Jewish families of the Duchy of Cieszyn bought the cemetery in Cieszyn from the now impoverished Singer family. Since they now owned a cemetery and were not concerned simply with the collection of taxes, the tolerated Jews must be regarded as a community.*° 36 MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, box 716; Mistodrzitelstvi, Patenty 1628-1880, label 29, box 205, p. 174; Bernardt, Handbuch der provinziellen Gesetzkunde von Mahren und Schlesten,

at A. Kaufmann, ‘Gedenkbuch der Stadt Teschen’, vi: ‘Geographisch-statistische Beschreibung des Herzogthums Teschen’, ZAO, 1177. 38 Tn 1781 the authorities finally acknowledged (in the case of Izaak Mojzesz, who lived in Komorowice in Galicia) that tolerated Jews could reside outside the country as long as they paid taxes (ZAO, KU, label 11/6a, box 469). 39 Tbid., boxes 469-70; AVAW, Alter Kultus, box 7. The collectors then were Jozef Ziffer of Konska (1780, 1782), and Efraim Ziffer of Bobrek (1784, 1785), followed by Jakub Lobenstein of Frydek (1788, 1795); they were all from outside Cieszyn.

40 MZAB, MistodrZitelstvi, Patenty 1628-1880, label 29/1, fos. 158-62; Z. Kukanova and L. MatuSikova, ‘Matriky zidovskych nabozenskych obci v Cechach a na Moraveé z let 1784 az 1949’, Paginea Historiae (Prague, 1992), 104-6; Spyra, ‘Cieszyn’, 276.

42 | Janusz Spyra The regulations permitting Jews to engage in useful economic activity anywhere and abolishing the restrictions on travel within the empire enabled them to stay in Cieszyn Silesia without a legal base. In mid-1792 there were already 848 Jews in the Duchy, which is 230 (37.2 per cent) more than the 618 Jews of 1773. Of the mid1792 number, 252 (29.7 per cent) were non-tolerated Jews from fifty families. Half of them came from the local tolerated families and half were foreigners (primarily from Moravia). Instead of the eighty-eight permitted by law, 156 families lived in the Duchy of Cieszyn. The majority of non-tolerated Jews had some legal title to be active in the area, most often as Tabaktrafikanten.* Initially the authorities wanted

to expel them, but the tobacco administration in Brno and the feudal landlords intervened on their behalf. The district office in Cieszyn indicated that non-tolerated Jews could be divided into two groups: foreigners and younger offspring of local

tolerated Jews. It proposed to grant the latter the right of residence with certain restrictions. At the same time the representatives of tolerated Jews sent the emperor requests to grant tolerated places only to the offspring of local tolerated families. On t March 1791 a court decree permitted Jews from local tolerated families to reside in Austrian Silesia on condition that they were unmarried and had a steady income. They were to apply to the authorities for tolerated places upon their vacancy, but

immediately had to pay taxes to the emperor’s treasury. Others, including nontolerated Jews, were ordered to leave the land within six months; in future no

foreign Jews were to be admitted.*” | The decree of 1 March 1794 meant the end of one of the main principles of the Jewish incolate as established by the edict of 1752 because it legally sanctioned the residence not only of tolerated Jews, but also of their offspring.*? They were called the uberzahlige (‘supernumerary’) Jews. By 1798 foreign Jews were allowed to conduct ‘temporary economic activity’ and even to apply for tolerated status. These were very rich people, and were called ‘temporary tolerated’ Jews, or simply ‘tolerated Jews’. Thus the terminology used by the authorities changed: the original eighty-eight tolerated Jewish families were now called the Familianten (‘family Jews’), and the whole group of Jews living in Silesia by the authority’s permit, systemierte Fuden (‘system Jews’).** The requirement to pay the taxes limited the size of the new categories, and in 1829 there were seven tiberzahlige Jews and eleven tolerated Jews. Over the following years the basic principles of the Jewish incolate remained 41 Of fifty non-tolerated families only half (twenty-five) resided there without an official permit. In Cieszyn Silesia eighteen Jewish families were registered with their fathers’ families with approval of the authorities (MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786—1880, box 639). *2 Ibid. Von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung, 69~-70.

43 This decree had the status of Normale (‘general legislation’), like edicts. It is sometimes called Toleranzgesetz (AVAW, Hofkanzlei, box 1552) or Normalienentschliessung.

44 Also Jewish soldiers after completing their service could become ‘supernumerary’ Jews (MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786—1880, boxes 617, 631; AVAW, Hofkanzlei, box 1551; von Scari (ed.), S'ystematische Darstellung, 3-5).

Jewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia 43 unchanged. From 1809 an eldest son’s filling the place of a deceased tolerated Jew did not require a decision of the Gubernium; it was granted by the district office. With almost automatic inheritance of family places by eldest sons conflicts only

arose over appointments to places that had been completely vacated. Transfers ended, having become unnecessary for the Jews from local families.*° After the unification of the province with Moravia the authorities aimed to unify the regulations regarding the Jews in both areas. This was never done, however, because of basic differences between Moravian Jews, who lived in closed kehi/ot, and Silesian Jews, who were scattered throughout the whole area. Under the impact of unification with Moravia the authorities started to compile formal criteria for receiving family status, such as being 18 years of age (24 years of age from 1833), having property valued at 300 fl. or more, passing an exam showing familiarity with the handbook Bnei tsiyon, and possession of certificates of German education and of good moral conduct.*© With women also obliged to attend finishing schools, the mid-nineteenth-century community of tolerated Jews belonged to the best-educated social class in Cieszyn Silesia.

The wars against revolutionary France and then against Napoleon increased the tax burden on the Jewish population of Cieszyn Silesia. New taxes were levied which in 1818 were merged into one Jewish tax. Recalculated in ‘convention currency’ (Convenz-Muiinze) at 1,200 fl., the tax was more than twice the pre-war level.4” The period of Emperor Franz, 1792-1835, was characterized by a turning away from the spirit of reform. The authorities revoked the Jewish right established during the reign of Joseph II to purchase estates in order to establish production shops, and they prohibited the long-term leasing of houses or the pawning of houses for debts. A court decree of g June 1791 barred Jews from leasing distilleries and commercial buildings, and from sub-leasing bars. After only two years this prohibition was revoked for Cieszyn Silesia, where the majority of Jews could not find alternative occupations. The local Jews also benefited from the decision of the Cieszyn district office of 28 November 1794 that only tolerated Silesian Jews could lease commercial buildings in Silesia, which was unsuccessfully opposed by Moravian Jews.*® As before, the Jews tried to bypass the limitations, especially in regard to purchasing estates (since owning or renting a house made conducting trade, as well as holding communal prayer and observing holidays, easier) and marriages. Jews often travelled to Hungary, which had different regulations, to hold their weddings, and then returned home. However, the court decree of 28 March 1794 45 Von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung, 31-2; MZAB, Mistodrzitelstvi, Patenty 1628-1880, label 29, box 205, p. 220; MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, box 631; AVAW, Hofkanzlei,

boxes 1543, 1549-52. #6 Von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung, 8-34. 47 Tbid. 175, 213-16. The supernumerary and temporarily tolerated Jews had additionally to pay toleration or family taxes (MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786—1880, box 716).

48 AVAW, Hofkanzlei, boxes 1551, 1574; von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung, 114, 118; MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, box 639; Mistodrzitelstvi, Patenty, label 29, box 205, p. 212.

44 Janusz Spyra ordered those who travelled for marriage to be expelled and not to be granted tolerated status.*?

With the increase in the number of Jews at the end of the eighteenth century, local Jewish communities began to develop in Cieszyn Silesia. The largest of them was in Cieszyn, where there were over 100 Jews in 1790. From the time of Joseph II they had a prayer house open to everyone. Juda Loeb! Gliicklich led the services. He had been active in the town since 1788, officially as a religious teacher or guide, but sometimes signing documents as a rabbi. In the town of Bielsko conditions for Jewish settlement were gradually improving: at the end of the eighteenth century it became a large centre of textile trade and production, participating in extensive exchange between the lands of the empire and Galicia and countries further east. At the end of the eighteenth century over too Jews lived there, not including Jewish merchants visiting the town on business. From 1800 the Jews of Bielsko had their — own prayer house and they employed a ritual slaughterer.°° Several dozen strong Jewish communities existed near Skoczow and in Frydek. Although state authorities at all levels referred to the Jews in terms of a JudenGemeinde, officially all Jews who were entitled to live there were treated as the ‘Cieszyn Jewry’. They were represented by Jewish collectors who had increasing responsibilities. The decree of 24 October 1795 described their duties precisely— to collect taxes and other fees from Jews, keep the books, implement the directives of the district office, and report on deaths and vacancies in family places—in addition to which they kept Jewish records and issued opinions on Jews applying for tolerated places. ‘They were elected at the meetings of all Familianten supervised by

, the district office. Every three years the collector had to secure the extension of his term, which usually took place without difficulty. The collector was now assisted by three Geschworene.°! The amounts of the Jewish contribution and other dues were

determined for each family every three years, and were confirmed by the district office. The collectors were paid 5 Kr. per gulden of taxation. This method of electing collectors and collecting taxes lasted until 1848. ‘The system secured the collec-

tion of all taxes due because the whole Jewish community was held responsible

| for it.°?

49 MZAB, Mistodrzitelstvi, Patenty, label 29, box 205, p. 222; MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, boxes 564, 631, 639; AVAW, Hofkanzlei, boxes 1549, 1550, 1574. °° Spyra (ed.), Zydowskie zabytki Cieszyna, 31; id., ‘Powstanie i rozw6j zydowskiej gminy wyzna-

niowej w Bielsku-Bialej i okolicy’, in J. Polak and J. Spyra (eds.), Zydzi w Bielsku, Biatej 1 okolicy (Bielsko-Biala, 1996), 24-5; J. Spyra (ed.), In the Shadow of the Skoczow Synagogue (Bielsko-Biata, 1998), 36-8. In 1795 the Cieszyn district office claimed that there were two Jewish communities in its area (MZAB, Moravske Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, box 564). °1 Later there were four Geschworene (MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, box 564; Mistodrzitelstvi, Patenty, box 205, pp. 234, 536; von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung, 66, 217-18). B MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, box 608. In the first half of the 19th cent. the collectors were Marcus Ziffer of Cieszyn (1798, 1807), Mojzesz Ehrmann of Rakowiec (1814, 1823), Joachim Abraham Brull of Bielsko (1823-37), and then Markus Glesinger of Gorny Zukow.

Fewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesia 45 In 1795 the authorities became interested in the possibility of Silesian Jews employing permanent rabbis and religious teachers; this was because of the requirement that births, marriages, and deaths should be registered. The Cieszyn district office suggested hiring a rabbi from the nearest Jewish kefilah in Moravia or Prussian Silesia because it did not believe the Cieszyn Jews could afford a salary

for their own rabbi, but the idea was abandoned. However, the court decree of 24 October 1795 required the creation of Jewish kehilah funds (Gemeindefonde) towards which the Jews had to pay an additional tax of 10 Kr. per tax gulden. This sum was lowered to 5 Kr. when the Jews pleaded poverty. The kehilah fund was intended to serve the needs of the whole community, but it was only in 1847 that the authorities permitted the use of the money which had been collected.*®

The creation of kehilah funds was another step towards recognition by the corporations of tolerated Jews as Jewish kehilot. The problem of rabbis returned after 1811 with the introduction of the General Citizen’s Code, the purpose of which was to regulate the everyday life of all subjects in the monarchy. ‘The code required Jews to obtain a permit for marriage from the district office, and the ceremony had to be performed before a rabbi or authorized teacher (religious guide). Marriages not performed in this way were declared legally invalid. In Cieszyn Silesia there were not enough rabbis or even clearly structured Jewish kehilot, and

the authorities resolved the matter by delegating the right to perform Jewish marriages to Juda Loebl Glucklich, active in Cieszyn as a teacher of religion. Only Jews belonging to the local ‘system’ families could obtain a permit to marry, which created the problem of secret Jewish marriages performed without permission and without the presence of an authorized official. The authorities tried to prosecute

those involved, especially after the province’s decree of 12 January 1827; they declared such marriages invalid and their children born out of wedlock, and expelled the couples. Nevertheless, such marriages were relatively frequent among the Jews living in Cieszyn temporarily or without a formal permit.°*

A radical improvement in conditions for Jews in Austrian Silesia came in the 1820s with the stabilization of the Austrian monarchy. The decrees of the central authorities gradually increased the range of occupations accessible to Jews, while the local authorities paid less and less attention to existing prohibitions. ‘There were important decrees in Austrian Silesia on 17 January 1822 and 24 April 1822 which permitted Jewish Familianten to lease road and bridge tolls from the state. They could be leased by both Moravian Jews in Silesia and Silesian Jews in Moravia. From 1823 landlords’ distilleries in Moravia could also be leased to Jews from °3 Tbid., box 564; von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung, 66, 76-7, 218-19. When in 1830 the Cieszyn collectors borrowed 500 fl. from the communal fund to erect a cemetery wall, they were admonished harshly, and had to return the money with interest (ZAO, Zemska Vlada Slezska v Opavé 1850-1928 (Z VSI), box 2444).

°4 MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, boxes 617, 632; ZAO, ZVSI, box 2026; von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung, 32. Cf. L. Geller, Theoretisch-praktischer Kommentar zum Allgemeinen Burgerlichen Gesetzbuch nebst den einschlagigen Nebengesetzen (Vienna, 1924), 70-6.

46 Janusz Spyra Austrian Silesia and vice versa. ‘The leases came with the right of residence in Silesia, which caused a large influx of Moravian Jews to Silesia.°° In 1831, 1,038 Jews lived in Cieszyn Silesia (0.55 per cent of the total population); in 1846 there were I,213 (0.57 per cent). A few hundred also resided there illegally. A group of Cieszyn burghers complained about illegal residents in 1844 and informed the authorities that, instead of the permitted eighty-eight families, there were 300 in Cieszyn Silesia. In the burghers’ opinion this increase had occurred over the previous ten years.°° That the authorities did not react clearly indicates that the system of incolate was already dead, even to them. Nevertheless, local Jews still had to apply for a family place, which put them in a better legal position, and for a marriage permit. Most of the local population was not opposed to co-operation with the Jews. Richer Jews were even accepted into restricted burghers’ associations, such as the Schiitzverband (Riflemen’s Association) in Cieszyn. They occupied a very important position in the area’s economy, especially in Bielsko, where they established several textile factories.°’ The increase in the Jewish population and the relaxation of anti-Jewish laws — made it easier for Jewish religious structures to function. Local prayer groups © _ (minyanim) became active in the area, and more permanent associations were created in Frydek (established in 1823), Skoczow (first mentioned about 1825), and Polish Ostrawa (established about 1830). The most active were the Jews of Bielsko, where

| in about 1817 they were richer and more numerous than in Cieszyn. In 1828 the Bielsko Jews got the emperor’s permission to build a synagogue, but it was not completed until 1838 or 1839. They considered themselves an independent Jewish

kehilah, and hired their own rabbi, although he was not confirmed by the state authorities. In 1831 the authorities did not agree to certify Ludwig Paneth of Bielsko, a son of the local cantor, as a ‘public’ teacher of religion, as the religious teacher in Cieszyn had been.°*® The first synagogue in Cieszyn Silesia to be erected as a separate building for the purpose of religious observance was built in 1838 by the Jews of Cieszyn, also by a special emperor’s permit. The Jewish tax-collector

Markus Glesinger supervised its construction. Funds came from the Jews of the whole duchy (except Bielsko), which technically made the synagogue the religious centre for all Jews in Cieszyn Silesia. In reality, it was accessible primarily to the Jews of Cieszyn and its environs. The synagogue had a permanent cantor. Cieszyn had a double function because it was regarded by the authorities as the site of the official ‘kehilal’ of local Familianten. In addition, it was the residence of 55 AVAW, Hofkanzlei, box 1534; MZAB, Moravské Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, box 564; Mistodrzitelstvi, Patenty, label 29, box 205, pp. 470, 486; von Scari (ed.), Systematische Darstellung, 70-1, 116-20. °° Spyra, “Gtowne kierunki rozwoju demograficznego’, 195-7. °7 P. Kenig, ‘Wktad Zydow w rozw6j przemystu welnianego Bielska i Bialej do konca XIX w.’, in Polak and Spyra (eds.), Zydz1 w Bielsku, Biatej 1 okolicy, 48-54. °8 Spyra, ‘Powstanie i rozw06j zydowskiej gminy wyznaniowej w Bielsku’, 25-7; MZAB, Moravské

Mistodrzitelstvi 1786-1880, box 575.

Fewish Rights of Residence in Cieszyn Silesta A7 the only Jewish religious teacher, who was entitled to officiate at marriages recognized by the state. Thus he performed the function of a substitute rabbi, and acted unofficially as rabbi. Until his death in 1829 Gliicklich was the teacher, then Izaak Kohn.°? Theoretically, all local Jews, including those from the Bielsko community, which considered itself a separate kehilah, participated in the forum of the ‘kehilah’ of the tolerated Jews in the Duchy of Cieszyn; in practice, however, except in matters imposed by the state authorities (taxes, certificates), the kehilah was limited to the common usage and maintenance of the cemetery in Cieszyn. Jewish religious life developed very differently from what was anticipated in the model imposed on the Jews through hostile legislation. The issues of the officially recognized Cieszyn ‘kehilal’ intertwined with the problems of the emerging grassroots Jewish structures. Not until 1818 did the Moravian—Silesian Gubernium begin to work on regulating Jewish kehi/ot in Moravia and Silesia, acknowledging the need to have authorized religious officials, preferably rabbis. ‘The main obstacle was the difficulty of employing them in scattered communities such as Cieszyn Silesia; local rabbis worked much more effectively in compact kehilot, as in Moravia and Galicia. The way to solve this dilemma was to create district rabbinates, and this was supported by the Cieszyn and Bielsko Jews. The Moravian—Silesian Gubernium ©

decree of g December 1847 created the post of district rabbi (Kreisrabbiner) to replace the officially appointed religious teacher in Cieszyn. His area encompassed the whole of Cieszyn district. In 1848 Abraham Schmied] was appointed to this position.© The position of district rabbi soon disappeared a» a result of the changes brought about by the Spring of Nations, primarily the abolition of districts. The system of the Jewish incolate was further undermined when the constitution of 25 April 1848 granted all citizens of the state equal civil and political rights. It was harder to do away with all the executive legislation of the previous period. Separate Jewish taxes were abolished by the parliament on 5 October 1848, and this was confirmed by the emperor’s patent of 20 October 1848. In this way, the office of Jewish collector became superfluous. ‘The requirements of a family place and marriage permits were abolished by the Gubernium in Brno by its decrees of 30 April 1849 and 18 July 1849. At the end of 1851, however, Emperor Franz Joseph I abrogated the constitution of 25 April 1848, and the issue of civil rights for Jews was suspended ‘until definite

— legislation’.®' In 1853 the requirement to obtain permission for marriage was 59 Spyra, Zydowskie zabytki Cieszyna, 15, 31. Until 1848, because of the prohibition, neither synagogue had a steeple, and they were officially called Bethduser (‘prayer houses’). There were no rabbis in Austrian Silesia because the Edict of Tolerance of 1781 did not allow it (Gubernium’s Report of 1837 for the Emperor, AVAW, Alter Kultus, box 7).

60 AVAW, Alter Kultus, box 3; MZAB, Moravské MistodrZitelstvi 1786-1880, box 608; ZAO, ZVSI, boxes 2020, 2026; Biermann, Geschichte des Herzogthum Teschen, 274. 61 Reichsgesetzblatt fiir die im Reichsrate vertretenen Konigreiche und Lander, no. 3 (Vienna, 1852); ZAO, ZVSI, box 2017. A. Eisenbach (ed.), Emancypacja Zydéw na ziemiach polskich 1785-1870 na tle europejskim (Warsaw, 1988), 371-83, 411-12.

48 Janusz Spyra reintroduced in spite of objections from the Silesian authorities. ‘The emperor’s decree of 2 October 1853 restored the pre-1848 limitations on the Jewish purchase

of estates. As in the time of Maria Theresa, the local Jews—members of old Familanten—had to approach the authorities not only with requests to purchase land, but also for permits to marry. They had to prove that they fulfilled the same requirements laid down at the end of the eighteenth century.®” These restrictions were not lifted until after 1859, when the equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of faith, was confirmed in the lands of the Austro-Hungarian empire, including Cieszyn Silesia, by the constitution of 1867. Translated from Polish by Gwido Zlatkes 62 Reichsgesetzblatt, no. 63 (1853); ZAO ZVSI, boxes 2014, 2016, 2017.

Duchy of Foznan P 1 under Rul ucny OF underPrussian Frussian NUile, 1815-1848 SOPHIA KEMLEIN INTRODUCTION THE beginning of Prussian rule in the Grand Duchy of Poznan and West Prussia sparked developments that would set the Jews of the region farther and farther apart from their co-religionists in other parts of partitioned Poland over the course of the nineteenth century. The integration of the annexed areas into the Prussian administrative and legal system contributed to this development, as did the fact that the citizens’ rights granted to Jews here came earlier and were more extensive than the rights granted to the Jews of Galicia or the kingdom of Poland.‘ Also, the processes of acculturation, in which Jews developed a German Jewish identity by adopting the German language and the secular education and career patterns of the educated German middle class, touched not just a small minority but the entire Jewish population.” Lastly, the mass emigration of Jews began earlier here than it did in the eastern parts of the former Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. This exodus led only a very small number of Jews to emigrate to the east; the overwhelming majority went west, either to the metropolitan areas of Prussia or to America.° In this chapter I will examine the effects of Prussian legal and administrative practices on the Jewish communities, and how these communities responded to the 1 See A. Eisenbach, Emancypacja Zydéw na ziemiach polskich 1785-1870 na tle europejskim (Warsaw, 1988).

2S. Lowenstein, ‘The Shifting Boundary between Eastern and Western Jewry’, Jewish Social Studies,

NS 4 (1997), 60-78; S. Jersch-Wenzel, ‘Zur Geschichte der jiidischen Bevolkerung in der Provinz Posen im 1g. Jahrhundert’, in G. Rhode (ed.), Juden in Ostmitteleuropa. Von der Emanzipation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Marburg, 1989); S. Kemlein, Die Posener fuden 1815-1848. Entwicklungsprozesse einer

polnischen Fudenheit unter preussicher Herrschaft, Hamburger Veroffentlichungen zur Geschichte Mittel- und Osteuropas, 3 (Hamburg, 1997), 237 ff.; ead., ‘Zur Geschichte der Juden in Westpreussen

und Danzig (bis 1943)’, in Akademie fiir Lehrerfortbildung in Dillingen (ed.), Danzig/Gdansk. Deutsch-polnische Literatur, Geschichte, Politik (Dillingen, 1996). 3 See C. Ostereich, ‘Des rauhen Winters ungeachtet .. .’. Die Auswanderung der Posener Fuden nach

Amerika im 19. Jahrhundert, Hamburger Veroffentlichungen zur Geschichte Mittel- und Osteuropas, 4 (Hamburg, 1997).

50 Sophia Kemlein changing situation. The question of the autonomy of the communities seems especially instructive, since in pre-emancipation times autonomy had generally been considered a guarantor of the continuance of Jewish life in the Diaspora. In the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth autonomy had been developed through countrywide institutions with claims for political representation. We must also ask to what extent the specific Polish Jewish tradition of self-governance continued under Prussian rule.* After briefly outlining the situation before Prussian rule, I will describe the legal status of the Jewish communities with particular attention to the regulations for South Prussia and New East Prussia, since they constitute stages leading to the formulation of legal norms after 1815.° I will then explore the practical implementation of these laws and the tense relationship between state supervision and the concept of a legal unit on the one hand and traditional Jewish autonomy on the other. Finally, I will briefly describe the ways in which the Jewish communities in the Grand Duchy dealt with the realities of Prussian rule, with its pressures for integration and assimilation.

THE EARLY YEARS: RICH IN TRADITION, POOR IN

, RESOURCES

The Jewish communities of Wielkopolska, established in the thirteenth century, were among the first in Poland and the first to receive extensive privileges. For centuries the communities existed here under the protection of Polish kings and nobles. They were integrated into the Polish legal system, which consisted mainly of a system of self-administration. The communities operated independently of the city magistrates; they administered themselves and had their own jurisdiction. ‘The community administration was in charge of the buildings connected with Jewish cultural and religious practices—the synagogues, mikvaot, and cemeteries—as well as poor relief and the communal system of taxation. On the regional level the communities of Wielkopolska established their own Judenlandtag (Jewish Regional Council), and as one of four regions in the Polish Crown lands they belonged to the Jewish Va’ad Arba Aratsot (Council of Four Lands). With their famous scholars and yeshivas, these communities also contributed greatly to the blossoming of talmudic scholarship in Poland—Lithuania in 4 Francois Guesnet explored this question in his outstanding study of the kingdom of Poland, to which I owe many suggestions for this chapter. See F. Guesnet, Polnische Fuden im 19. Jahrhundert. Lebensbedingungen, Rechtsnormen und Organisation im Wandel, Lebenswelten osteuropaischer Juden, 3 (Cologne, 1998). > Prussia formed these two provinces from the annexed areas after the second and third partitions of Poland: South Prussia included Wielkopolska as well as western Mazovia, and existed as a Prussian administrative entity between 1793 and 1806; New East Prussia, established in 1795, extended from the eastern border of South Prussia to the Niemen and the Bug. Both provinces were conquered by Napoleon in 1806 and integrated into the Duchy of Warsaw.

Fewish Community in Poznan, 1815-1848 51 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The messianic movements that spread from the south-east in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not evoke tremendous response in Wielkopolska. Hasidism also failed to gain much of a foothold in this region, since the breeding-ground for this type of mystical movement, with its new class of leaders, did not exist here to the extent that it did in the east.® This circumstance had far-reaching consequences in the partition period. Missing was that alternative to rabbinic traditionalism which was in some ways hostile to

education, and which increasingly undermined the authority of the rabbis and diminished solidarity within the community of a city to the point of dissolution— but which at the same time tended to dissociate even more from the non-Jewish environment than the rabbinic school. At the end of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth traditional Talmud study was still widespread in Poznania, the rabbis still represented the highest authority in their communities, and communal unity was still largely intact. However, there were clear symptoms of crisis that cannot be overlooked. More than 95 per cent of the Jewish inhabitants of this region were crowded into the medium-sized and small towns, where as tradesmen and artisans—that is, in their main occupations—they were exposed to competition from non-Jews. Together with an extraordinarily high rate of population growth, their concentration in a few professions led rapidly to the impoverishment of the Jewish population and, consequently, to the indebtedness of the Jewish communities, which often lent money to Catholic churches and abbeys without having sufficient collateral.’ The Poznan community was so badly in debt at the beginning of the eighteenth century that it

had to give up its position of leadership in Wielkopolska to the community of Leszno.° In this case, though, the origin of the debt lay also to a large extent in the anti-Jewish attitude of the magistracy, which had repeatedly demanded high additional sums for ‘tolerating’ the community within the city walls. Rich in tradition, poor in financial resources: this is how the Prussian administration found the Jewish communities at the time of the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Poznan in 1815.

In this agricultural province, with its many towns and markets, almost every village with a town charter had a Jewish community. Because of their concentration 6 An important explanation for the lack of response to hasidism lies in the fact that the region was not affected by the Cossack rebellions. Another reason can be found in the social and economic structure of the Poznan region, which left fewer fields of occupation open to Jews than was the case in the eastern parts of the country. Thus the social differentiation among the Jews in Wielkopolska was less extensive. J. Topolski, ‘Uwagi 0 strukturze gospodarczo-spolecznej Wielkopolski w XVIII wieku, czyli dlaczego na jej terenie nie bylo zydowskich karczmarzy’, in J. Topolski and K. Modelski (eds.), Zydzi w Wielkopolsce na przestrzent dziejow (Poznan, 1995).

7 K. Modelski, ‘Z dziejéw gminy Zydowskiej w Wolsztynie (finanse gminy w XVIII wieku)’, in Topolski and Modelski (eds.), Zydzi wm Wielkopolsce, 104-5.

8 J. Jacobson, ‘Zur Geschichte der Juden in Posen’, in G. Rhode (ed.), Geschichte der Stadt Posen (Neuendettelsau, 1953), 245-6.

52 Sophia Kemlein Table 1. Distribution of the Jewish population of the Grand Duchy of Poznan, 1842—1843, by size of community

Size of Number of Totalnumber Percentage of total

community communities | ofmembers Jewish population

> 2,000 5 18,949 25 1,001—2,000 15 21,807 28

501—1,00041 2612,669 19,488 16 25 201—500 =< 200 36 4,526 6 TOTAL 123 77,439 100

Sources: ‘Die Regierung Posen, Abt. des Innern, an den Minister der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinalangelegenheiten, Eichhorn. Nachweisung der jtidischen Korporationen in Beziehung auf das Kultus- und Schulwesen, v. 16 Jan. 1844’, in M. Jehle (ed.), Die Juden und die juidischen Gemeinden Preussens in amtlichen Enqueten des Vormarz, 4 pts.

(Munich, 1998), pt. 3, pp. 866-921; ‘Die Regierung Bromberg, Abt. des Innern an den Minister der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinalangelegenheiten, Eichhorn. Nachweisung der in einzelnen Kreisen und Ortschaften des Reg.-Bez. Bromberg wohnhaften Juden v. 15. Sept. 1843’, in Jehle (ed.), Die Juden und die jtidischen Gemetnden, 930-44. The figure for the number of inhabitants for the city of Poznan due to too high divergence is from J. Topolski and L. Trzeciakowski (eds.), Dzieje Poznania, 11/1: 1793—1918 (Warsaw, 1994), table 19.

in the cities, Jews constituted about 20 per cent of the town population in the middle of the nineteenth century, and in some places they constituted more than 50 per cent. Precise figures for the sizes of the communities are available for the years 1842-3 (see Table 1). According to these figures, more than half of all Jewish inhabitants of the province—53 per cent—lived in communities with more than 1,000 members. The largest community in the province of Poznan counted 7,359 souls in 1848.° No Prussian province and no region in any other German state could boast such a density of Jewish communities as the Grand Duchy of Poznan. Let us take a quick look at the environment in which these large communities were settled. The non-Jewish urban population was on average 50 per cent German and 50 per cent Polish, with the Polish population to be counted mainly among the lower classes.'° Under Prussian rule the province remained agricultural. The earliest manifestations of urbanization and industrialization—which had begun in the last years of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth—were not developed further, and the region remained the most backward of the Prussian provinces. Only two cities

in the province had more than 10,000 inhabitants in 1849: Poznan (39,000 not ’ By way of comparison: Berlin had just overtaken Poznan that year as the largest Jewish community in Prussia, with 8,348 Jewish inhabitants; almost 40,000 Jews lived in Warsaw in 1840 (B. Scheiger,

‘Juden in Berlin’, in S. Jersch-Wenzel and B. John (eds.), Von Zumwanderern zu Einheimischen. Hugenotten, Bohmen, Fuden, Polen in Berlin (Berlin, 1990), 294; Guesnet, Polnische Juden, table 2). 10 B. Grzes, J. Kozlowski, and A. Kramski, Niemcy w Poznanskiem wobec polityki germanizacyjnej 1815~1920, ed. L. Trzeciakowski (Poznan, 1976), 24.

Fewish Community in Poznan, 1515-1845 53 including members of the military) and Bydgoszcz (13,000). The development of smaller towns in particular stagnated.’ The search for better economic conditions influenced the pattern of migration in two directions. After the erection of customs barriers with Russia in 1820, Jewish merchants emigrated primarily to the kingdom of Poland in order to avoid losing their former markets in the east. Additionally, in the 1820s there began migrations of Jews from smaller or economically depressed villages into prospering cities like Poznan and Bydgoszcz, or into towns such as KoSscian and Pleszew which had not been inhabited by Jews before the beginning of Prussian rule.‘* After the inauguration of the Vorlaufige Verordnung wegen des Judenwesens (Provisional Regulation regarding Jewish Affairs) on 1 June 1833, naturalized Jews who demonstrated even the earliest indications of a bourgeois basis of existence in the eyes of the Prussian administration were allowed to settle in other Prussian provinces. Hundreds of naturalized families were now drawn, especially from the smaller cities in the western counties of the province, to the cities of Berlin and Breslau.!? But the ‘tolerated’ Jews who still formed three-quarters of the Jewish population in the middle of the 1840s, and who did not possess any civil

rights—notably the right to freedom of movement—remained locked in the eco- | nomically backward Grand Duchy with no prospects in their overpopulated trades of retail and textiles. Among this group we find the first emigrants to America, who sparked the massive exodus of Jews from this province in the 1830s and 1840s.'* A comparison of two figures suffices to illustrate the extent of this loss of population for the Jews of Poznan: in 1846 the number of Jews living in the Grand Duchy was 81,250, or 6 per cent of the entire population; in 1910 there were only 26,500 Jews, accounting for 1.3 per cent of the population.’?

THE LEGAL STATUS OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITIES UNDER PRUSSIAN RULE The partitions of Poland brought about the dissolution of the only non-absolutist State in eastern Europe. In the annexed territories the late absolutist regimes of the three partitioning powers began with the dismantling of the corporate system of self-administration in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. Jewish autonomy

suffered the same fate. In the province of South Prussia the General-JudenReglement ftir Stid- und Neuostpreussen (General Regulation for South and New 11 J. Bartys, ‘The Grand Duchy of Poznan under Prussian Rule: Changes in the Economic Position of the Jewish Population 1815-1848’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (LBIYB), 17 (1972), 191-204. 12 B. Breslauer, Die Abwanderung der Juden aus der Provinz Posen. Denkschrift im Auftrage des Verbandes der Deutschen Fuden (Berlin, 1909), table A.

13 Kemlein, Die Posener Fuden, 180 ff. ;

‘4 In her study of Jewish emigration from the province of Poznan to America, Ostereich estimated that by 1849 about 6,000 Jews had emigrated, and by the founding of the Reich a total of about 30,000. See Ostereich, ‘Des rauhen Winters ungeachtet .. .’, 69, 75. 'S Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, table 22.

54 Sophia Kemlein East Prussia regarding the Jews) of 1797 covered many of the Jewish communities of what was later called the Grand Duchy of Poznan.!® This decree called for a combination of state protection with meticulous control, re-education of the Jews to turn them into ‘useful’ citizens in the Enlightenment sense of the word, and state involvement in internal communal and private affairs.‘ The changes required by the decree were far-reaching. The application of all of its regulations would have meant the complete abolition of the communities’ autonomy. Not only would jurisdiction have been taken from them, but the independent administration of commu-

nity affairs and the election of the kahal would have been ended. Instead, the magistrates were to appoint Jewish city officials as soon as the former kahal members had stepped down; the appointed officials would then lead the communities under the supervision of the magistrate. The Prussian bureaucrats also wanted to

control and reduce the number of synagogues and rabbis and other communal employees. The regulations of the new rule were apparently considered so severe—in other areas as well'®—that the Judenlandtage were briefly revived. A few months after the new regulation was decreed, delegates of the various Jewish communities gathered in Kleczew to discuss the harsh measures that so affected the conditions of the Jewish

population, and to formulate changes to propose to the king.” In fact, as a consequence, many restrictions in the economic sector were toned down or withdrawn. The Jewish representatives asked in vain for the return of jurisdiction to their rabbis, with one exception: the community of Poznan retained its own court.?? The kahal had begun to fight for its preservation immediately after it had become known that the Jewish inhabitants would be placed under the soon-to-be-established city courts. The Poznan community’s previous experiences of extended lawsuits in the old magistrate’s court had been so negative that it did not want to be subject to that court again. The kahal submitted to the administration the old privileges, according to which legal proceedings involving Jews could only be judged by the rabbi or the ‘6 The district of Netze had been combined with Royal Prussia to form the province of West Prussia at the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772. After 1815 it formed the northern part of the Grand Duchy of Poznan. The General-Juden-Reglement of 1750 was applied to Jewish communities here.

Jurisdiction and autonomy remained untouched, although the communities had to vouch for their members. Apart from the financial exploitation of Jews, the expatriation of several thousand Jews from this area weighed particularly heavily on the communities (S. Stern, Der preussische Staat und die Juden, 3 vols. (Tubingen, 1962-71), iii. 311). 1” ‘Text repr. in L. R6nne and H. Simon, Die friiheren und gegenwartigen Verhaltnisse der Juden in den sdmmilichen Landestheilen des Preussischen Staates. Eine Darstellung und Revision der gesetzlichen Bestim-

mungen tiber thre staats- und privatrechtlichen Zustande, Verfassung und Verwaltung des Preussischen Staates, ed. Ronne et al., pt. VII, vol. ii (Breslau, 1843), 292-302.

‘8 Examples are the difficulties in obtaining permission to marry and multiple restrictions in the economic sector.

‘9 The following according to L. Lewin, ‘Ein Judentag aus Siid- und Neuostpreussen’, Monatsschrift fiir die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 59 (1915), 180-92, 278-300.

20 The following according to P. Bloch, ‘Judenwesen’, in R. Priimers (ed.), Das Jahr 1793. Urkunden und Aktenstucke zur Geschichte der Organisation Sudpreussens (Poznan, 1895).

Jewish Community in Poznan, 1815-1848 55 voivode, and not by the magistrate.21 The community then was granted its own court, organized as a royal tribunal—albeit with a non-Jewish judge and a nonJewish clerk, who could not be chosen by the community itself, but who had to be paid from the community’s funds.” The shtadlan of the community was allowed to serve as an assessor in court, but without a vote. After the new city courts began to operate, the Jews apparently found that they could act with greater independence, confronted with less bias, than they had assumed at first. There can be no other explanation for the kahal’s request in 1802 to have the Jewish court dissolved again.”° Of course, the kahal wanted to save the money it was spending on the Jewish courts, but financial interests are not reason enough. Since the request was rejected, in the end the Jewish jurisdiction continued to exist against the will of the community. In the following years it became clear that many regulations of the GeneralJuden-Reglement existed only on paper. The kehalim continued to work as before, without being controlled by the magistrates; even the old election system remained in place. We have to assume that both state and Jewish jurisdictions continued to exist side by side, and breaches of Jewish law could still be punished with criminal charges in Jewish courts.”* From the brief, ten-year period of the Reglement’s validity the communities were able to draw several conclusions: the era of state protection of Jewish legal autonomy had ended; even the establishment of an instrument from an earlier time, the Judenlandtag, had not been able to restore the former situation. In Poznan, where it final-

ly did succeed, the community would in the end have preferred to give up the re-established old privilege. At least in part, the institution of legal autonomy had

outlived its usefulness. Instead, the communities were confronted with a new bureaucratic system that aimed for pervasive state control, and thereby doubtlessly threatened the traditional Jewish way of life. At the same time, through experience the communities arrived at the important understanding that this higher authority protected them from the despotism of anti-Jewish magistrates. The most prominent example concerns the abolition of the vastly overcrowded Jewish quarter in Poznan after the devastating fire of 1803. The government was no longer willing to listen to the bickering of the magistracy and ordered that Jewish inhabitants should be allowed to settle anywhere in the city.2? The weakening of legal autonomy— 21 See the protocol of 2 July 1793, ibid. 617 ff. 22 The kahal had made a request that it at least be allowed to keep some of the old rights of election

and representation. 23 Bloch, ‘Judenwesen’, 600-1 n. 3. 24 ‘The uninterrupted continuation of Jewish jurisdiction in the kingdom of Poland after 1815 makes

this at least plausible. However, it was also a problem of competition for power between hasidic and rabbinic authorities (Guesnet, Polnische Fuden, 210 ff.). 29 M. Jaffe, Die Stadt Posen unter preussischer Herrschaft. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ostens, Schriften des Vereins fiir Sozialpolitik, 119, pt. 2 (Leipzig, 1909), 56~7, 73 ff. In addition to the cancellation of the settlement restrictions, the abolition of the privileges of the guilds was important for Jews’ economic activity. See Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, 53-4.

56 Sophia Kemlein dissolution of Jewish jurisdiction was still out of the question in practice— represented a great blow to the independence of the Jewish communities. But this loss was balanced by an increase in legal security. The Reglement of 1797 made no mention of two important issues: the legal status of the communities and questions of membership. In practice, this meant at first that former regulations on membership continued to apply—thus that only those who regularly paid their dues were considered members of the community. However, on this issue there was an early indication of the pattern that would come to dominate the relationship between Jewish communities and the Prussian state in the following decades. On the one hand, since the conclusion of the Holy Alliance, the concept that a state which defined itself as ‘Christian’ was incompatible with an integrated Jewish population had dominated in Prussia. Therefore, the provincial and regional authorities were ordered to refrain from getting involved in Jewish communal affairs. On the other hand, the local authorities were constantly asked to deal with the Jewish community, since the pervasive state control and the standardization of the law could not exclude them. The communities owned property and funds, or were in debt, and conflicts arose that had to be resolved by courts or state intervention. This contradiction was never resolved in Prussia because the Jewish religion was never officially recognized there, either by the Emanzipationsedikt of 1812 or by the Gesetz tiber die Verhaltnisse der Juden (Law on the Conditions of the Jews) in 1847, or by the Gleichstellungsgesetz des Norddeutschen Bundes (Equal Rights Law of the North German Union) in 1869. ‘Emancipation’ in Prussia meant granting citizens’ rights to Jews as individuals, but did not involve granting equality to the Jewish religion.*° Most Jewish communities in Prussia therefore ended up as ‘tolerated’ religious communities, similar to private clubs.?’ This was also the status of the Jewish communities in the Grand Duchy of Poznan after 1815.78 The state refused any role in supervision of the Jewish jurisdiction and intervened only when the security of the public order seemed in doubt. For the indebted communities in Poznan, the fact that there were no financial obligations connected with membership and that Jewish jurisdiction was officially dissolved was especially difficult. The kehalim were left with no means to use against members who were unwilling to pay dues; at the same time, control of the kahal by its members was nearly impos26 This important difference, which has received little scholarly attention, was pointed out recently by Manfred Jehle, ‘Die Enqueten der preussischen Regierung zu den Verhaltnissen der Juden und der jiidischen Gemeinden, 1842-1845’, introduction to Jehle (ed.), Die Juden und die jtidischen Gemeinden Preussens in amthchen Enqueten des Vormarz, 4 pts. (Munich, 1998), pt. 1, pp. Ixxvi ff.

“7 J. Fehrs, ‘Der preussische Staat und die jiidischen Gemeinden in der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Ein Uberblick’, in R. Jiitte and A. P. Kustermann (eds.), Jiidische Gemeinden und Organisationsformen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1996), 201-2.

28 Cf. the presentation of contemporary legal conditions of Jews in the Grand Duchy of Poznan, 27 Feb. 1827, in German and Polish, Archiwum Panstwowe w Poznaniu (APP), Akten des Oberprasidiums Posen (OPP), sig. 5077, fos. 63-75; also Ronne and Simon, Die Verhdalinisse der FJuden, 314-16.

Jewish Community in Poznan, 1815-1548 57 sible. Although the kehalim could levy taxes with the permission of the new authori-

ties or raise the current dues, the indebtedness of the communities could not be controlled in this way. On the contrary, the refusal of the central authorities in Berlin to end the legal limbo of the Jewish population in the Grand Duchy of Poznan on the individual and community level by implementing a new regulation made the situation in the communities increasingly difficult.2? In Leszno, for example, the situation had escalated to the point that in 1832 all community-owned land and buildings had to be auctioned, including the cemetery, the synagogue, and the bathhouse.°° It was precisely this circumstance—the high indebtedness of the communities

and a community structure that was no longer equal to this problem—that the provincial authorities viewed as so grave that an ‘opportune’ moment was chosen to

try to push for a new regulation in Berlin.*! The result of these endeavours, the Provisional Regulation regarding Jewish Affairs in the Grand Duchy of Poznan of 1833, went far beyond reforming the community structure.** The Prussian government’s goal was to draw the Jews of the province into the middle class by means of education and by leading them from trade to handicrafts and agriculture. The central responsibility for this process, namely the implementation of the legal regulations for schools and professional training, was given to the community leaders. The first part of the regulation restructured the communities so as to enable the community leaders to fulfil their tasks. According to the new rules, the communities remained tolerated religious societies, but in their financial affairs they became

corporations under public law; that is, the Jewish communities were now called corporations. This meant that the entire financial system was placed under government control, and contributions and taxes could be collected with the help of police and court proceedings. In addition, the introduction of obligatory membership ensured that no one could escape payment.®®

For the administration of the corporations, collegial instruments of self-administration based on the revised Stadteordnung (town ordinance) of 1831 were introduced. According to this regulation, the so-called representative assembly was the legislative organ, and the board of the corporation, which was composed of admin. istrative officers and their advisers, was the executive organ. At the same time, the 29 Letter of Poznan’s Provincial President Flottwell to Secretary of the Interior Brenn, 5 Oct. 1832, Geheimes Staatsarchiv (GStA), Berlin, I. HA, rep. go, no. 33, fos. 168-71.

30 A. Heppner and I. Herzberg, Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der Juden und der jidischen Gemeinden in den Posener Landen, 2 vols. (Kozmin, 1904, 1929), 600. The real estate was purchased by a

Jew and given back to the community. 31 For the history leading up to this regulation, see in detail Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, 96 ff.

32 Text printed in Ronne and Simon, Die Verhaltnisse der Juden, 305-9; repr. in Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, 331-7.

33 Instruction of Provincial President Flottwell, 14 Jan. 1834, to the royal government of Poznan and Bydgoszcz to ensure the implementation of the decree of 1 June, repr. in ROnne and Simon, Die Verhdaltnisse der Juden, 309-14.

58 Sophia Kemlein regulation stated explicitly that the corporation’s authority should only extend to the ‘internal affairs’ of the community. In all other respects, the Jews were to be considered members of the local communities. ‘This statement was aimed at preventing the Jewish communities from using their corporate status for the purposes of political and economic representation to the outside world.** The regulation also established the system of elections to the assembly and the board, and placed the elections under the supervision of government officials. As for the school system, the corporation boards were responsible for ensuring that every child between the ages of 7 and 14 attended a public school where secular subjects were taught, and that needy children were given money for schoolbooks and clothing from the corporation’s funds. Jewish schools, like the Christian ones,

qualified as public schools if they met government requirements that German should be the language of instruction and that the Jewish teachers should pass state exams. The religious courses were to be organized by the communities in their own way, but even the teachers of these classes had to pass a state exam. Moreover, the boards were not relieved of their responsibility for the youth of the community upon their graduation. They were required to ensure that the young people obtained afterschool training in a ‘useful handicraft and did not become door-to-door salesmen’. What remained in the regulation of 1833 of the former autonomy of the Jewish communities? As in the case of the General-Juden-Reglement of 1797, the answer is nothing. Jewish jurisdiction was dissolved and the entire community administration placed under government control, from the election of leaders to the spending of the last penny. Only religious affairs were excluded, because the government did not wish to burden itself with any involvement in this area. New tasks for the communities were the supervision of a school system that no longer corresponded to

Jewish tradition, and the professional training of the graduates. ‘The Prussian authorities doubtless intended to further the ‘process of assimilation’ of the Jewish population in the Grand Duchy of Poznan with the help of the corporation boards. Did the representatives and administrative officials thereby become puppets of the Prussian government? How far did the new corporation leaders let themselves be exploited to further such ends? And if they did allow it—why? In order to answer these questions, we must examine the implementation of these regulations in practice.

THE CORPORATIONS’ SCOPE OF ACTIVITY IN OLD AND NEW AREAS OF RESPONSIBILITY There was a high turnout for the first elections under government supervision. In

contrast to later elections, there was no difficulty anywhere in mobilizing the 34 The regulation of 1833 does not, therefore, reflect Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s later intentions in the 1840s of placing the Jewish communities autonomously alongside the Christian communities and excluding them from the proclaimed ‘Christian’ state.

Jewish Community in Poznan, 1815-1548 59 required two-thirds of all the members entitled to vote.*? This would have been the best possible moment for resistance against the regulation of 1833—1in the form of a boycott, for example—but there was none. This fact might lead one to assume that the new law was widely accepted among Jews; in reality, their support owed less to the restructuring of the community than to the prospect of legal equality.°° The reason for the Jews’ overwhelming loyalty to the Prussian state lay in their hope that

they would acquire the same citizen’s rights that the Jews in the old provinces had been granted—and this was true of both reform-oriented and traditionalist circles.?"

During these first elections supporters of the reform movement, who had thus far remained in the background, were elected as representatives in a number of communities.?° Even if they constituted only a small minority among the representatives of a particular community, their influence in this phase of radical change could be significant; they spoke German and often possessed additional skills in legal matters and accounting. ‘They were therefore more capable than the supporters of traditionalism of meeting the demands of the Prussian government. ‘The people of the communities that elected them undoubtedly hoped that these men would give them an advantage in dealings with the authorities. For their part, the Prussian officials could rightly expect that the goals of their government would be implemented much more easily with reformers in positions of authority than with convinced traditionalists. The new representatives and administrative officials took to their work with great

enthusiasm and did not shy away from the significant additional commitment of time.®? The first problem that they had to take up with the authorities was the list of the debts and plans for repayment. The regulation of 1833 had set the course for a settlement of the debts, but despite strict controls, repayment took several decades in a number of particularly poverty-stricken communities. The departure of Jews

from the smaller towns increased the burden on those who remained. A typical example is the community of Borek in the county of Krotoszyn, which counted 532 35 On the elections, see Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, 110 ff.

36 This at least was the tenor of the speeches given at the inauguration of the new representatives. See Sonderbeilage der Zeitschrift des Grossherzogtums Posen, no. 84, 11 Apr. 1834; M. L. Bamberger, Geschichte der Fuden in Schénlanke (Berlin, 1912), 16; Speech by R. Moses Veilchenfeld, 7 Jan. 1834,

APP, Akten der Stadt Santomysl, sig. 45, fos. 67-75; Speech by representative Liebermann Speyer,

9 Apr. 1834, APP OPP, sig. 9013, fos. 30-8. 37 Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, 250 ff. 38 Among the communities with reform-oriented representatives were Poznan and Gniezno; in Grodzisk Wielkopolski the medical doctor Marcus Mosse, who had only moved there from Lusatia in 1835, was elected leader of the corporation in the next elections in 1838 (Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, I10—I11, 210 ff.; E. Kraus, ‘A Jew in the Prussian Province of Posen’, VBI YB 42 (1997), 12-13).

83 Tn his memoirs Baer Low Monasch describes how much time the new corporate community required. Marcus Mosse explained his petition to be allowed to withdraw soon after the election by saying that the high level of commitment demanded by his new post could not be reconciled with his profession (P. Fraenkel, “The Memoirs of B. L. Monasch of Krotoschin’, LBIYB 24 (1979), 206; Kraus, ‘A Jew in the Prussian Province of Posen’, 13).

60 Sophia Kemlein Jewish inhabitants in 1837. In the following year its debt amounted to 1,541 Reichstaler. By 1849 the community had been reduced by a little less than a hundred people to 437, but the debt of 1,328 Reichstaler in 1847 was only slightly less than that of nine years earlier.4° Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did the economic situation of the corporations and their members slowly begin to improve. In spite of all the pressures and difficulties the corporations’ members had to bear as a result of communal debts, one had to give the Prussian authorities some credit on this point. By regulating the corporations’ finances, they often established the preconditions that enabled them to perform their tasks. It is worth noting in this context that the greater part of the corporations’ income in the first half of the nineteenth century still came from taxes on kosher meat.*! However, since this was a voluntary contribution paid only by those who were buying kosher meat in their own community, it could not be collected with the help of administrative enforcement; moreover, it was impossible to calculate how much money to expect in any given year.*” Thus the authorities could not control the entire financial system, because traditional forms of taxation simply eluded them.

This circumstance promoted the continuation of traditional forms. In some communities the former—and at the time illegal—instruments of Jewish jurisdiction were still in effect, and used to punish those who bought their kosher meat in other localities.*? In some cases the meat would be declared treyf by the local rabbi. In some communities it was still customary to exclude the culprit from the honour of being called to read from the Torah in the synagogue.** This lesser form of ban seems to have been the only restriction from the old Jewish jurisdiction that still had some sort of regulating function. The greater ban (herem) was, according to the

| rabbis, no longer applied. 40 See the accounting documents of the corporation for the years 1838 and 1847 in the community files: Foundation ‘Neue Synagoge Berlin—Centrum Judaicum’, Archiv (CJA), 1, 75 A, Bo 6 Borek 74, fos. 10-14, and Bo 6 Borek 18, fos. 11-12. 41 Since the tax on kosher meat was hardly sufficient to cover the corporations’ costs in any community, their members had to make additional payments, which were calculated according to income and were noted in tax rolls under a decree of the secretary of the interior. Members could contest their pay-

ments by complaining to the Prussian authorities, but community leaders could also request police assistance to collect the tax. See Secretary of the Interior to Provincial President Arnim, 27 Dec. 1841, in ROnne and Simon, Die Verhdltnisse der Fuden, 323.

42 Provincial President Flottwell to the Government of Bydgoszcz, 22 Oct. 1835, GStA Berlin, I. HA, rep. 77, tit. 1010, no. 5, vol. 1, fos. 110-11. 43 See the rabbi’s report in the context of the questionnaire of the secretary for mental health, educational, and medical affairs on the religious, school, and legal situation in the Jewish communities of the

Prussian governmental districts (1843-5), GStA Berlin, I. HA, rep. 76-IIl, sect. 1, pt. XIMa, no. Ic: Report by Chief Rabbi Eiger in Poznan, 30 July 1843, fos. 86-7; Report by Rabbi Dr H. S. Hirschfeld in Wolsztyn, 10 July 1843, fos. 141-2; Report by Chief Rabbi Heymann Joel in Skwierzyna, 14 June 1843, fos. 182 ff.; Report by the Chief Rabbi in Kepno, 13 July 1843, fos. 220 ff. 44 Announcement of the Corporation of Rogozno, 29 Aug. 1834 and to July 1835, in J. Jacobson, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Rogasen, reproduced in MS (Berlin, 1935), suppl.; Report by Chief Rabbi Heymann Joel in Skwierzyna, 14 June 1843, fos. 182 ff.

Jewish Community in Poznan, 1815-1548 61 The level of debt and the burden it placed on individual members had immediate consequences for one of the central areas of Jewish self-administration: poor relief. Especially in small communities with high debt, there often remained nothing in the budget for the poor. The poor themselves were no longer permitted to wander from one community to the next begging for alms. Instead, each corporation had to take care of ‘its own’ poor.*° On occasion, a corporation attempted to hand over the care for an individual of unknown origin to another corporation.*® It was not only the scarcity of financial means that had the community looking for excuses. The administrative interventions into the traditional principle of subsidy, too, led to gaps in support that should, at least in theory, have been impossible among Jews. The welfare of the poor remained an important concern of the representatives, even after the city magistrates were bound by law in 1842 to pay for all the local poor regardless of their religion.*’ The magistrates did not care to support the Jewish

poor in addition to the Christian poor, especially since the Jewish poor relief - operated as well as—if not better than—the city charity without their help. In Wschowa, Babimost, and Pleszew the municipal administration at first refused to

observe the law. In all three towns negotiations over the contribution of the Jewish | corporations to the municipal Armenkassen (relief funds), from which all poor inhabitants of the city were supported, began only in 1846 and 1847.*° For several years the administration of charity continued in the same (now illegal) manner that

it had before, unchanged either by the magistrates, who did not pay, or by the corporations, which did not want to relinquish any authority. But even after the new regulation was put into practice all Jewish communities continued to support their poor, since the payments provided by the magistracy amounted to less than previous payments by the corporations.*? Also, donations that were required for the fulfilment of Jewish laws, such as that of flour for Passover, were not taken care of by the magistracy.°° In some places it was agreed that the magistracy would pay a lump sum into the corporation’s funds and thereby relinquish its obligation to the 4° Excerpt from the Amtsblatt der Regierung in Posen, Dec. 1834, CJA 1, 75 A, Pl 1 Pleschen 50,

fo. I. 46 Kemlein, Die Posener Fuden, 125. 47 See the law concerning the obligation for the welfare of the poor, 31 Dec. 1842, Gesetzsammlung fiir den Preussischen Staat, 1843, no. 2318.

48 Letter of the Landrat in Wschowa to the Magistrate of Wschowa, 15 Jan. 1847, GStA Berlin, XVI. HA, rep. 32, no. 233, no fo.; Landrat in Wolsztyn to the Government of Poznan on Charity in Babimost, 3 May 1847, ibid., no. 219, no fo.; Contribution of the Local Municipality to Charity, 1846, CJA 1,75 A, Pl 1 Pleschen 165.

*° For Pleszew, see Contribution of the Local Municipality to Charity, 1846, CJA 1, 75 A, Plt Pleschen 165. For Babimost, see Government in Poznan to Magistrate in Babimost, 26 Aug. 1847, in J. Toury, Der E:ntritt der Juden ins deutsche Burgertum. Eine Dokumentation (‘Tel Aviv, 1972), 359.

°° Die Regierung Posen, Abt. des Innern, an den Minister der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und _ Medizinalangelegenheiten, Eichhorn. Nachweisung der jiidischen Korporationen in Beziehung auf das Kultus- und Schulwesen, v. 16 Jan. 1844’, in Jehle (ed.), Die Juden und die jiidischen Gemeinden, pt. 3, p. 853.

62 Sophia Kemlein - poor.®! Beginning in 1842, the magistracy in Poznan paid 1,750 Reichstaler each year to the corporation, until the Jewish poor relief became entirely part of the city in 1849.°” In this area, too, we can see that the traditional tasks of self-administration were not easily replaced by governmental regulations. With or without the authorities’ approval, the boards of the corporations tried to keep at least part of the administration of poor relief under their own direct control. Apart from the welfare funds that the corporation collected and dispensed through the board, the Jewish welfare associations served as a last resort in emergencies. Jews held on to these traditional, independent associations even under Prussian rule. They felt bound by the religious obligation of serving one’s neighbour and helping the needy. The activities of these associations covered three essential areas: the ritual burial of the dead; diverse charities such as support for the poor, adornment of the bride, and care for the sick; and study and prayer.°? Often the association devoted itself to several of the tasks mentioned. The most widespread association in the Poznan communities, even under Prussian rule, was the hevrah kadisha (holy society), or burial association, which saw to it that burials were carried out in accordance with ritual laws, and paid the cost of the burial when the

family could not. In the district of Poznan sixty-one of the seventy-five corporations had burial associations in 1843; only some of the smaller communities with less than 350 Jewish inhabitants did not have one.** In addition, there were more than forty other specialized charitable associations for supporting the sick and the poor, as well as an orphanage and a Jewish hospital (the Latzsche Krankenanstalt in Poznan). A number of associations were founded only after the regulation of 1833 was enacted. This revitalization of the system of charitable associations demonstrates yet again that the communities recovered after the communal organization was

restructured and that new energies had been released. For example, the women’s | association for the ‘support of poor widows in helping them pay for housing’ in Poznan® and the Beit Hamidrash association in Zerk6w®® in the county of WrzeSnia were both founded in 1834. The associations could define and fulfil their own goals without any interference from the authorities, and at the same time they were independent of the possibly ‘too modern’ corporation board. They therefore inclined in particular towards preserving traditionalism inside the communities. 51 Tbid. 852. 52 Heppner and Herzberg, Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 854-5. 53 On the associations in general, see J. Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichte der Jfuden in Deutsch-

land 1847-1871. Zwischen Revolution, Reaktion und Emanzipation (Dusseldorf, 1977), 211 ff.; on the pre-emancipation era, see S. W. Baron, The Jewish Community: [ts History and Structure to the American Revolution, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1942), 11. 319 ff.

54 Die Regierung Posen, Abt. des Innern, an den Minister der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinalangelegenheiten, Eichhorn. Nachweisung der judischen Korporationen in Beziehung auf das Kultus- und Schulwesen’, in Jehle (ed.), Die Juden und die judischen Gemeinden, pt. 3, pp. 855-919. There is no such documentation for the district of Bydgoszcz. °° See the association’s report of Aug. 1842, APP, Police Presidency Poznan (PPP), sig. 4673, fos.

28-30. °6 Heppner and Herzberg, Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 1025-0.

Jewish Community in Poznan, 1815-1848 63 Other new associations combined charity with secular education. One example

is the Jiidische Tochterverein (Association of Jewish Daughters) in Poznan, a

retail.°® | |

women’s society founded in 1845 ‘for the promotion of poor girls’ schooling and their training in feminine handicrafts’.°’ The orphanage for boys in Poznan, too, combined social welfare with efforts in professional training: upon graduating the boys were to be apprenticed to artisans, farmers, or artists, but were not to work in

The difficulties that the leaders of the corporations encountered in finding

places for the graduates in ‘useful’ professions apparently gave rise to some new initiatives. In the mid-1840s associations for the training of Jewish apprentices were founded in several corporations—for example, in Ostr6w Wielkopolski in 1845.°° There the association for the clothing of the poor was transformed at its twentieth anniversary into the Verein zur Herausbildung jiidischer Handwerker (Association for the Training of Jewish Artisans); its goal was to have one poor graduate trained in a different craft every three years. The Israelitische Handlungsdiener-Institut (Institute of Israelite Shop Assistants) was founded in Poznan in 1843. This association supported travelling ‘trade salesmen’ as well as members who were ill or unemployed, but its main purpose was to educate trade apprentices in arithmetic, accounting, and sales etiquette.°! In addition, it organized presentations at which not only Jewish salesmen, but also non-Jews like Poznan’s police director Julius Minutoli, were invited to lecture.© In its founding year the association had forty-eight full members who were trade assistants, and eighty-seven associate members, most of whom were salesmen.®° The association was in essence a collective organization for the Jewish salesmen and their employees in the Grand Duchy. Compared to the total number of welfare associations in the district of Poznan, the number of new associations that were not exclusively religiously oriented was

quite small. In fact, the impulse to be charitable out of religious conviction in pri- / vate initiatives, and in distinction from the non-Jewish environment, increased in the Jewish communities after 1833. The tendency of the corporations to preserve spheres of activity that were autonomous or semi-autonomous—that is, Jewishly defined—despite restrictions and 57 See Statuten des Jiidischen Tochtervereins, 14 Apr. 1850, APP PPP, sig. 4673, fos. 41-8. 58 See Statuten fiir die israelitische Waisen-Knaben-Anstalt zu Posen, Poznan/Posen 1836, CJA 1, 75 A, Br 9 Bromberg 131, fos. 3-14; later statutes in APP PPP, sig. 5074.

°2 Der Orient, 6/10 (5 Mar. 1845), 74. 60 Der Orient, 8/14 (2 Apr. 1847), 209. 61 See Statuten des Israelitischen Handlungsdiener-Instituts, Oct. 1843, APP PPP, sig. 4675, fos. g—22; Der Ontent, 8/7 (12 Feb. 1847), 51 ff.

62 A. Kronthal, ‘Aus einem jtiidischen Leben des vorigen Jahrhunderts’, Fidische FamilienForschung, 6 (1930), pt. 22, pp. 234-47, pt. 23, pp. 271-82, pt. 24, pp. 298-303: 275.

63 Statuten des Israelitischen Handlungsdiener-Instituts, Oct. 1843, APP PPP, sig. 4697; T. Dohnalowa, ‘Kupcy zydowscy w Poznaniu w okresie zaboru pruskiego’, in Topolski and Modelski (eds.), Zydzi w Wielkopolsce, 177.

64 Sophia Kemlein interventions by the authorities was nowhere so clearly visible as in the school system.°* The leaders of the corporations did not fulfil their responsibility to ensure that every child received a secular education by sending them to Christian schools. Rather, despite all of the attendant financial problems, they chose to found public

Jewish elementary schools with Jewish teachers and a curriculum that combined religious with secular education. By 1839 there were fifty-eight Jewish elementary schools in the province, and by 1847 there were seventy-two schools which were attended by 71 per cent of school-age Jewish children. (Of the rest, 23 per cent attended Christian schools and 6 per cent did not receive any instruction.)® The authorities had exerted significant pressure on the corporations to push for compulsory school attendance and the abolition of traditional one-room schools (heders) devoted to religious education. The leaders had not been able to avoid that pressure, and to some extent they did not want to avoid it. The acquisition of the German language and a secular education was the price that Jews had to pay in this province if they wanted to become citizens of Prussia. It was thanks to the boards of the corporations that this process did not result in mass alienation from the traditional world. Jewish religious instruction, albeit scaled back, remained an integral part of schooling. In fact, for the majority of Jewish children, daily life remained within a Jewish framework to an extent unequalled in any other regional Jewry in Prussia. Contrary to the rest of Prussia, the Jewish elementary school here represented the norm, rather than the exception. Thus, it played an essential role in the preservation of Jewishly defined identity. While the corporation leaders had been successful in their involvement with the school system, the results of their efforts to train graduates were disastrous. Because of the economic crises beginning in 1839, hardly a single corporation was able to place all of its graduates, even though the desire to do so—as the founding of the associations attests—was clearly strong.®° Finally, let us turn to religious affairs, an area that the corporations were explicitly asked to administer themselves. Here it became clear that the lack of regulations, instructions, or even higher precedents could severely affect the efficiency of

a community, or even lead to its demise. The division of responsibility between rabbi, representative, and administrator was never clarified, which led to frequent struggles that were exacerbated by the conflict between reform-oriented and traditionalist parties. The biggest conflicts occurred during elections of rabbis, but there were also conflicts over new synagogue regulations introducing reforms in religious practice.©°’ As in the case of kosher meat taxes, administration officials tried to 64 On the following, see A. Warschauer, ‘Die Erziehung der Juden in der Provinz Posen durch das Elementarschulwesen. Nach archivalischen Quellen’, Zeitschrift ftir Geschichte der Fuden in Deutschland, 3 (1889), offprint; Kemlein, Die Posener fJuden, 78-89, 128-41.

6 Figures in Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, 129 and tables 10a and 10b. 66 Tbid. 169-70. 67 The few synagogue regulations that were introduced in this province before 1848 were chiefly intended to allow the service to run smoothly. Real reconstruction of the forms of the service was hardly ever addressed (ibid. 224-5).

Jewish Community in Poznan, 1815-1848 65 impose fines and penalties for violation of new synagogue regulations—although they were not legally entitled to do so®*—or they turned to the authorities for support. In Grodzisk Wielkopolski and Miedzyrzecz they called on the police to stand guard at services, in the fear that they would not be able to guarantee peace and order themselves.®? In Gniezno the authorities even responded to such a request at the opening of the new synagogue. ’° Jews complained to the authorities about the outcome of rabbinic elections, but also about such minor problems as the ostensibly unfair distribution of synagogue benches. After the loss of Jewish jurisdiction, the Prussian authorities were obviously accepted by the corporations as the ultimate authority and enlisted accordingly, even in conflicts over religious matters. It should be noted that the reform-oriented corporation boards were able to push for reforms in religious life only in the smaller communities. Here there was often no rabbi, no bezt midrash, and no hevrah kadisha—none of the institutions that were present in the larger communities that defended traditionalism against any reform and were influential enough to determine the religious direction of a community.” The sphere of activity for the reform-oriented corporation leaders lay above all in

the school system and in secular associations. Thus, in this transitional region between west European and east European Jewries there developed a unique mixture of traditional Jewish culture of the eastern Ashkenazi type, with the religious traditions (minhag polin), liturgical music, and traditional foods of the east European Jewries on the one hand, and the cultural patterns of the acculturated west European Jewries, with the adoption of German language, secular education, and a bourgeois culture of social clubs on the other.

CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK Though I have been able to touch on many of the different aspects and consequences of the dissolution of Jewish communal autonomy only briefly, two conclusions can be drawn. First, the formal abolition of Jewish jurisdiction was not a catastrophe for the Jewish communities. Even in 1797 it was apparent that the system of legal autonomy had outlived its usefulness. But the Prussian government put the Jewish communities in an extremely difficult situation after 1815, in that it did not create sufficient mechanisms to replace that autonomy. Only with integration into the Prussian legal system and increased state supervision over the communities’ finances after the 68 Ibid. 116 and 225-6. °9 See Corporation Board in Grodzisk Wielkopolski to the Magistrate, 17 Mar. 1840, CJA 1, 75 B, Gr 2 Grodzisk Wielkopolski 62; Corporation Board in Miedzyrzecz to the Government of Poznan, 9 Oct. 1844, GStA Berlin, XVI. HA, rep. 32, no. 134, no fo. 7 A. Warschauer, Geschichte der Stadt Gnesen (Poznan, 1918), 413. ™ See the more detailed account in Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, 216 ff. 7 See Lowenstein, ‘The Shifting Boundary between Eastern and Western Jewry’, 61 ff.

66 Sophia Kemlein decree of 1833 was it possible for the regulated community administration to operate again. It is not surprising, therefore, that the decree was not blamed for the loss of

autonomy but rather was welcomed as an opportunity to rely on the Prussian authorities as a neutral third party in cases of conflict—and with the communities increasingly divided into traditionalist and reform-oriented camps, there was a great deal of conflict in this period. The corporate structure obviously met a real need in the communities for order and regularity in their affairs, and helped them to overcome a crisis. ‘The communities were given an organizational structure here that not only proved capable of regulating their troubled finances, but also offered them the opportunity to keep communal life intact in the changing conditions of modernization. The revival of associations serving social needs and the construction of the Jewish elementary schools are impressive evidence of this. In the eyes of the authorities the corporate communal structure proved useful as well; the regulation was extended to all Jewish communities in Prussia in 1847, and served as the legal foundation for the Jewish communities until their dissolution in

1939.’° It served both the state authorities and the Jewish communities in the Grand Duchy well in 1833. However, the state did not develop it further in the following decades, but used it to exert control over the administration of the Jewish communities without at the same time having to interfere in their religious affairs. In the end this highly problematic policy of the Prussian state with regard to the Jewish communities—involving exclusion, discrimination, and control at the same time—precluded a comprehensive emancipation of the Jewish minority as religious community in Prussia, and not only sanctioned antisemitism in Germany, but also promoted it. Secondly, the formal dissolution of Jewish jurisdiction and the state’s extensive intervention into Jewish self-administration could not break the communities’ will to continue to organize areas of independent activity. The tradition of Jewish selfgovernance was kept alive where it was necessary or possible. Where the Prussian state left gaps in the law, the communities retained elements of Jewish jurisdiction, namely, in the administration of kosher meat taxes and the implementation of new synagogue regulations. ‘he corporate communities’ leaders were reluctant to relinquish the administration of charity to the local Armenkassen, and nowhere did they give it over entirely. Traditionalist circles responded to the Prussian regulations by maintaining existing charity associations and establishing new ones on the old model.

The establishment of new types of associations and public Jewish elementary “3 Gesetz tiber die Verhaltnisse der Juden, 23 July 1847, in I. Freund, Die Emanzipation der Fuden in Preussen. Unter besonderer Berticksichtigung des Gesetzes vom 11. Marz 1812. Ein Beitrag zur Rechtsgeschichte (Berlin, 1912), 11. 501-20; H. M. Graupe, Die Entstehung des modernen Fudentums. Geistesgeschichte der deutschen fJuden 1650-1942, 2nd edn. (Hamburg, 1977), 232. Fehrs claims that the law of 1847 was abolished only in 1971 for the Berlin community. Fehrs, ‘Der preussische Staat und die jiidischen Gemeinden’, 219.

Jewish Community in Poznan, 1815-1848 607 schools was the response of reform-oriented circles. Even when the two groups found themselves in irreconcilable conflict, they both tried to maintain Jewish life as religiously defined. In the Grand Duchy of Poznan the corporate community remained the centre of Jewish life far beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. While the maintenance of Jewish milieux in which all areas and stages of life were shaped by religious and cultural traditions would have been unthinkable without the still-powerful Polish Jewish tradition of self-governance, other factors played a role as well. ‘The size and density of the Jewish communities in this province is one such factor. These were not mass Jewish settlements on the scale of those in Warsaw or later in Lodz and

Berlin, where sheer numbers made the traditional model of the one community impossible. Other stabilizing factors were the unchanged agrarian structure of the Grand Duchy, which allowed the Jewish population to retain its inherited economic function, and the absence of industrial centres which would have made possible—and even required—a social reorientation. Finally, because it was mainly younger Jewish people who had left the province after the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘* the communities not only shrank, but also aged. Here lay the real threat to the Jewish world of Poznania: mass emigration with its palpable consequences in every community.

Although emigration to the western provinces and cities—and even more so emigration abroad—constituted a break with the Jewish world of Poznanzia, it did not mean that the emigrants were denying their origins. In America, for example, Jews from Poznania founded their own communities in order to keep the specific religious characteristics of each alive.’ In Germany a conspicuous number of Jews who had grown up in the Grand Duchy took on leading positions in regional and national Jewish institutions as adults. Although they supported different religious movements, they all shared a natural commitment to continue their involvement in Jewish life.’° The effects of the Jewish self-assertion that was a cultural pattern in the communities of the Grand Duchy of Poznan continued into the twentieth

century. Translated from German by Sabine von Mering 74 Ostereich, ‘Des rauhen Winters ungeachtet . ..’, 156 ff.

See R. Flanz, ‘Vanguard to the Russians: The Poseners in America’, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 18 (1983), 20; Ostereich, ‘Des rauhen Winters ungeachtet .. .”, 70 ff.

76 W. J. Cahnmann, ‘A Regional Approach to German Jewish History’, Jewish Social Studies, 5 (1943), 218; T. Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918-1933 (Hamburg, 1986), 14-15; Lowenstein, “The Shifting Boundary between Eastern and Western Jewry’, 71.

Between Germans and Poles: ‘he Jews of Poznan in 1848 KRZYSZTOF A. MAKOWSKI THE impulse towards freedom which overtook nearly the whole of Europe in 1848 also affected the lands of partitioned Poland. The revolutions in Vienna and Berlin

once again stirred the hopes of the Poles, if not for rebirth of the Polish Commonwealth, then at least for essential national concessions from the partitioning

| powers. The events in the Grand Duchy of Poznan, then a part of the Prussian realm, captured the attention of European public opinion for several months because of their complex political and ethnic dimensions as well as their military climax. In this outline I will attempt to answer the question ‘What was the stance of the Jews of Poznan in those tumultuous days?’ An extensive literature has arisen on the topic of the Spring of Nations in the Poznan region. The first publications appeared even as the events took place, and the subject continued to interest later historians and journalists. However, most writers concentrated on the military and political aspects, and later on the social aspects as well. Much less attention was devoted to the issue of nationality. Polish— German relations received most of the attention, and the Jewish population usually appeared on the fringes of the discussion. In some instances it was passed over altogether—though this is true mainly of post-war Polish historiography. I wish

also to put an end to the simplifications, myths, and stereotypes that Jerzy Kozlowski criticizes in his evaluation of the historical literature concerning the Spring of Nations in the Poznan region: ‘Polemics that began during the revolutionary events and were carried on by participants and observers upon their conclusion have made their way into the works of historians.’! This general observation

also holds true for the Jewish question. With a few exceptions, the stereotypes formed in 1848 in evaluations of the attitude of Poznan’s Jews have been continually and uncritically repeated, and, as a result, have become established in historical literature. In many publications the judgement of authors has additionally been clouded by emotion and bias, not to mention occasionally even partisanship or This is a modified and expanded version of an article that was published by Wydawnictwo Poznanskie in J. Topolski and K. Modelski (eds.), Zydzi w Wielkopolsce na przestrzent dztejow (Poznan, 1995).

1 J. Kozlowski, ‘Niemcy w Poznanskiem wobec Wiosny Ludow (1848-1850)’, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Ph.D. thesis, 3.

The Ffews of Poznan in 1848 69 hatred. Therefore, it seems to me necessary to re-evaluate the attitude of the Jews in the Grand Duchy of Poznan to the events of the Springtime of the Nations in a way that is free of oversimplification. Because of its limited framework, this outline obviously cannot fulfil that function in any definitive sense. My aim is merely to summarize and give a critique of the literature on the subject to date. I will also pay some attention to how the events of 1848 resonated beyond the Duchy. I have not limited myself to secondary sources in my research on this issue: without studying the abundant primary sources, it would be impossible to evaluate the secondary ones. My sources are mainly diaries, memoirs, correspondence, political

writings, and polemics, as well as the major periodicals of Poznan at the time, including German Jewish ones. I have used archival materials to a lesser extent. I shall begin with a short description of the situation of the Jews in Poznania just before the outbreak of the Spring of Nations. It should be particularly stressed that the greatest concentration of Jews in the Prussian monarchy was to be found in the Grand Duchy of Poznan. In 1848 approximately 78,500 Jews lived there, constituting almost 6 per cent of the population of the province (6 per cent in the district of Poznan; 5.5 per cent in the district of Bydgoszcz). They lived mainly in urban areas (in many of which they constituted 30-50 per cent of the population).” They did not have the same rights as Christians since many restrictions were imposed upon them. In 1833, on the basis of the Vorlaufige Verordnung wegen des Judenwesens

| im Grossherzogthum Posen (Provisional Regulation regarding Jewish Affairs in the Grand Duchy of Poznan), the Jews on the territory of the Grand Duchy were divided into two groups: naturalized and tolerated. To the first group only the richest, as well as scholars and artists, could be admitted. In addition to being in possession of a fortune or an education, conditions of naturalization included willingness to accept a surname and abandon traditional clothing as well as to speak German in public life. Although naturalized Jews had many rights in comparison with other Jews in Prussia, they were still bound by certain restrictions. The most important was that, without the permission of the authorities, they could not move to other Prussian provinces. Tolerated Jews did not have any rights. In 1847 naturalized Jews, who constituted approximately 25 per cent of the Jewish population of the region at that time, gained the same status as their co-religionists in the rest of Prussia. The economic position of Jews in Poznania varied considerably. ‘Towards the end of the 1840s representatives of the financial élite constituted barely 10 per cent, while a large group lived on the edge of poverty. The majority of Jews, faithful to the demands of their religion, were under the influence of their rabbis and were far from religiously or politically liberal. Before 1848 their contacts with the Christian

world were infrequent. At that time they engaged in public life mainly through their struggle for equal rights. They were inclined to mistrust Christians because of resolutions passed by the provincial parliaments in 1827 and 1845 opposing their 2 Eugen von Bergmann, Zur geschichte der Entwickelung deutscher, polnischer und judischer Bevolkerung in der Provinz Posen seit 1824 (Tubingen, 1883), 242-7.

70 Krzysztof A. Makowski total emancipation; there was also the attitude of many municipal councils, which did not grant them municipal rights. They avoided getting entangled in conflicts between the authorities and the Polish population, although on the whole they tried to be loyal to the Prussian king.® Such was the situation of the Jews as 1848 began—a year which was as turbulent

as any of the previous hundred years in that province. After the outbreak of the February revolution in Paris, the idea—fanned by liberals in western Europe—of a

general crusade against Russia, and the consequent rebirth of Poland, emerged among the Poles of the province. This stirred up fresh turmoil in Poznania, which was still depressed after the fiasco of the attempts to prepare for insurrection two years earlier. On 20 March news reached Poznan of the revolution in Berlin as well as of the royal patent, which, it was thought, gave the inhabitants of the province a free hand in the question of their allegiance to united Germany. The leaders of the Polish movement approached Moritz von Beurmann, the provincial president, and were granted permission to select a deputation to go to Berlin to present to the king

proposals dealing with the status of Poznania in the Prussian state. A national committee was appointed, which chose as its objective the liberation of the country, and after a period of indecision the Prussian authorities gave it recognition. However, instead of presenting the proposal for independence, the deputation, contrary to its mandate, merely suggested national reorganization of Poznania. In the course of negotiations with ministers it was agreed that the Poles would administer the province and that a Polish army corps would be established. On 24 March the king accepted the reorganization of the Grand Duchy of Poznan. The national committee then dispatched its representatives throughout the province and designated district commissioners to bring the insurrectionist leadership into line and

restore order, since in many areas people had arisen spontaneously against the Prussian authorities and formed armed units. In the meantime the war division of the national committee began preparations for war with Russia, with or without the assistance of Prussia. Ludwik Mierostawski, who took over the de facto leadership, soon had an army of 9,000 under his command. These initiatives were stimulated by events in Germany. In the first days of April both the German pre-parliament and the Prussian parliament called for the re-establishment of Poland. Soon, however, the political climate changed. The German Democrats were losing their influence, and the conservatives, together with the king, did not support the idea of war with Russia. Behind the backs of the liberal ministers the army in Berlin ordered General Friedrich August von Colomb to disband the Polish armed 3 More on the situation of the Jews of Poznan at the time can be found in S. Kemlein, Die Posener Juden 1815-1848. Entwicklungsprozesse einer polnischen Judenheit unter preussischer Herrschaft (Hamburg,

1997). Particularly important are the author’s calculations of the number of naturalized Jews (pp. 157 ff.). See also A. Eisenbach, Emancypacga Zydow na ziemiach polskich 1785-1870 na tle europejskim (Warsaw, 1988); and W. W. Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-191 4 (Chicago, 1980).

The Jews of Poznan in 1848 71 units and restore order in the Grand Duchy of Poznan. As a result, on 3 April Colomb declared a state of siege in Poznan and dispatched his army, the so-called ‘mobile columns’, which were to restore order throughout the province.

Meanwhile the Prussian government sent the royal commissioner, General Wilhelm von Willisen, who was to act on the proposals of the reorganizing committee, to the Grand Duchy. In the interests of peace and order he was to negotiate a compromise with the Poles. ‘To this end he appointed a new reorganizing committee and began negotiations with representatives of the national committee. However, he demanded the disbanding of the Polish armed units. Although at first this provoked general consternation, he managed to sway the members of the committee by promising in exchange the establishment of a national army in the Duchy. On 11 April in Jarostawiec, near Sroda, an agreement was reached, based on the premiss that in exchange for the Poles disbanding several of the armed units, a reorganization of the province would be initiated and military operations would cease. The core of the future Polish division was to be concentrated in four camps: WrzeSnia, Ksiaz, Pleszew, and Mitostaw. On 14 April the king accepted the prin-

ciples of the agreement, but under pressure from the German residents of the province ordered four of the western districts to be excluded from the reorganization of the Duchy, as well as the so-called Note¢ region. The Jarostawiec convention was considered by the Polish soldiers to be a betrayal. Likewise Mierostawski, who had not abandoned the idea of entering the kingdom of Poland, was against demobilization. Thus he ordered the official enactment of the agreement while simultaneously organizing reserve units. Meanwhile, Willisen attempted to carry out the national reorganization of the province. But, encountering stubborn opposition from the local Prussian administration in an atmosphere of general reluctance on the part of the Germans, he returned to Berlin. General Colomb, on the other hand, was looking for any pretext to close down the camps. Prussian squads began an operation throughout the province to remove the Polish authorities and disarm smaller Polish military units, which provoked resistance not only among the insurgents, but also among the civilian population. As a consequence, there were a few skirmishes. In response to all this the national committee turned to Berlin for help. Although the government promised to send a new royal commissioner, it excluded several more districts, together with Poznan, from the reorganization. Meanwhile General Colomb, taking advantage of the outbreak of military skirmishes, declared the convention of Jarostawiec broken and on 28 April ordered the liquidation of the Polish camps. In response to that order the national committee disbanded, and after three battles (at Ksiaz, Mitostaw, and Sokotow) against overwhelming odds, the military leadership surrendered on g May. Here and there partisan groups continued, but soon the entire Polish movement was totally crushed. After his arrival in Poznan during the first days of May the new royal commissioner, General Ernst Pfuel, declared martial law throughout the province, and early in

72 Krzysztof A. Makowski June established a new boundary limiting the Polish part to the small principality of Gniezno. Towards the end of October the Prussian National Assembly rejected even this proposition and decided to uphold the status guo ante. In the second half of 1849 the matter ceased to be discussed at all, and the Poles, taking advantage of the Prussian constitution, continued their struggle for national goals by non-military means.* How did the Jews respond to these events? With regard to the events in Berlin the Jews, like the Germans, took a ‘wait and see’ stance, the more so because there were rumours in the province that they were to be ‘wiped out and robbed’ by the Poles.? After the national committee issued a proclamation on 22 March guaranteeing that their rights would be honoured, even the Jews started to be affected by the euphoria

of those days.© Consequently, at a joint meeting that very evening, the Jews of Poznan, through their representatives Eduard Katz and Joseph Samter, declared their support for the Polish proposals. A large number also signed up for the local national guard (a total of ninety-three, which constituted over 16 per cent).’ The situation was much the same in other cities in the province. Public meetings __- were organized and, as a sign of brotherhood, Jews wore white and red ribbons and entered the citizens’ guard and local national committees.® Nevertheless, antiJewish incidents occurred in several localities in the Duchy. Although, as it later turned out, news of these was exaggerated, it inclined the national committee to issue a new proclamation on 24 March giving the Jews full citizens’ rights and appealing to them to support the common cause.”? This initiative turned out to be insufficient, and the period of mutual co-opera-

tion between the three nationalities living in the Grand Duchy of Poznan was coming to an end. Several factors contributed to this. The first serious cause for misunderstanding had arisen on 22 March, when the national committee refused to admit Germans and Jews from Poznan into its ranks. This step not only seriously undermined their trust in the Poles, but also dashed their political ambitions; the 4 More about the course of events in the Spring of Nations in Poznania can be found in, among others, S. Kieniewicz, Spoteczenstwo polskie w powstaniu poznanskim 1848 roku (Warsaw, 1960); K. Rakowski, Powstanie poznanskie w 1848 roku (L’viv, 1900); H. Schmidt, Die polnische Revolution des Jahres 1848 im Grossherzogtum Posen (Weimar, 1912); K. Makowski, ‘Das Grossherzogtum Posen im Revolutionjahr 1848’, in R. Jaworski and R. Luft (eds.), 1848/49. Revolutionen in Ostmitteleuropa

(Munich, 1996). > J. Moraczewski, Wypadki poznanskie z roku 1848 (Poznan, 1950), 32. ° Text of the proclamation in Biblioteka PTPN, Poznan, Rok 1848 w Wielkopolsce, sig. 60353 IV. ” Bialyniak [K. Rzepecki], W potmiekowa rocznice: Rok 1848-my. Opis wypadkéw w Berlinie 1 W. Ksiestwie Poznanskiem (Poznan, 1898), 35; Z. Grot, Orezny czyn poznanskiey Wiosny Ludéw (Poznan, 1948), 6.

"5 om W. Leitgeber (ed.), Pamietnik pulkownika Brzezanskiego z roku 1848 (Krakow, 1893), 6;

F. Paprocki, ‘Wykazy imienne czionkéw powiatowych i lokalnych komitetow narodowych w Wielkopolsce w 1848 r.’, Kronika Miasta Poznania, 1 (1948), 26-49; H. Wuttke, Stadtebuch des Landes Posen (Leipzig, 1877), 240.

° Biblioteka PTPN, Poznan, Rok 1848 w Wielkopolsce, sig. 60358 Iv. See also B. Grzes, J. Kozlowski, and A. Kramski, Niemcy m Poznanskiem wobec polityki germanizacyjnej 1815—1920, ed. L. Trzeciakowski (Poznan, 1976), 84; Eisenbach, Emancypacja Zydow na ziemiach polskich, 375.

The Fews of Poznan in 1845 73 very next day the Germans established their own committee, in which they included

the Jews. Crucially important for mutual relations, however, was the news on 24 March of the king’s assent to the national reorganization of the province, which in practice meant bestowal of autonomy. This aroused serious concern among both Germans and Jews regarding their status in a Grand Duchy of Poznan governed by Poles. The mood of distrust and the sense of threat grew with the removal of - Prussian bureaucrats, and especially with the establishment of Polish armed units.’° On 27 March the Germans established a new committee in Poznan, which now clearly began to work against Polish national aspirations. The situation was similar

elsewhere in the province. The Germans set up their own national committees; petitions from various corners of Poznania flooded Berlin, demanding the division

of the province and the incorporation of particular cities and districts into the German union. In many places, most often under cover of the army, or with its participation, the Germans began to restrict the growth of the Polish movement, especially in districts where the Germans were in the majority. The conflict escalated at the beginning of April, as maintaining the whole of Poznania in Prussia became the ultimate goal of the Germans. They categorically demanded the suppression of the Polish movement, and organized armed units for the purpose in many areas to support the army in pacifying the Poles. At that time bloody incidents were a frequent occurrence.1? In the face of the Polish-German conflict, the situation of the Jews, who were caught between the two sides, became particularly difficult. How did they respond in these circumstances? According to most of the literature on the subject—at the time and later—they were firmly on the side of the Germans. Differences lie only in the details of events and the motives behind their actions. The great majority of German authors claim that without exception the Jews joined the German movement and were decisively against Polish aspirations. ‘The reason they give for this is the attraction of the higher German culture, as well as their unwillingness to return to Polish rule. These opinions are supplemented by a long list of wrongs the Jews suffered at the hands of the Poles for their loyalty towards the Prussian state.‘ A similar position is found among Jewish authors, although the events of 1848 are not given much attention in their writings.'° 10 Grzes et al., Niemcy w Poznanskiem wobec polityki germanizacyjne, 78 ff.; Eisenbach, Emancypacja Lydow na ziemiach polskich, 391-2; Schmidt, Die polnische Revolution, 97 ff.

‘1 For a more detailed discussion, see W. Kohte, Deutsche Bewegung und preussische Pohtik 1m Posener Lande 1845-49 (Poznan, 1931), 25 ff.; Grzes et al., Niemcy w Poznanskiem wobec polityki germanizacyjne, 81 ff. 12 See e.g. C. Meyer, Geschichte der Provinz Posen (Gotha, 1891); Wuttke, Stadtebuch des Landes Posen; Kohte, Deutsche Bewegung.

13 Isaak Herzberg wrote a separate article on the events of the Spring of Nations in Poznania entitled ‘Die polnische Insurrektion und die Juden in den Posener Landen’, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, 40 (1910), 475-7. See also A. Heppner and I. Herzberg, Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der fJuden und der judischen Gemeinden in den Posener Landen (Kozmin, 1904, 1929), 239-42; I. Herzberg, Geschichte

74 Krzysztof A. Makowski Likewise, Polish authors, often with a note of bitterness, stress the decidedly pro-German stance of the region’s Jews, but give completely different explanations for their attitude. Generally, they accuse the Jews of typically taking the stronger side and being motivated by material gain. ‘This view is undoubtedly a reflection of the opinion expressed by one of the prominent participants in those events, Jedrzej Moraczewski, who wrote: ‘Materialistic ideas connected [the Jews] more closely with the Germans overrunning Poland for profit, rather than with the Poles, who have a poetic love of the fatherland.’'* To be fair, it must be said that such opinions are found primarily in older publications. Moreover, most Polish authors pay less attention to the pro-German stance of the Jews than to their anti-Polish attitude. They are often considered to have been even more at fault than the Germans for acting against the Poles. They are accused of many crimes, including mistreatment of prisoners, but primarily of inciting the Prussian soldiers against the insurgents and the civilian population. It should be stated that the last two allegations can be found in some of the writings of German authors.'° Although most Polish scholars do not deny the fact that during the events of 1848 there were anti-Jewish incidents, they nevertheless attempt to minimize and rationalize them in various ways, most often as revenge for earlier wrongs. In most cases, as mentioned above, the blame for provoking the incidents was placed on the Jews. An

excellent example of this interpretation is a sentence from an article printed in Dziennik poznanski in 1913: ‘Only when scythes were rattled and shots rang out, when Jewish features were clearly revealed and there were palpable causes, was some Jewish blood spilled, because Jews not only stood on the side of German reaction and

the Prussian armies but even provoked the Prussian soldiers to violence . . .’.'° Occasionally in Polish publications mention is made of neutral or pro-Polish Jewish attitudes, but this is most often explained as being motivated by fear of reprisal.‘

Thus in historical literature two radically different pictures of the attitude of the Jews of Poznania during the Spring of Nations have developed, both painted in black and white. Unfortunately, this is true not only of older publications, but also

the most recent.’® Cautious attempts to go beyond this simplistic approach are der Fuden in Bromberg (Frankfurt am Main, 1903), 63; L. Lewin, Geschichte der FJuden in Lissa (Pniewy,

1904), 119; id., ‘Geschichte der Juden in Inowrozlaw’, Zeitschrift der Historischen Gesellschaft fur die Provinz Posen (1900), 89. 14 Moraczewski, Wypadki poznanskie z roku 1846, 37. 15 See e.g. Heinrich von Brandt (ed.), Aus dem Leben des Generals der Infanterie z.D. Dr. Heinrich von Brandt, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1882), 11, Schmidt, Die polnische Revolution, 150 ff.

16 K. Z., ‘Zydzi poznanscy w r. 1848’, Dziennik poznanski, 120 (1913). See also, for instance, S. Karwowski, Historya Wielkiego Ksiestwa Poznanskiego, 3 vols., vol. 1: 1815-1852 (Poznan, 1918), 465-76; W. Stachowski, Rok 1848 w dawn. powiecie bukowskim (KoScian, 1934), 25 ff. 17 See e.g. Kieniewicz, Spoteczenstwo polskie, 217. 18 See e.g. M. Rezler, Wielkopolska Wiosna Ludéw (1848 roku): Zarys dziejéw militarnych (Poznan,

1993); L. Trzeciakowski, ‘Die Ereignisse von 1848 in Grossherzogtum Posen aus der Sicht threr Teilnehmer: der Polen, Deutschen und Juden’, Berliner Jahrbuch ftir osteuropdische Geschichte, 1 (1996), 229-49.

The Jews of Poznan in 1848 75 somewhat exceptional.’? There are various reasons for this state of affairs. I began my discussion by mentioning how the issue was used for purely political ends. This relates not only to Polish and German historical writing but to Jewish historical __-writing as well. The works mentioned above were written mainly at the start of the twentieth century, when the tide of antisemitism was rising in Germany. In describing the attitude of the Jews during the Spring of Nations, their authors were aiming primarily to stress that the Jews identified fully with the Germans, and to emphasize the enthusiasm with which they defended their Prussian homeland. Unfortunately, contemporary historical literature has been unable to rise above the myths and stereotypes that were generated at that time. It is no longer the result of a conscious distortion of the past, but rather a matter of poor historical research, caused first of all by a lack of familiarity with foreign literature (Polish or German), and secondly by the uncritical use of sources, especially diaries and the press. Let us look more closely at the mechanics of the problem. The best place to start is with the most sensitive issue; that is, with the scale of confrontation between Poles and Jews during the Spring of Nations in Poznania. From most of the publications on the

subject one gets the impression that the province witnessed serious incidents of slaughter and pogroms. However, this is unconfirmed by the sources. The press of the time, the administrative reports, and even the literature, while propagating such opinions, incline one to come to completely different conclusions. That such incidents did take place is unquestionable, but because of the vicious propaganda war being waged at the time, their scale was often exaggerated on both sides. Gossip of all kinds travelled around the province; for example, it was rumoured that Jews poisoned the water and vodka supplies.7° From time to time there were reports in journals and various other accounts of harm done to Poles or Jews; these appeared in both Gazeta polska and Zeitung des Grossherzogthums Posen. It did not matter that the reports turned out to be exaggerated or even false; what was important was that they allowed each side to create an image of events favourable to itself. The greatest

impact was made by the completely fabricated news printed on 26 March in the Berlin Zeitungshalle of the alleged slaughter of local Germans and Jews by the Poles of Gniezno.”! Because of conflicting evidence and lack of proof, it is often no longer possible to determine precisely the extent of the wrongs suffered by both sides. Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept that all the reports which have not been disproved are 19S. W. Baron, ‘The Impact of the Revolution of 1848 on Jewish Emancipation’, Jewish Social Studies, 3 (1949), 236-7; Kemlein, Die Posener Juden, 308-21; Kieniewicz, Spoleczenstwo polskie; Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews, 109-17; Eisenbach, Emancypacja Zydow na ziemiach polskich, 375 ff. 20 See e.g. H. Booms and M. Wojciechowski (eds.), Deutsche und Polen in der Revolution 1845-1849. Dokumente aus deutschen und polnischen Archiven (Boppard am Rhein, 1991), 276 (Hans von Schleinitz’s

report of 14 Apr. 1848 to the Provincial President). 21 Zeitung des Grossherzogthums Posen, 81 (1848), 448; A. Warschauer, Geschichte der Stadt Gnesen (Poznan, 1918), 424. See also Beitrage zur factischen Widerlegung der mit H. W. bezeichneten Flugschrift tiber die neuste polnische Insurrection im Grossherzogtum Posen’ (Berlin, 1848), 2-3.

76 Krzysztof A. Makowski true, the actions of Jews against Poles and vice versa were very limited in range. There were only three serious incidents (in Trzemeszno, WrzeSnia, and Buk), and these were directly connected with military operations. A few, perhaps a dozen Jews at most, died at Polish hands in the Grand Duchy in April and May of 1848. It can be surmised that during the time of the skirmishes several dozen more were wounded; moreover, in several localities Jewish stores and places of worship were broken into—in Milostaw, for example. In this incident it was the local villagers and not insurgents who were primarily to blame. I do not wish to minimize the tragedy of the victims, but I should like to stress that in Poznania a regular military battle was going on, and the Poles, rightly or wrongly, viewed the Jews as opponents. On an even smaller scale were the anti-Polish incidents perpetrated by Jews. Only the Jews of Trzemeszno were accused of treacherously shooting several insurgents during a skirmish with the Prussian army, and this was in conjunction with Germans. In several places, especially in Leszno and Krotoszyn, Jews supposedly prevented the Poles from taking control in the first days of the movement. Sources also mention reports of Jews removing Polish ribbons, inciting Prussian soldiers,

denouncing Polish activists, and tormenting the demobilized Polish insurgents after the signing of the Jarostawiec convention. However, all of these incidents took place within a dozen or so localities, and, judging from the reports, few people were directly involved.?” One of the more important issues is the scale of Jewish political involvement in

those days—not an easy question to resolve. To date no one has researched the number of Jews actively involved in the German national movement. It is known that two Jews, a doctor, Siegmund Hantke, and an innkeeper, Eduard Katz, mentioned earlier, were among the twelve-member German committee in Poznan. Towards the end of March, when the Germans expanded their representation, they co-opted first a merchant named Damrosch, and then three additional merchants,

Eduard Mamroth, Louis Falk, and Jaffé. Moreover, Katz was one of two representatives of the German citizens of Poznania who were to campaign in Berlin for the incorporation of the Duchy into Germany.?? In the provinces Jews participated in public meetings organized by the Germans and joined their citizens’ guard and national committees. In Gniezno, for example, of twenty elected representatives three were Jewish merchants.”* In several places,

especially in the western and northern parts of the province, Jewish municipal council members, together with Germans, sent petitions to Berlin demanding their exclusion from the reorganization and the incorporation of their particular region into the Reich.”° In several places it can be deduced from the reports that Jews 22 See Zbhurzenie Ksigza przez Prusakéw w dniu dwudziestym dziewigtym kwietnia 1848 r. (Poznan,

1849), 5-14. 23 Wuttke, Stadtebuch des Landes Posen, 240-9. 24 Warschauer, Geschichte der Stadt Gnesen, 246. 2° Grzes et al., Niemcy w Poznanskiem wobec polityki germanizacyjne), 95.

The Jews of Poznan in 1848 77 were key participants in organizing the German national movement. According to Isaak Herzberg, the Jews in Bydgoszcz were particularly active. Likewise in Leszno they were in the forefront of the Verein zur Wahrung deutscher Interessen in der Provinz Posen (Society for the Defence of German Interests in the Province of

Poznan).° On the basis of the above, and considering that there were almost 80,000 Jews in the Grand Duchy, neither the thesis that there was total support for the German

movement nor the assumption that anti-Polish attitudes were universal can be defended. In reality, the Jews were active in the German movement ona larger scale

only in Poznan and a few other cities in which there was a preponderance of Germans in the population. Furthermore, closer analysis indicates that in each of these localities only a handful of individuals were active, and these were mainly from the wealthier classes—the emerging bourgeoisie and intelligentsia.?’ In fact, in 1848 a few members of the local Jewish community had already spoken out against the false views that were generally held in Polish publications. For instance, in the polemic published in Gazeta polska mentioned above, Joseph

Samter wrote: ,

Believe me, Poles, the great number of Jews who believe that your cause is just do not deserve the accusations of Gazeta polska. . . . Brother citizens! Tell me honestly how you would like it if some writer cursed the entire Polish nation because some fool did something bad. ...soI protest against your claim that we are generally your enemies; I honour the holiness and justice of the Polish cause and genuinely wish that the Lord God never bestows on another nation the fate that we bore.”°

It is strange that no researchers to date have taken note of this.?° The sources confirm that Samter’s assurance was not just empty words. Among the progressive Jewish intelligentsia of Poznania who sympathized with the revolu-

tion, the Polish movement attracted enthusiastic supporters, at least initially. Especially active were doctors, particularly Marcus Mosse, who commanded the defence of Grodzisk against the Prussian army.?? Moreover, Robert Remak of Poznan, a doctor of renown at the time, was a member of the delegation to the king 26 Zeitung des Grossherzogthums Posen, 98 (1848), 566; Herzberg, Geschichte der Juden in Bromberg,

63; Lewin, Geschichte der fJuden in Lissa, 170. 27 See Kieniewicz, Spoteczenstwo polskie, 220. 28 Gazeta polska (1848), no. 16, p. 62. See also Zeitung des Grossherzogthums Posen, 98 (1848), 564; and the correspondence of Jewish residents of the Grand Duchy of Poznan published in Allgemeine Zeitung

des Fudenthums (2 June 1848), 357-8. It is worth noting that one of the Polish correspondents, who signed himself S. from Leszno, expressed a similar opinion in Gazeta polska (1848), no. 165, p. 662. 22 Kemlein was the most recent to mention this as a minor point in her book (Die Posener Juden, 317). 30 FE. Stocki, ‘Udzial lekarzy zydowskich w powstaniu poznanskim 1848 r.’, Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytuiu Historycznego, 11-12 (1954), 109-22; D. Matuszewski and M. Rezler, Wiosna Ludéw 1848 roku w Grodzisku Wlkp. (Grodzisk Wielkopolski, 1998), 21 ff.; Kieniewicz, Spoleczenstwo polskie, 220. Herzberg went so far in distorting the facts in his article on the events of 1848 that he claimed Mosse was the chief defender of German interests (‘Die polnische Insurrektion und die Juden’, 478).

78 | Krzysztof A. Makowski demanding the release of the prisoners of Moabit, and he later defended the Polish cause at the Constitutional Club in Berlin.*! It is also worth mentioning that Jews helped financially in the formation of insurgent armed units in Mitostaw. A dozen or so Jews joined Polish national committees in several localities. In Borek and Nowe Muasto, for example, members of the communities sent reports to the press

denying rumours of violence perpetrated on them or testifying to the peaceful atmosphere that reigned in the town.*? Even so, it should be emphasized that a proPolish stance was far rarer than a pro-German one.

In summary, I want to stress that, although there are numerous examples of direct involvement on the part of the Jews in the events of 1848 in Poznania, these could only pertain to a modest fraction of the population. That is why I fully agree with Artur Eisenbach’s assertion that most Jews did not support either side. This is true particularly of the poorer, less educated social classes, who generally remained neutral in the Polish—-German conflict.** Quite significant is the portion of a diary concerning these times written by the Jewish printer Baer Low Monasch from the town of Krotoszyn, which had been affected by the conflict. This is what he writes about 1848: During the six months of revolution my son Isidor and I did the work demanded by those times: we printed proclamations, posters, voters’ rolls, ballot papers, speeches and so on. Several times I was woken up in the middle of the night and asked to do rush work required in the morning. My labours during this period were so well paid that I managed to live without the eight marks from Behrend and even saved a modest sum.**

Although the diary was written not too long after the events, there is no trace in the report of emotional involvement in the conflict on the part of the author. The above claims do not change the fact that even before 1848 a large group of Jews of Poznania (although it is obviously impossible to determine how large) was

attached to German culture, and this, I suppose, laid the groundwork for the stereotypes mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, the phenomenon cannot be explained in as simplistic a manner as it was by contemporary writers, since the causes were very complex. In my opinion, three major factors influenced the trend towards

assimilation of the Jews into German culture in the Grand Duchy of Poznan: the Haskalah, the active attitude of the authorities, and the passive attitude of the Poles. 31 Zeitung des Grossherzogthums Posen, 82 (1848), 451; M. Motty, Przechadzki po miescie, ed. Z. Grot (Warsaw, 1857), 1. 52.

32 See Gazeta polska (1848), no. 20, p. 75; no. 22, pp. 84-5; no. 23, p. 89; no. 31, p. 117; Paprocki, “Wykazy imienne czionkdéw’. . 33 Eisenbach, Emancypacja Zydéw na ziemiach polskich, 393; Kieniewicz also mentions this (Spoleczenstwo polskie, 220). It is worth adding that most Germans and Poles were likewise passive towards the events taking place in the Grand Duchy of Poznan at that time. 54 P. Fraenkel, “The Memoirs of B. L. Monasch of Krotoschin’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 24 (1979), 216.

The Jews of Poznan in 1848 79 By 1848 the Haskalah, which assumed the acceptance of the language and culture of the country of residence and the practice of reformed religious observance, had already gained a significant following among the representatives of the local upper classes.®? The policy of the Prussian authorities towards the Jews of the Grand Duchy of Poznan dovetailed with the slogans of the Haskalah. The authorities used the educational system, and later also the army draft, to acculturate the Jews of Poznania by degrees. The open attitude of the local Germans during the Spring of Nations contributed to this process. It is possible to accuse them, as did some Polish journalists of the time, of having ulterior motives. Whether or not this is true, the Germans did elect Jews to their national committees and allowed them to join their citizens’ guard and the societies and associations which arose later. ‘The Jews must have felt this to be a manifestation and a guarantee of their total equal rights, and at the same time a recognition by the Germans of the Jews as ‘theirs’.

In the press and other publications they were most often written about as ‘die Deutschen jiidischer [or ‘mosaischer’| Religion’ (“Germans of the Jewish (or Mosaic)

religion’). If we add to this the general loyalism of the local Jews, which I mentioned , earlier, then it is hardly surprising that in many cases the Jews defended their German homeland with the enthusiasm of neophytes, especially since the matter of equal rights was not yet completely resolved.

The attitude of Poles in Poznania towards the Jews was radically different. | Absorbed in the battle to defend their own nationhood after the partitions, they did practically nothing to oppose Prussian policy and attract the Jews to their cause. At the crucial moment they limited themselves to issuing proclamations, which were not followed by concrete action. On the contrary, the national committee denied the Jews membership in its ranks, destroying once and for all the chance of any wider co-operation. At this point one might ask whether the local Poles were at all interested in gaining the support of Jews for their cause. Unfortunately, it 1s hard to find convincing arguments supporting an affirmative answer to this question. Until 1830, in light of the struggle to regain their own state, the Poles gave the Jewish question low priority. After the defeat of the November uprising, when more and more voices—especially among the emigrants—traised the issue of giving Jews citizenship, the response in Poznania was slow in coming. At that time support was

increasing for ‘organic’ work, which stressed economic development and the creation of a strong Polish middle class—as measured against the Germans and the Jews. Although the supporters of organic work never excluded the possibility of cooperation with individual Jews who were favourably disposed to Polish causes, striving to incorporate the Jews as a group would have been considered contrary to Polish interests. In the face of the weakness of both the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, and the 35 See also J. Bartys, ‘Grand Duchy of Poznan under Prussian Rule: Changes in the Economic Position of the Jewish Population 1815-1848", Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 17 (1972), 198; Kemlein, Die Posener Fuden, 205 ff.; Eisenbach, Emancypacja Zydow na ztemiach polskich, 47-8.

80 Krzysztof A. Makowski conservative attitude of the majority of estate owners, there was no social or political

group in the Grand Duchy of Poznan at the time that could formulate a coherent programme for emancipating the Jews and winning them over to Polishness. Moreover, it was fairly generally held that the Jews owed Poland a debt of gratitude for giving them shelter in the past, and that they should feel obligated to pay back this debt by unconditionally supporting Polish national ambitions. However, the Jews were of the conviction that since they had lived on these lands for centuries they constituted an integral part of society, and therefore deserved not only equal rights, but also the freedom to decide on their own affairs. If we add to this the cautious attitude of Jews towards Poles, originating in the independent Commonwealth and deeply rooted in their consciousness, as well as the frequent signs of resentment Jews saw in Poles,°*° then it is easier to understand why so few of them were engaged

in the highly uncertain business of the restoration of Poland. For these reasons, there was virtually no Polonization among the Jews. Moreover—although this is a subject for a separate investigation—it seems that Polish culture, with its Catholic rustic ethos, was not particularly attractive to the Jews in Poznania. The bourgeois Protestant value system of the Germans was probably much closer to their own. As I have mentioned, the Jews were highly urbanized. Nor was it without significance that since the Middle Ages Jews and Germans had been minorities together in Poznan. Thus to some extent a common fate united

them, while their mutual relations were unfettered by old grievances. Although the events of the Spring of Nations did influence some Jews to opt for a proGerman stance, it can be assumed that at least with regard to the upper classes, the course of acculturation had already been decided. The events in Poznania were also of interest to Jews outside the province. For

example, the Poznan press published two letters from Jews of the kingdom of Poland. The first called upon Jews to support the cause of the restoration of Poland, and the second condemned their pro-German sympathies.®’ These two themes were linked in the widely known proclamation of the Jews of Krakow written by Rabbi Ber Meisels.?° The Jews of the Great Emigration also voiced their opinion on the matter. At the beginning of April Leon Hollaenderski called upon the Jews of Poznan to spare no effort in the cause of the liberation of Poland, and called upon Poles to be true to the principles of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. Henryk Gonsawer, an emigrant to Nancy, publicly expressed similar sentiments. In June Jan Czynski strongly criticized the pro-German stance of the Jews of Poznan. An

important role in the emigration of that time was played by Ozeasz Ludwik Lubliner, who as a delegate at the parliamentary sessions in Frankfurt tried to win 36 See Gazeta polska (1848), no. 16, p. 62 (the polemic of J. Samter); no. 165, p. 662 (letter from S. from Leszno); Zeitung des Grossherzogthums Posen (1848), no. 98, pp. 563-4 (J. Samter’s article). 37 Gazeta W. Xiestwa Poznanskiego (1848), no. 97, p. 404; Gazeta polska (1848), no. 67, p. 262. 38 See E. Halicz (ed.), Nurty lewicowe w dobie polskich powstan narodowych 1794-1849. Wybor zrodet (Wroclaw, 1961), 352-3.

The Jews of Poznan in 1848 SI over the German democrats to the Polish cause. In his dissertation, written just after 1848, he likewise criticized the pro-German stance of the Jews of Poznan and argued that it was historically and legally unjustified.°? The events in Poznania also

had a significant impact on liberal Jewish circles in Germany. Some of them dreamed of overcoming national conflicts through the restoration of Poland. In this project Jews were to play the role of intermediaries between Germans and Poles. In addition, they expected that the defeat of Russia would liberate their co-religionists in the kingdom of Poland. However, when news of bloody incidents in Poznania reached them, their attitude underwent a radical change.*° Finally, it should be stressed that, as in the entire realm of the Hohenzollerns, the year 1848 constituted a clear demarcation line for the Jews in Poznania. The

Springtime of the Nations brought them voting rights and almost full citizens’ rights. A political awakening also took place among them, which was expressed largely through participation in the citizens’ guard and the German national committees and associations. However, the majority of Jews, especially poor inhabitants of small towns, remained totally passive. The Polish movement did not meet with significant support from them. Besides, in the face of the Polish—German conflict, Polish leaders treated the Jewish question as marginal, and made no effort to win

over Jewish opinion. ‘This factor was decisive in the orientation and scale of the

acculturation of the Jews. |

The Spring of Nations undoubtedly cast a shadow over relations between nationalities in Poznania, which never returned to their earlier condition. Despite certain fluctuations, tensions lasted right up to the outbreak of the First World War. However, we cannot simply speak of a complete sundering of relations, with Germans and Jews on one side and Poles on the other. For instance, in the parliamentary elections only a fraction of Jews voted for Germans, and then only for liberals, while in many districts they entered into coalitions with Poles, especially in smaller localities. Contacts also existed at other levels, primarily in institutions connected with local government, and especially in the economic sphere. Directly after the events of the Spring of Nations the effects of the conflicts were felt most deeply by the Jews: shortly afterwards their rights were limited, as the Germans— especially the conservatives—withdrew their support. They were also affected by the economic boycott declared by the Polish League. This was undoubtedly the 39 O. L. Lubliner, Uwagi krytyczne nad postepowaniem Zydéw w Xiestwie Poznanskiem w roku 1848

oparte na dowodach historycznych 1 prawnych (Poznan, 1850) (MS at the main library of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, sig. 229 11); A. Eisenbach, Wielka Emigracja wobec kwesti zydowskie] 1832-1849 (Warsaw, 1976), 444 ff.; Eisenbach, Emancypacja Zydéw na ziemiach polskich, 363 ff. 40 Allgemeine Zeitung des Fudenthums (10 Apr. 1848), 236-7; Baron, “The Impact of the Revolution of 1848 on Jewish Emancipation’, 236-7.

“1 R. Rirup, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and Jewish Emancipation’, in W. E. Mosse, A. Pauker, and R. Rurup (eds.), Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-fewish History (Tiibingen, 1981); Z. Grot, Dziatalnosé postow polskich w seme pruskim 1848-50 (Poznan, 1961), 158; Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Fews, 117; Eisenbach, Emancypacja Zydéw na ziemiach polskich, 399.

— -82 Krzysztof A. Makowski most important cause of the mass emigration of Jews from Poznania, mainly to Berlin and Breslau and other parts of Germany, but also to Great Britain and the United States.*” Translated from Polish by Christopher Garbowskt 42 Heppner and Herzberg, Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der fuden, 242; Lisenbach, Emancypacja Zydéw na ziemiach polskich, 401; Grzes et al., Niemcy w Poznanskiem wobec polityki germaniza-

cyjnej, 129-30. It should be added that the emigration of Jews from the Grand Duchy of Poznan was also and in no lesser degree caused by the economic rivalry they faced from the middle class—mainly the German middle class.

The Rabbinical Schools as Institutions of Socialization in ‘T’sarist Russia, 1847-1873 VERENA DOHRN BETWEEN 1847 and 1873 the rabbinical schools of Vilna and Zhitomir were not merely educational institutions; their general role in promoting reform and their

specific status as boarding schools made them vehicles of socialization as well. | School regulations and the conduct and self-awareness of pupils and teachers—as well as the public’s fear of contact and its suspicion of these institutions—marked off the schools from the traditional Jewish world around them. The schools developed their own atmosphere, which left a lasting impression on the pupils. In this

chapter I will attempt to show how the special character of these institutions evolved during the period in which they emerged and developed. Their character was expressed by the rabbinical schools’ living quarters, with well-furnished and well-equipped rooms, by the appearance of pupils and teachers, by school regulations (especially the system of supervision), and by the conduct of the headmasters, teachers, supervisors, and pupils. Our information comes from two fundamentally different sources—public records and memoirs; in addition the schools have also attracted a significant historiographical literature. The records

document the administrative and disciplinary aspects of the rabbinical schools, while the memoirs convey experiences from childhood and adolescence, and contain highly individual accounts of school life. ‘The connections between these two kinds of source are fascinating. The total picture has to be constructed from hetero-

geneous and fragmentary information, and, as a consequence, some situations remain vague or unexplained.

THE SCHOOL BUILDINGS ‘Since Vilna’s medical-surgical academy closed, and its facilities were taken over by the Gymnasium, only the national coat of arms that hung in the academy premises

remains’, wrote the curator of the Belarusian school district, Evarest A. Gruber, on 12 December 1847, to the director of all schools within the Vilna district. He recommended placing this coat of arms in the building of the rabbinical school. On

84 Verena Dohrn 7 January 1848 the school’s administration confirmed receipt of it." The item is mentioned again in the school’s inventory of 1865, where it is described as a goldplated tin eagle.* A few months after the rabbinical school opened, the tsarist insignia was affixed above the entrance gate and became the institute’s symbol from that point onwards. According to the inventory, the rooms were decorated not with pictures of respected Jews but with likenesses of Russian authorities, including a

sculpture and two portraits of Alexander II and a portrait of Nicholas I. In the prayer hall was a prayer about the tsarist family’s benevolence in a gold frame and a plaque commemorating the visit of Alexander II on Yom Kippur 1858.°

Vilna’s rabbinical school was located on Zawalna Street, near the city centre. That in Zhitomir was on the outskirts of the town. In Vilna the premises consisted of a Spacious town house, whereas in Zhitomir they were modest wood and brick buildings connected by courtyards. The buildings for both schools were leased from the state rather than purchased, and their leases renewed annually.* Both schools were small at first, but grew over time, as enrolment fluctuated considerably. During the Crimean War enrolment increased by 27 per cent and 16.5 per cent a year in Vilna

and Zhitomir respectively: from 157 in Vilna and 1go in Zhitomir during the academic year of 1851/2 to 253 in Vilna in 1853/4 and 301 in Zhitomir in 1854/5. Afterwards it plummeted, but increased again in the early 1860s. Ultimately, the school in Vilna had 500 pupils and that in Zhitomir somewhat fewer.° There were fifty grant students in Vilna and thirty-three in Zhitomir; later there were sixty-five at each of the institutions. The other students paid for their tuition. Many did not board at the school but found lodgings in the city. Nikolai Pruzhansku, for example, reported that he and another rabbinical school student before him stayed at Vilna’s new choral synagogue, as he was a guard there.® Mikhail Morgulis mentions rooms being let in Zhitomir, often accommodating six to ten students. They were let with the approval of the headmaster and served as a gathering place during leisure time and holidays for those who boarded out.’ In 1865 when the headmaster, Kassian A. Pavlovskii, handed over administration to Petr A. Bessonov, his inventory listed 55 school desks and benches, 69 wooden beds and 42 stools, 117 tin and 86 china dinner plates, 61 tin cups, 130 tin spoons, 66 knives and 55 forks, bedclothes for 69 beds, and school uniforms for 65 students. Thus, furniture, tableware, and uniforms were available to the grant students.® 1 Lietuvos Valstybinis Istorijos Archyvas, Vilnius (LVIA), collection 577, list 2, act 1, fos. 77-8.

inventory 338, fos. 106-10. 3 Tbid. 2 Inventory for 1865, Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Muzei, Moscow (GIMM), collection 56, * LVIA, collection 567, inventory 2, file 5916, fo. 80 (1847); cf. LVIA, file 647; cf. also collection

577, inventory 2, file 17, fo. 2ob (1872); Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Istorychnyi Arkhiv Ukrainy (TsDIAV), collection 707, inventory 87, file 1342a, Br, 116; TsDIAU, collection 707, inventory 87, file 2149, 85 pp. > J. Gessen, ‘Ravvinskie uchilishcha v Rossii’, Fvreiskaia entsiklopediia (EE), 16 vols. (St Petersburg,

1908-13), Xill. 258-63. 6 N. Pruzhanskii, ‘Perezhitoe’, Knizhki Voskhoda, 5 (1904), 41. 7 M. Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, Voskhod, 15/9 (1895), 107; 15/11—12 (1895), 86. 8 GIMM, collection 56, inventory 338, file 8/78, fos. 106-10.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia 85 In addition to the classrooms, the rabbinical schools contained a kitchen and a dining hall, an infirmary, an office and records archive, a library, and apartments for the headmaster, the inspector, the supervisor, and the custodian. ‘The headmaster in Zhitomir complained to the authorities (who were less generous than those in Vilna) of cramped conditions, shortages, and inadequacies. A few contemporary students mentioned overcrowding. In the lower forms over sixty students were usually squeezed into a class.? Rearrangements to create more space were more frequent here than in Vilna. Buildings were sometimes let or vacated, or a service residence or classrooms in the boarding school were converted to serve other purposes. ‘Throughout its existence, however, the school was located at the intersection of Chudovskii and Berdichevskii Streets. In his memoirs Mikhail (Manasseh) Morgulis, who was admitted to Zhitomir in 1852/3, offers a remarkably detailed description of the school. Instead of the ‘temple of scholarship’ he had expected, he found a two-storey house on a large estate, packed with students, adults, and adolescents, whose conduct and dress amazed him: The intersection of Chudovskii Street and short Berdichevskii Street where the Zhitomir school was established, far from the city centre and its urban hustle and bustle, served the school’s mission. The only other institution [in this part of the town] was the prison across the street. The windows of the two faced each other. During breaks, students would sit on the window ledges and look into the prison windows, where the inmates sat and looked back

in silence. ... , |

The school buildings comprised two and a half storeys. The bottom storey resembled a basement. Its windows opened directly onto the pavement. The classrooms up to the fourth form and the one for the seventh form were here. ‘The smell of damp was so strong that the Polish writer Jozef Kraszewski, on a visit to the school’s headmaster, drew back in dismay at one of the classroom doors. The second storey contained the classrooms for all the remaining upper forms and the inspector’s residence. ‘These rooms were large and bright and well suited for their purpose. The third level contained the common dormitory, where both the grant and the tuition-paying students lived. A tall, covered stairway led to a glass gallery, ending in broad doors opening into the dormitory. Here, the most noticeable sight 1s a storage area in a secluded section of the gallery. This luggage room is the most interesting part of the dormitory. It is a sacrosanct space containing all the deepest secrets. The dormitory’s true valuables are locked away here: tea, sugar, gingerbread, home-baked goods, goose fat, and occasionally—for those of age—alcoholic beverages. Throughout the day this area is shrouded in silence. ‘The only time of activity 1s before the noon meal and sometimes before

breakfast: people open the locks and grope through their suitcases, removing assorted edibles from various corners, the half-open suitcases concealed from others. .. . From this gallery, where the storage area was, wide doors opened onto a fairly spacious hallway, with walls lined with hooks for the jackets. To the right of the hallway was the washing area, containing a huge round basin with a copper cistern decorated with roosters on a copper dish. In the washing area the older students thrashed the younger ones as they 9 Pruzhanskii, ‘Perezhitoe’, Knizhki Voskhoda, 6 (1904), 84-5; K. Margaliot, Zikhronot miyamim avaro (Warsaw, 1895), 34; Den, 15 (1870), 255-7.

86 Verena Dohrn pleased, and with the same force as the thrashings they received in class on Fridays. Here, thrashings occurred several times a day rather than once a week. There was nothing else remarkable about the washing area. The other doors, which faced the entrance, led from the hallway toa large room with many windows overlooking the prison. In this room six or seven long tables with benches along both sides and a stool at the head of each, next to the wall, ran from the windows to the doors. Here sat the class elder (starshi1), who was responsible for all the others seated at the table. The wall opposite the windows was lined with alcoves containing the books and notebooks for each table. Both sides of the room led to sleeping areas; one side had two bright rooms and the other three, though the one leading to the legendary storage room was less bright. At the doorway of each bedroom was a tall nightlight consisting of a long metal pipe filled with water at the top, containing a long tallow candle designed to burn from eleven at night until six in the morning... . Outside the building was a spacious courtyard known as the paradnyi dvor (main courtyard), where the students strolled during their breaks or to relax from doing their homework inside. Along the street was a fence with a gate, through which the boarders jostled at the end of the day. Opposite the fence was an annexe in which the custodian (podriadchik), the legendary Itsko, lived. The kitchen was there as well. Across from the main building was another annexe containing both the dining hall and the infirmary, where students came if they felt ill or needed to see the school physician, who visited the school once a week. Beside the infirmary was the residence of the supervisor (nadziratel), who lived at the dormitory and kept order. The paradnyi dvor extended along the supervisor’s residence into the backyard where the supply areas (s/uzhby) were. This backyard was a frequently used passageway to the courtyard of the building next door, through which students could easily escape from the supervisor’s view and sneak into the city and return equally unnoticed.!°

Mikhail Morgulis completed the rabbinical course at the school in Zhitomir in 1861, and Chaim Margaliot was accepted there as a grant student in 1863/4. In his memortrs the later state rabbi of Dubno describes the school buildings in the second decade and how the headmaster, Pavlovskii, who was transferred from the school in Vilna to the one 1n Zhitomir, rented a large courtyard and had it lavishly renovated and cleaned. He moved both the teaching facilities and the living quarters there. He also relocated the office to these premises, as, in addition to a large building, the courtyard contained five spacious wooden houses."

THE APPEARANCE OF THE STUDENTS AND THEIR JEWISH INSTRUCTORS Although the first generation of Jewish instructors usually wore the old style of dress and looked the same as their co-religionists, the students had a distinctive hairstyle and garb. Uniforms were required at rabbinical schools. Like their counterparts at Russian Orthodox schools, these students wore double-breasted jackets and

trousers made of dark green wool in the winter and dark blue nankeens in the ‘9 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 15/9 (1895), 103; 15/11—12 (1895), 82-5. ‘I Margaliot, Zikhronot, 26-7.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia 87 summer. hey also wore dark green peaked caps, no yarmulkes, and shaved their beards and trimmed their hair. Proponents of educational reform insisted that the young men wore clothes and shoes that were compatible with their tradition and were not forced to wear the tsarist uniform, as Gymnasium students were. They believed that this system obviated social distinctions and brought about democratic equality.!* Opponents of school uniforms, however, saw them as a violation of religious prescriptions. To traditional east European Jews, abandoning their conven-

tional garb, trimming their beards, and going bareheaded was tantamount to flouting the principle of tse/em elohim (that dress should reflect man’s position as the image of God).'? Many of them believed that the students at the schools were ‘treyf embodying an evil spirit’.‘+ Certainly, their uniforms alienated the students from traditional Jewish society and led them to be ostracized. At the same time the uniforms reflected the Haskalah’s goal of dress reform as it had been conceived by the maskilim of Vilna in the early 1840s. The reformers had called for such a change but had stopped short of imposing it for fear of being persecuted and ostracized until they received orders from the tsarist government to take these measures.!° The introduction of uniforms at the rabbinical schools was part of a larger policy to induce the Jews of the tsarist empire to abandon their traditional mode of dress.'® Jewish men’s traditional garb (belted kaftans, breeches, knee-length socks, slippers, and beaver-lined shtreime/s covering their yarmulkes) had become a sign of cultural status, signifying an authentic relationship with Jewish tradition and a commitment

to stability and continuity. Influenced by the west European wave of modernization, the maskilim in eastern Europe saw traditional Jewish garb as obsolete and a barrier to social change. They devised other norms for dress, complaining that traditional dress isolated Jews from their ‘educated fellow citizens’ and complicated the acceptance of Jews within non-Jewish society. Maskilim such as Izaac Meir Dik and Abraham Mapu questioned traditional religious models of social legitimization. % R. Kulisher, Jtogi (Kiev, 1896), 39-40; Pruzhanskii, ‘Perezhitoe’, 6 (1904), 82; P. Liakub, ‘Opisanie Vilenskogo ravvinskogo uchilishcha’, Rassvet, 15 (1860-1), 242. 13 A. Paperna, ‘Vospominaniia’, Perezhitoe, 3 (1911), 358; P. Wengeroff, Memoiren einer Grossmutter, 2 vols. (2nd edn. Berlin, 1913), i. 199.

MA. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben (‘Pages of my Life’) (New York, 1926), 123-4; trans. as The Education of Abraham Cahan by L. Stein, A. P. Conan, and L. Davison (Philadelphia, 1969). A bitshrift fun wilner maskilim (‘A Petition of the Vilna Maskilim’), in U. Margulis, Di Geshikhte Jun yidn 1m rusland (“The History of Jews in Russia’), i. 1772-1861 (Moscow, 1930), 446-9; Perezhitoe, 1 (1910), 12-14. ‘© Pauline Wengeroff, Isaac Meir Dik, and other authors have described the garb of east European

Jews, reporting on the clothing reform and commenting on these changes. Wengeroff, Memoiren, i. 194-210; I. M. Dik, Di yidishe kleyderumwekslung wos ist geshehen in dem yor 1844 (“The Exchange of the

Jewish Garb’), trans. of an article by L. Levanda, Den (1844), with additions by the translator (Vilna, 1870); M. Berlin, Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo naselentia v Rossii (“Ethnographics of the Russian Jewish

Population’), Etnograficheskii sbornik 5 (St Petersburg, 1861), i. 11-14; J. Gessen, ‘Odezhda: Russkoe zakonodatelstvo ob odezhde evreev’ (‘Clothes: Russian Laws concerning Jewish Clothes’), EE xii. 46-50.

88 Verena Dohrn Dik and Levanda noting the garb’s non-Jewish origin, and Mapu considering biblical styles of dress to be impractical, they recommended pragmatic, hygienic, eco-

nomic, and aesthetic alternatives. Reforming modes of dress would help Jews become ‘useful citizens’.* Moses Montefiore, the philanthropist and advocate of Jewish rights, was highly respected throughout Jewish circles, especially among the Jews in eastern Europe. During his visit to Russia traditional Jews were deeply confused to see this observant Jewish man travelling through Poland and Russia in European garb and witha European hairstyle at the height of the debate on clothing reform in 1846.'® Sholem Abramovich (Mendele Mokher Seforim) elaborated on this experience in an anecdote that credited Montefiore with being responsible for the reform. Montefiore was said to have offered the tsar money if he agreed not to impose the reform on the Jews. Although the tsar readily agreed to this proposition, one of his ministers pointed

out that it would be foolish to give up an unfailing source of taxes and recommended that the tsar implement clothing reform to deceive Montefiore. Dressed as

Germans, the Jews would be unrecognizable to him. Following the reform, the philanthropist was said to have searched in vain for the Jews.?° The clothing reform was implemented over eight years (1844-52). All Jews wearing standard local non-Jewish dress received a tax exemption, whereas those con-

tinuing to wear more traditional garb continued to pay the higher rate, except for | children under 10 and adults over 60.7° At the insistence of Tsar Nicholas I (against

the vote by the committee for Jewish reform), a tax on yarmulkes was imposed. Shortly thereafter all Jews—except for the elderly, who with the governor’s permission paid a special tax—were prohibited from wearing their traditional style of dress. In addition, Jewish women were forbidden to shave their heads when they married.

The rabbis were entrusted with enforcing the prohibition and held accountable. Every distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish garb was to be eliminated. Sidelocks were strictly forbidden, as were ta/it, tefillin, and yarmulkes outside religious services. Rabbis, since they were not required by their religion to wear special clothes and were influential throughout the Jewish community, had to wear the same style of dress as the non-Jewish population.*! The policy that the maskilim attributed to the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment was perceived by the people in the Pale of Settlement region as an infringement on their Judaism, a state-imposed oppressive decree (gezerah). The maskilim, 17 Dik, Di yidishe kleyderumwekslung; A. Mapu, Ahavat tsion: kol kitvey (and edn. Tel Aviv, 1955), 19.

"3 L. Loewe (ed.), Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore (facs. of the London edn., 1890; London, 1983), 352.

19 M.M. Seforim, Schloimale, trans. S. Birnbaum (Berlin, 1924), 58-63. 20 Polozhenie o korobochnom sbore s evreev (Dec. 1844), sect. 14; 20e Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rosstiskoi Imperii, XIX, no. 18.545. 21 §. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earlhest Times until the Present Day,

trans. I. Friedlander, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1916-20), ii. 143-5; Gessen, ‘Odezhda’.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia 39 for their part, objected to the widespread use by the police of violent and humiliating methods to enforce the kleyderumbeytung (‘conversion of dress’) or kleyderumvekslung (‘exchange of dress’) as the practice was known in Yiddish. The police tore off women’s bonnets to reveal their shaved heads in the public market and brutally cut

off men’s sidelocks and removed their kaftans in the middle of the street.** The effect was counter-productive. As Simon Dubnow was to point out later, if east European Jews were gradually starting to dress in European clothes, this change was occurring in spite of, rather than because of, the clothing reform.”° Since the late 1840s the daytsh, as the Jews wearing European clothes were called, had been an

increasingly common sight in the shtet/s of the settlement region. Most people, however, tried to avoid displaying conspicuous associations with either the traditionalists or the modernizers. Such forms of compromise included wearing a slightly shorter kaftan, a top hat instead of a shtrezme/, and the old Jewish cap with | high earflaps like a peaked cap over the yarmulke, as well as trimming their beards

slightly. |

Students at rabbinical schools had a similar experience with their school uniforms, which were quite conspicuous. The students looked as odd as the Jewish excise collectors, who shaved and wore short jackets. Their European clothes reflected their elevated status, which was viewed as progressiveness by some and as

heresy by others. The memoirs of Albert (Abraham Elijah) Harkavy record the provocative effect of these uniforms on the people of Vilna: The grant students, in particular, appeared on the streets mainly in short black jackets; they sported haircuts and even shaved, wore gloves, and contrasted sharply with the masses. I remember how G. [Moisei Gurvich, a teacher at Vilna’s rabbinical school], who eventually had himself baptized and became a high-ranking official, wore black gloves when he went for

walks. His father prepared wooden packing boxes at the gate of a transit station.”* ,

Harkavy, along with Abraham Cahan, whose recollections convey a similar impression, viewed the appearance of the rabbinical school students with a combination of reserve and fascination. Neither Harkavy nor Cahan studied at the school.

However, as a law student in St Petersburg in the 1860s, Harkavy followed the example of the students by exchanging his clothing for more European garb and hairstyle, as a photograph proves. His adaptation to Russian society, however, served to make him less conspicuous and did not irritate other Jews in the way the rabbinical school students did. Cahan remembers feeling ‘ecstatic’ upon learning that his father intended to enrol him in the rabbinical school (which he did not actually do). The boy’s father derived his modern ideas (hayntigen ambitsies) from the private Russian lessons he received from a student at a rabbinical school. He 22 Wengeroff, Memoiren, i. 208-9; Dubnow, History. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (AZ) (1845), 304, 390; (1846), 318, 641, 754; (1847), 136; (1850), 229, 543, 635-6; (1851), 67, 214, 222, 235,

260-1, 282, 295, 332-3, 344-5, 512; (1853), 396; (1856), 299. 23 Dubnow, History, ii. 145. 24 V. Garkavi[A. Harkavy], ‘Otryvki vospominanii’, Perezhitoe, 14 (1912), 274—5. Cf. n. 49.

go Verena Dohrn had thus benefited from this modern education without having to take a public stand.”°

The subtle differences among the memoirs show that those who attended the schools did not have a uniform attitude to their experiences there. The traditional world viewed the rabbinical schools as alien, and deplored their deviation from custom. Insiders’ perceptions of the new educational institutions suggest various issues: for some (Mikhail Morgulis, Nikolai Pruzhanskii, Lev Levanda, Ruben Kulisher), the difficulty of reconciling tradition and reform and (ironically) the accompanying ambivalence in considering them as opposing forces; for others (Yakov Gurland, Petr Liakub, Ruben Kulisher, Chaim Margaliot), the question of how to establish areas in which tradition and reform are compatible.”° The introduction of school uniforms had another, entirely different, effect, which was also calculated by the reformers. The unity and uniformity signified seclusion and strength, the power of educational reform.”’ Supplying the students with coats and shoes, jackets, trousers, shirts, waistcoats, suspenders, scarves, and peaked caps kept them warm, reassured them, and was a considerable luxury amid the dire poverty of many families in the Jewish settlement region in the 1850s and 1860s. Many children were so poor they could not attend school for lack of clothes and shoes.”° The reports of former grant students convey gratitude for the outfits and the care they received.” The uniforms worn by the Jewish teachers were recognized, and even legitimized their role. Mikhail Morgulis writes that a teacher, Hirsch Segal, found a religious justification for not wearing yarmulkes in Jewish schools. He became known as General of the Yarmulkes.*° The Europeanized yeshiva students (known as obevropetvshiesia orumbokhery— self-Europeanizing poor students, according to Pruzhanskii), who came exclusively to sit for the final exam, were a special phenomenon at the rabbinical school. They reached their own compromise between tradition and modernity, attending various yeshivas in Vilna, and sitting for the exams there as well as those at the rabbinical school. They thus participated in the new system of education but had not broken with tradition and had continued to wear sidelocks and kaftans.*? Most of the first generation of Jewish teachers wore traditional garb. Abraham Ber Lebenson, who taught Bible studies and Hebrew language and literature at the

Vilna school, accepted no compromise. He was said to have continued wearing — %° Cahan, Bleter, 123-6.

26 Liakub, ‘Opisanie’, 242; Kulisher, /togi, 40; Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 15/9 (1895), 121: the seminary students were considered identical to other Jews, except that they trimmed their hair; Pruzhansku, Perezhitoe, 6 (1904), 82-3; Margaliot, Z:khronot, 35. 27 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 15/9 (1895), 121. 28 T. Rulf, Meine Reise nach Kovno (‘My Journey to Kovno’) (Memel, 1869); AZF (1869), 162-4; Otchet chlena soveta Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshchenta Postelsa po obrazovanuu evreiskikh uchilishch

(St Petersburg, 1865), 31. 29 A. Kovner, ‘Iz zapisok evreia’, [storicheskii vestnik, 3 (1903), 988; Margaliot, Zikhronot, 27.

30 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 17/4 (1897), 77. |?! Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 3 (1904), 29.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia QI sidelocks and a kaftan, although his son, a hotel owner and the school’s patron, sported a top hat and fashionable trousers.** Iuda Idel Shereshevsky and his son Ilya Sh. were a similar case.?? The school inspector and history teacher Samuel Joseph Fuenn was said to have observed religious tradition by tying a handkerchief around his waistcoat like a belt on the sabbath.** Even such a zealous advocate of clothing reform as Izaac Meir Dik, who taught at a public Jewish school in Vilna and worked closely with the rabbinical school, exercised moderation by wearing a beard and a medium-length jacket.*° The appearance of the Jewish teachers changed with the second generation in Vilna. At that point they were permitted to wear the uniforms issued by the Ministry of Education and Science, which featured shiny brass buttons. This certainly raised their status—representatives of the government were called knep/ (‘buttons’) in Yiddish, because they all wore uniforms with such buttons. School uniforms served to even out social differences, although other social distinctions existed within the rabbinical school, including undemocratic regulations.

SCHOOLDAYS, THE BOARDING SCHOOL, AND SUPERVISION OF MORAL CONDUCT The rabbinical schools’ objectives included reconciling fundamentally different principles and value systems by linking the ethos promoted by the tsarist authorities, enriched at first by the humanist principles of the Enlightenment and later by a national-romantic Russian patriotism, with what were regarded as the highest values of the religious traditions of east European Jews. Tsarist educational and disciplinary methods were combined with Jewish ethical maxims, and the chronology of the Jewish calendar with that of the tsarist regime. The start of the state school year coincided with the Jewish New Year, although the former took priority. Prayer times and sabbath were combined with the Russian Gymnasium’s timetable. Jewish and public holidays were celebrated simultaneously, and the kitchens were kosher. The school week ended on Friday. Classes met from Monday to Friday; from half past eight in the morning until half past two in the afternoon there were four periods of instruction.®° On the sabbath and Sundays there were only three periods of moral and religious education and edification. Every day the students prayed in the morning, in the afternoon before mealtime, and in the evening. On the sabbath they attended religious services.*’ The rabbinical schools survived three distinct eras of tsarist educational policy by modifying their pedagogical standards and methods: the era of Tsar Nicholas, which

82 Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 5 (1904), 42-3.

33, Paperna, ‘Vospominaniia’, 357. 34 Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 3 (1904), 33. 3° TD. Roskies, “The Master of Lore: Isaac Meir Dik’, in_A Bridge of Longing (Cambridge, Mass.,

1996), 68. 36 Each lesson lasted an hour and a half. 37 TIstoricheskie svedeniia o vilenskom ravvinskom uchilishche (Vilna, 1873), 5; Y. Gurland, Kevod haBait (Vilna, 1858), 35-6; Liakub, ‘Opisanie’, 242; Margaliot, Zikhronot, 26.

g2 Verena Dohrn was dominated by the conservative influence of Platon A. Shirinsku-Shikhmatov, who replaced the more liberal Sergei S. Uvarov; the great reforms, which affected the rabbinical schools largely thanks to the liberal policy of Minister Avraam S. Norov and Curator Nikolai Pirogov; and forced acculturation with its Russian nationalist orientation. Uvarov had established the guidelines for the educational system at the rabbinical schools. Both the school regulations and the curriculum were based on his enlightened humanist views in so far as they were compatible with the autocratic system’s constraints and the domination of the Christian Orthodox nobility. The Enlightenment ideology of moral education was the central tenet here. Jews were entitled to participate in this educational project as heirs of an idealized antiquity. The enlightened objective was to teach them to become pious individuals with a humanist education, ‘useful citizens’, and loyal subjects of the tsar. Praising and encouraging students was the first method indicated. By their third year of operation, however, the rabbinical schools experienced the decisive influence of the minister of education and science, Shirinskii-Shikhmatov, who shifted the areas of emphasis and prioritized traditional religious education with an authoritarian pedagogical view of people and society.*® As curator of the school districts of Vilna and Kiev, his influence on both rabbinical schools outlasted the conservative

policies of Tsar Nicholas. Conversely, Pirogov’s commitment was to pedagogical liberalism during his brief term as curator in the South-West Russian border region (1856-8 in the Odessa school district and 1858-61 in the Kiev school district).

Pirogov, a renowned physician with an international reputation, criticized the estate-based authoritarian military school system and pursued educational reform, rationality, and teaching methods based on universal Christian humanism. His ideas formed the basis for new school legislation in the Russian empire. He is considered the founding father of Russian pedagogy.®” Pirogov had strong sympathies with the Haskalah and Jewish educational reform. ‘The use of praise and reprimand was indeed the essence of the application of enlightened educational principles at the rabbinical schools. None the less, although it was mentioned nowhere in the regulations, beating was commonplace—as it was at the tsarist schools of the time, in keeping with long-standing Prussian tradition.*? Thanks to Pirogov’s influence, corporal punishment was abolished at all tsarist schools in 1863. However, the suppression of the Polish uprising in 1863 was followed by other types of disciplinary action and oppression, such as political control and forced conversions, which affected the students in Vilna more than those in Zhitomir. The headmaster, always a Christian, oversaw supervision of moral conduct but dealt with individual cases only if problems arose.*! Little is known about Ivan Vaskevich and Prokofii Verbitskii and their tenure of this office. Yakim Tsimerman 38 P. Kapterev, Istoriia russkoi pedagogii (St Petersburg, 1910), 214-15. 89 Ibid. 240-7, 267-79; N. Hans, History of Russian Educational Policy, 1701-1917 (London, 1931),

97-100. 40 Hans, History, 75. 41 Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 4 (1904), 54; 7 (1904), 84; Margaliot, Zikhronot, 28.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia 93 suffered for being a baptized Jew and had a tough time. Vladimir Kovalevsku, Petr Bessonov, and Kassian Pavlovskii were generous, easygoing headmasters.*” Bessonov may have lost his position because of his sympathy for the institution and the maskilim. He ran the Vilna school for only a year during its most difficult time of the forced acculturation under the rule of general governor Nikolai M. Muravev. During his term at Zhitomir Pavlovskii 1s said to have ignored both the instruction and life at the boarding school. Though he sat with the boarders in the courtyard, he never set foot in the classrooms. He was also lenient about administering exams on the sabbath. He dealt calmly and sensibly with students who disobeyed school rules, and disliked abuse and humiliation from teachers and among fellow students, as well as corporal punishment. Students who were late or skipped class or arrived at the school with dirty clothes, unwashed hands, or uncombed hair had to stay an hour or two after school or were placed in detention. He was fair to students who followed their lessons diligently and earned the respect of their teachers and supervisors.*? Students had the right to complain to the headmaster about teachers. Seventh-formers who took advantage of this opportunity at Zhitomir found in him a sympathetic ear.** His response was quite different when a student complained that the German teacher Lev Mendelsburg taught unsystematically, like a melamed. In this case, the headmaster and the school board sided with the teacher.*° Unlike Pavlovskii, Nikolai Sobchakov, as headmaster of the school in Vilna, was not able to steer the difficult course of forced acculturation following the Polish uprising of 1863, although there were some serious political incidents during his term. At night a masked student appeared at his window singing patriotic songs and alluding to the headmaster’s subservience to authority. The headmaster retaliated by delaying the final exams and issuing low marks, thereby preventing the schoolleavers from registering in time for the new academic year at the universities. He and the students engaged in a power struggle. One of the tuition-paying pupils from the upper forms had the temerity to denounce Sobchakov’s conduct publicly (albeit anonymously) by composing a poem that satirized the headmaster and affixing it to the entrance to the school. A major investigation was launched. Interrogation of all tuition-paying students yielded one of the supervisor’s lists of penalties,

which had somehow come into the possession of the students. These students were held accountable for the derisive poem, placed in detention, and subsequently expelled. They complained, successfully, to the minister of education and science.

Other accusations against Sobchakov included forcing students to be baptized, assisting Jakov B. Brafman, the notorious apostate, in the publication of his The Book of the Kahal, and vexing Jewish teachers.*° Sobchakov’s example shows that “2 Kulisher, /togi, 23, 26, 39, 45; Margaliot, Zi:khronot, 26 ff.; Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 7 (1904), 79; Prilozhenie k khakarmeliu, 28 (1861-2), 110-11: the headmaster Pavlovskii was one of the three non-

Jewish members of the relief fund for poor pupils in Vilna. 43° Margaliot, Zikhronot, 28.

44 Thid. 37 ff. 45 TsDIAU, collection 707, inventory 261 (1867), file s. 46 “Zapiski odnogo uchitelia’, Den, 15 (1870), 255-7.

04 Verena Dohrn in cases of doubt the headmaster was able to impose his will, but that means were sometimes available to exert pressure from below. Everybody, including students, parents, supervisors, and teachers, had the right to lodge a complaint (proshenie) with the authorities. ‘These accusations were not always fair. The chief supervisor of the Zhitomir school charged Pavlovsku, who had tried to mitigate the policy of forced acculturation, with abuse of power and prejudiced language.*’ Under the autocratic regime filing charges served two purposes. It was both an instrument of , basic democracy and a way to denounce or control others. The tsarist school system consistently divided authority between instruction and supervision and between teachers and supervisors, as Pirogov pointed out in a critical report.*° Teachers were responsible for directing students in their education. They were expected to influence their performance and exert control. Even though supervision of moral conduct was not part of their job, they disciplined the students anyway. Moreover, at both schools there were two very distinct types of colleague (the Christian and the Jewish teachers) who were forced to work closely together, though they could only be said to have shared a common view of humanist enlightened education in a very general sense. Ongoing differences between the schools and between colleagues were manifest. At the school in Vilna turnover was high among the Christian teachers, who were often transferred for political reasons. At both schools, however, their Jewish colleagues stayed longer, despite a serious generation gap in Vilna. Little appears in the memoirs from Vilna about the Christian teachers and their educational influence, except for one critical commentary. More information 1s available from Zhitomir, mostly positive. Pruzhanskii remembers the hostility towards Jews from the Russian instructor G., who was most probably the convert Nikolai Petrovich Gurev and whose original name was Moisei Gurvich.*? Morgulis has written about the respect and admiration of the students for their Christian teachers, who were considered men of learning and integrity. These teachers cultivated their love for Russian literature and history and their sympathy for the suffering of the Russian people.®° The other authors express a similar view. The Jewish teachers were figures of authority and bore considerable and complex responsibility for the students. The position of the inspectors was especially ambiguous, as these individuals were accountable both to the students and to the state authorities. The influence of the Jewish teachers diminished gradually, along with the importance of and respect for Jewish subjects. They were responsible for guaranteeing the continuity of Jewish education as changes occurred and in a sense 47 TsDIAU, collection 707, inventory 261, file 20 (24 May 1866-5 July 1866). 48 Kapterev, Istoriia, 273-4. 49 Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 3 (1904), 55-6. Pruzhanskii indicates only which teacher he meant, call-

ing him ‘G.’ At that time Nikolai P. Gurev, alias Moisei Gurvich, was the only teacher for Russian language whose surname started with G. 5° Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 17/4 (1897), 65.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia 95 for serving as the guardians of the students within the Jewish community.°! The memoirs reveal how some cases turned out. Pruzhanskii believed that, of all Jewish teachers at the school in Vilna, Salomon Zalkind was the only one who showed an interest in and sense of responsibility towards the students. He invited them to his house for meals and conversation and sometimes even gave them money.°” Lebenson was the only Jewish teacher for whom Levanda expressed admiration.** This teacher was also highly respected by Yehuda Leib Gordon.** Margaliot, Morgulis, and Paperna praised the commitment and interest of their Jewish teachers at the

school in Zhitomir, especially Eliezer Tsvayfel, Hirsch Segal, and Mordechai Sukhostaver. Even though they lacked the formal academic education of their Christian colleagues, were insecure and torn in different directions, and were unsure where the Haskalah and educational reform would take them, they were extremely learned men with much to impart.®? They spent time with the students outside class as well. Another teacher, Palichinevskii, was a very special guardian angel to Morgulis during his days as a student. Morgulis, after transferring from Berdichev (where Palichinevskii had been his teacher at the state school) to Zhitomuir, sublet accommodation from this teacher during his first year at the new school. Formally, however, the students were accountable for their conduct to the supervisors (nadziratel) rather than to the teachers. Even the school regulations contained a section on the supervision of moral conduct (mravstvennyi nadzor). A chief supervisor (otvetstvennyi nadziratel) was to be appointed from among the officials, as well as a junior supervisor (mladshii nadz1-

ratel), either Christian or Jewish (section 42), where the chief supervisor reported to the headmaster (section 43). The supervisors were appointed by the curator (section 44) and were selected according to their moral attributes (section 45); the responsibilities of the supervisors included keeping order in classes, monitoring the moral conduct of the students, and conducting home visits whenever possible (section 46). The supervisors reported to the chief supervisor, who was accountable to the headmaster (section 47), and were obliged to submit monthly lists (in the format appropriate for the school district) about the conduct of each student (section 48). The rabbinical school’s administration was to ensure that all pupils met their

religious obligations (section 49) and to instil in them respect for the tsar and unconditional obedience to the state authorities (section 50). Disciplinary measures included assigning one of the best students to act as class elder by watching over the

| others; honours (pokhvalnye otzyvy) in the headmaster’s presence; and honours °! Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 3 (1904), 31-2. °2 Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 4 (1904), 50 ff. °3 L. Levanda, ‘Liubitelskii spektakl’, Russkii evrei, 19 (1882), 730.

°4 J. L. Gordon, ‘A. B. Lebenson: Ego literaturnaia deiatelnost 1 znachenie dlia russkikh evreev’, Evreiskaia bibhoteka, 8 (1880), 160-77.

°° Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 17/4 (1897), 67-87; 17/6 (1897), 86-100; A. Paperna, Ztkhronot: sefer hashanah, i (Warsaw, 1900), 60-75; Margaliot, Zikhronot, 30-4, 40-3; Kulisher, /togi, 44.

96 Verena Dohrn lists (pokhvalnye listy) were kept throughout the year, signed by the headmaster and

the chief supervisor, and distributed at the end of the school year (section 51). In extreme cases students were subject to the disciplinary measures that applied in Jewish state schools in general (section 52).

There were three categories of supervisor: the chief supervisor, junior supervisor, and class elder, also known as the auditor or—in Hebrew—the koreh (‘person who reads aloud’). As they often served as tutors, all chief supervisors were Christian. They were like the inspectors at the Gymnasiums and were responsible for both the boarders and the students living outside the school. Jewish junior supervisors were permitted. Over time Jews educated in part at rabbinical schools were appointed as junior supervisors at both schools. The 1857 permission to wear the uniform of the Ministry of Education and Science at rabbinical schools applied to supervisors as well.

The duties the supervisors had to fulfil were as simple as their operating procedures were precise and rigid. Supervisors obeyed them to the letter. Their supervision of moral conduct was more like paramilitary control than an educational exercise. Their work schedule was as follows: they woke the boarders early in the morning, placed the class elder in charge, and departed. Meanwhile, the students were supposed to do their homework. Two hours later the supervisors reappeared to supervise prayers. Afterwards they took the students to the dining hall for breakfast and then to the classroom half an hour later. They repeated this procedure when classes were over. After taking the students for their afternoon meal, the supervisors led the students to the work area to do their homework and fetched them again in the evening for roll-call and prayers.°° The supervisors were not responsible for ensuring that the students actually recited the prescribed prayers, but were merely expected to keep order. The duties of the supervisors included keeping the honours and penalty lists and carrying out corporal punishment. On Friday afternoons exams and thrashings took place, according to the memoirs. By Friday morning the students were so nervous that they were unable to pay attention in class until the supervisors walked in and read the names of those to be punished. The punishments were carried out in the classroom with all fellow students watching. Disciplinary thrashings continued until the fourth form; the upper forms were spared. The poignancy of the accounts attests to the fear that these weekly procedures instilled in the students.°’ When Nikolai Pirogov spoke out against corporal punishment, the supervisors at the rabbinical school in Zhitomir—according to the memoirs—changed their position without any objections or questions and, out of respect for the curator’s authority, removed the thrashing benches from the classrooms. The anecdotes reveal that the procedures were not taken very seriously and that 56 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 15/11—12 (1895), 85-7; Liakub, ‘Opisanie’, 242; Gurland, Kevod, 35-6; Zhemchuzhin, ‘Ocherki ravvinskoi bursy ili ravvinchuki’, Den, 22 (1870), 369-723 33

(1870), 535-8. 57 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 15/9 (1895), 110-15.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia 97 the students played tricks on the supervisors during prayers by doing everything but reading prayers. They also mention a supervisor in Zhitomir who collected all the students’ tefillin and had the shoemaker polish them along with the shoes. After prayers the students had black stripes and spots all over their arms, chests, and heads.°° On the one hand, the paramilitary supervision of the students demanded extraordinary restriction and subjugation; on the other hand, under these conditions they enjoyed greater freedom than under any other type of supervision,

such as that of their family. |

Though the system was simple, the structure of authority was highly complex. The supervisors represented the immediate state educational institution and were therefore controversial figures of authority. As Christians they felt superior to Jews. Morgulis and others have written that many supervisors looked down on the students and addressed them by the bitter-sweet term z/id (‘Yid’) and with the informal ty, regardless of their age or education, while the director called them vy. ‘The supervisors were less educated than most of the students. None the less, they were highly diverse. According to Morgulis, one of the Jewish supervisors in Zhitomir who was qualified to teach at primary level in the rabbinical school had no idea how long the Thirty Years War had lasted. The records reflect that in 1859 a certain Jakob Taft graduated as a teacher from the school in Zhitomir.°’ A magazine announcement indicates that in 1862 a super-

visor of the same name participated with a teacher and the rabbi in opening a sabbath school at the local rabbinical school.®° According to the official correspondence this Jakob ‘Taft was also involved in a mysterious incident that caused unrest

at the school. The rabbinical school’s headmaster, Yakim ‘T'simerman, the Kiev curator, and the Ministry of Education and Science ordered that it be kept secret that the grant student Judah Melamed from the sixth form talked in his sleep. The headmaster had notified the government representative of Volynia about the situation. The supervisor, Taft, submitted a report as well. The curator ordered that Melamed be removed from the dormitory, since his loud talking during his dreams disturbed the other pupils. ‘The objective was to avoid letting the students make too much of the case. Melamed was to be supervised closely to ensure that he would not ‘mystify the supervisor during his visions’. ‘The headmaster assumed that Melamed

meant no harm.°' The supervisor’s report reveals that Melamed’s visions might have frightened people other than his fellow students since they were political. In his sleep he had prophesied that St Petersburg would burn at the beginning of the summer, misfortune would strike, and that there was a plot to shoot the tsar’s brother, the governor of the kingdom of Poland, Konstantin Nikolaevich, and to start an uprising against the tsar. If the plot succeeded, Russia would come under °8 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 15/11—12 (1895), 87; Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 3 (1904), 33. °° Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (RGIA), collection 733, inventory 98, file 181,

fo. 45. 60 Sion, 34 (1862), 545. 6! RGIA, collection 733, inventory 98, file 760, fos. 1-2.

98 Verena Dohrn French rule.® The record ends there. Mikhail Morgulis’s recollection of the dim Jewish supervisor with primary school teaching credentials, and other anecdotes about life at the rabbinical school, suggest a schoolboy’s prank in which Taft’s dimness was exploited successfully against the political fears of the authorities. In 1873 Vilna’s rabbinical school had six supervisors: the chief supervisor was the collegiate secretary Nikolai G. Trofimov, who was Russian Orthodox and came

from the St Petersburg artillery battalion, and the supervisor for the boarding school was the collegiate secretary Platon I. Levitsku of the clerical seminary at Mogilev. The second supervisor for the boarding school was the rabbinical candidate Mavrikii N. Yakryn, who had graduated from Vilna’s rabbinical school in 1867, and the third, Isaac D. Ginzberg, who had only domestic education. The two supervisors for the non-boarders were the collegiate secretary Filaret M. Shlianin of the clerical seminary in Vologda and the government secretary Ivan V. Protopopov, who was Russian Orthodox and had attended the Gaivoron district seminary.®? Nikolai Pruzhanskii, who knew these supervisors, described both Jewish ones in his memoirs: the one who had attended the rabbinical school wore his uniform proudly, was narrow-minded and arrogant towards the Jewish students, , and acted learned. The other one, a certain G., had a traditional education and was quiet and reserved. Also Jewish, he had been very religious and had done much to observe religious laws.°* The correspondence from 1869 between Vilna’s curator and the Ministry of Education and Science contains a notice to all curators that a student had slapped the supervisor Yakryn in the face. The incident occurred when Yakryn summoned the ninth-form student Grigorii Donchin to prayers before the afternoon meal. Donchin retaliated by boxing Yakryn’s ears. The student was expelled from the school, and all curators were notified.°° The boarding school system enabled enforcement of strict authoritarian supervision in the rabbinical school and—in line with Morgulis’s comparison of the institute to the prison opposite—its operation as an intermediate institution. While the students’ uniforms gave the impression of a unit, the students actually comprised two distinct groups. Some of the young people attended the school with their parents’ consent, while others had come against their will. There were boarders and students residing outside the school, grant students and ones who paid tuition, students studying to become rabbis and others training to become teachers, as well as a broad range of age groups. While the students attending with parental consent generally had similar educational experiences at home and at school and continued their studies where they had left off, the ones who came against their parents’ will had often broken suddenly and irreparably with their former life at their parents’ 62 RGIA, collection 733, inventory 98, file 760, fo. 3. 63 LVIA, collection 577, inventory 2, file 17, fos. 26-36; collection 567, inventory 6, file 1208, fos.

17-20. 64 Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 6 (1904), 83-4. 65 RGIA, collection 733, inventory 189, file 319 (1869); TsDIAU, collection 707, inventory 35, file 40, fo. 27.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia 99 homes or—if they were already married—that of their in-laws, and consequently had far more serious identity problems. Abraham Goldfaden, who had attended the school in Zhitomir, notes this distinction in his recollections about his friend and subsequent colleague, the Yiddish publicist and author Joel Linetsky. Linetsky came from a prominent family and was the son of the rabbi of Vinnitsa, whereas Goldfaden was the son of a craftsman. A snob, a rabbi’s son, deceived his parents and family, secretly studied forbidden books, at night stole money from his mother’s pocket for expenses, and then ran away from home in the middle of the night and fled to Zhitomir. He arrived there, an embittered hero, at least half-enemy to his parents and even more so to his milieu, and thought himself a big hero. He broke his fetters and became a free man! Brought a sacrifice before the altar of that heavenly daughter, the Haskalah. All his life this young man’s bitterness against others remained and also his exaggerated notions of his own courage. But as for me, little Abraham Goldenthread, the son of Hayim Lipa the watchmaker, I was never embittered and not much of a hero. My father was himself a maskil of the older generation, who wanted his eldest son to be a Jewish human being with all the virtues. He sent me to the best teachers in Staryi Konstantinov, later to school, and then to the Zhitomir school. The one who understood this best of all was the best teacher in the school, Jacob Eichenbaum.®

The students’ social origins and their parents’ attitudes towards educational reform also affected the internal dynamics of the school’s social environment. The division of students between boarders and those who lived out was also based on social and ideological distinctions. The latter were usually from affluent homes, while the boarders tended to be from poor or less well-to-do families. Those who lived out were free to spend their time outside school as they pleased, whereas the boarders were not allowed to leave the school without the director’s special permission and could go into the city only in groups. The former were ‘free’, whereas the latter felt like prisoners and described themselves in such terms, according to Morgulis, who had been on both sides of the fence. During his first year he lived in the city and afterwards at the boarding school. As the son of a merchant from Berdichev, he did not come from a poor home. At school the boarders, who were nearly all grant students, took it out on the students who lived out for this degradation and restriction of their freedom.®’ At the school they were privileged, but highly dependent on the authorities. In addition to their social and ideological differences, the students followed different curricula. The primary stage and middle school of the Gymnasium (three and

four years) were followed by years of occupational training at the school. The teacher training programme was practical and spanned only a year, whereas the rabbinical programme lasted two years and involved more intensive study. According to Morgulis, the rabbinical students therefore felt superior to their counterparts °° D. I. Silverbusch, ‘Visiting Goldfaden, Father of the Yiddish Stage’, in L. S. Dawidowicz (ed.), The Golden Tradition: Fewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (New York, 1967), 323-4.

6? Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 6 (1904), 82.

100 Verena Dohrn in the teacher training programme. In addition, the students covered a vast age range. The youngest were boys of 10 or 11. Many had already attended state primary schools. Others enrolled in the rabbinical school at 18 or 20 and had life experience but no schooling (that 1s, they were familiar with the Torah, the Talmud, and other rabbinical literature, but knew nothing about Russian, mathematics, history, geography, and literature). There was neither an age limit for enrolment (although one was imposed later, when it became a teacher training school®’), nor a limitation on repeating years—at least not in Zhitomir until Pavlovskii became the headmaster. According to the memoirs, the oldest students at the school in Zhitomir were 40. There was a variety of anecdotes about these older students.°? Moreover, the students demonstrated such a broad spectrum of intellectual abilities that no admission criteria appear to have existed—presumably to boost enrolment at this pioneer institution or to enable as many youths as possible to enjoy its benefits. ? The student body’s disparate composition gave rise to problems with recognition and discipline. At times children played pranks on the

adults, and adult students had difficulties in being treated like children by the teachers and supervisors. On the other hand, the age composition resembled that of a family. The older students were responsible for the younger ones. | At first one supervisor and later on two or three supervisors were responsible for the boarding school. To some degree, however, the boarders took care of themselves. They watched over each other so diligently, according to Chaim Margaliot, that even the headmaster felt no cause for concern.’! The supervision was organized in a comprehensive hierarchy that included even the youngest students. ‘The class elders ranked below the supervisors and were selected according to their performance and good conduct. Since the grant students, who were largely boarders, were the most obligated to the school and therefore took the requirements more

seriously, they were often appointed as class elders, according to Morgulis’s memoirs. The class elders were responsible for both the performance and the conduct of the students 1n their group. They provided coaching and meted out punishments. Morgulis remembers that their authority was so extensive that they even marked

work. Asserting that the students treated each other like brothers, as Chaim Margaliot reports,” is certainly a euphemistic description of the authoritarian system of organization among the students—given Morgulis’s account of the daily practices in the washroom of the school at Zhitomir. Involving the students in the 68 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 16/5—6 (1896), 169; Margaliot, Zikhronot, 27; Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 3 (1904), 30; S. Dubnow, Kniga zhizni: Materialy dlia istorii moego vremeni

(‘Book of Life: Materials for the History of my Time’), ed. V. Kelner (St Petersburg, 1998), —60.

ee Margaliot, Zikhronot, 27; Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 16/5—6 (1896), 169; Pruzhansku, Perezhitoe, 6 (1904), 80. ® Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 6 (1904), 80-1; Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 16/5—6 (1896),

172-90. “1 Margaliot, Zikhronot, 28. Tbid. 35.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia IOI supervisory system caused a rift between them. Students obtained power over their fellow students. According to Zhemchuzhin: Class elder (starshit) is a technical term and has unique significance. The class elder was a type of sergeant, with the authority to organize at his discretion the so-called small fry (meliuzga). They ran errands for him, satisfied his every whim, and were compelled to stand in the corner or kneel at his command. Some class elders had the younger students pluck their hair—a supreme delight at the school .. . All class elders, even the good-natured ones, had an exalted sense of power, which permeated the institution at the time, all the way from the headmaster to the servants. ‘There were people of superior and humble status in all strata, from managers to underlings. . . . ‘The younger students were at their mercy. They had to do everything their class elder commanded: they fed him the pzrog: they had been sent from home, as well as pastries (/epeshk1), Nuremberg gingerbread (prianik1), and fat, which the students adored. ’®

This literary sketch by a graduate of the rabbinical school in Zhitomir provides

a satirical impression of what Mikhail Morgulis described in somewhat more straightforward terms, though just as critically. According to his fellow student and colleague Mikhail Kulisher, Morgulis, that great critic of the system, was also a class elder. Kulisher’s description reflects the ambiguity of the memoirs, as well as the divergent ways that the class elder could serve in this capacity. Tall, well-built, muscular, clean shaven, wearing a grey coat with a red lining—that is how I remember Morgulis, when he was 20 and I ro. That was in 1857. His face was serious and even pompous—although he was exceptionally good-natured and kind. ‘They [the class elders| made a tremendous impression on those of us in the lower forms: they were not merely students from the top form but in a sense also heads (the eldest students rotated twenty-four-hour supervision in the study area, the dining hall, and the dormitories and

were responsible for keeping order). According to the system of order enforced in the rabbinical dormitories at Zhitomir at the end of the 1850s, the elders were entitled to treat the pupils from the lower forms as they pleased and to smack them about. They were also tutors of all students of the first three forms boarding at the school (not of those who lived out). They do not appear to have devoted a lot of time to this activity—probably because they often made themselves scarce in these years (byvali v otluchke), but possibly also because the boarding school students from the lower forms usually had their own tutors hired by their parents. None the less, I recall how often Morgulis was surrounded by children who wanted to talk to him and to play with him. Being strict was an indispensable part of the job, which Morgulis did as required. Beneath his veneer of seriousness, however, he was extremely good-hearted. The children valued all his qualities, especially since Morgulis had a reputation for being a good student, was well read, and even a talented poet.”

The information indicates that aside from the school regulations the school students shared values that gave rise to feelings of solidarity. Pruzhanskii describes the situation metaphorically as Mount Sinai. The sense of identity, like that created

73 Zhemchuzhin, ‘Ocherki’. , ™ M. Kulisher, M. G. Morgulis. Opyt kharakteristiki: Pamiati Mikhaila Grigorevicha Morgulisa (Odessa, 1914), 13-16.

102 Verena Dohrn at Sinai through a revelation imparting special ethical responsibility and establishing traditions, was manifested by a mutual willingness to help. The students were said to help each other unselfishly, whether with food, money, or coaching. ’° The sense of isolation created by the generation gap and opposition to patriarchal tradition created an additional bond. The students enjoyed provoking the Jewish community around them. They would speak Russian in public, even if they hardly knew the language, go bareheaded, smoke on the sabbath, and eat unkosher sausage. Since smoking on the sabbath and eating treyf were against regulations, these practices were possible only behind the backs of the Jewish teachers and supervisors. ’° As for smoking and failing to observe the sabbath, many Jewish teachers set the wrong example. Smoking, to the annoyance of many observant co-religionists, was said to have been Inspector Eichenbaum’s passion.’” However, according to the respected former student Jehudah L. Katzenelson, his pious contemporaries in Zhitomir also indulged in this habit from time to time. Two types of problem, however, apparently did not exist at the rabbinical school.

While the records consistently reflect excessive alcohol consumption at religious | academies in Russia,’® there are no such indications with respect to the rabbinical schools. Even Pruzhanskii, who was usually very critical in his observations, noted that the students at the school in Vilna were indifferent to alcohol.®° Also, there are virtually no signs of conflict arising from sexual misconduct by students. According to Pruzhanskii, none occurred. In this respect the students were enlightened and had studied the talmudic treatises on marriage and divorce law, which often list sexual deviancies. While, following examples from belles-lettres, they had friendships, romances, and—often imaginary—love affairs with the daughters of landlords or neighbours, or with the maids of the Polish nobility living in the town, the students did not carry out obscene pranks or cause scandals.°+ Margaliot describes how one student, who in any case did not take his education seriously, went to a brothel in Zhitomir and was subsequently expelled with the approval of his class-

mates, who were afraid of getting a bad reputation.°* Many older students had come to escape marriages they had entered when they were very young. ‘They had no interest whatsoever in becoming involved with women. Transferring the paramilitary educational system of the tsarist schools of that day to a rabbinical school caused problems. Not that the Aeders and yeshivas lacked hierarchy and rigidity, unquestionable authority and privation, but the rabbinical Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 2 (1904), 49 ff.; Margaliot, Zikhronot, 35. 7 Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 3 (1904), 24-6. ™ Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 17/4 (1897), 76; M. Stanislawski, Nicholas I and the fews: The Transformation of fewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855 (Philadelphia, 1983), 113; A. Shochat, Mosad ‘Harabanut mita’am’ berusia (Haifa, 1975), 36 (from the memoirs of the Moscow rabbi Maze). 7 J.L. Katzenelson, Maj shera’u einai u’shma’u aznai: zikhronot miyamei chay (Jerusalem, 1947), 114.

7 M. Kohler-Baur, Die Geistlichen Akademien in Russland im 19. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1997),

g2. 8° Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 3 (1904), 25-6. 81 Ibid. 26-7; Cahan, Bleter, 123. 82 Margaliot, Zikhronot, 38-0.

Rabbinical Schools in Russia 103 school regulations required strict discipline and had a set rhythm. Students had to adjust not only to the teaching and boarding facilities, but also to how the schools incorporated two entirely heterogeneous fields of education with different languages, teachers, and subjects of study. Life at the school was entirely new and different compared with the traditional Jewish schools and provided the students with individual freedoms and perhaps even certain conveniences, but gave rise to insecurity, humiliation, and restrictions as well, and necessitated changes in behaviour. Pruzhanskii did not adjust to the new school. His memoirs highlight the different moods prevailing in the traditional k/oys and the rabbinical schools: It was not always pleasant there [in the k/oys]. The walls and ceilings were gloomy and sooty and the floors, tables, and windows dirty; here [at the rabbinical school] everything is much cleaner and neater, although it reflects a certain uniformity and public bureaucracy. The kloys may be gloomy but does not exude an air of depression or pressure. It has free space and allows many forms of expression. Here, on the other hand, everything is uniform and drab and does nothing to stimulate the imagination.®*

In daily institutional practice the students devised their own regulations. Once they became familiar with the strategies and personalities of the supervisors, they were able to escape their control despite the rigid regulations. They read everything in the school library, in addition to censored literature that they sneaked into the library, went on secret escapades into the city, and engaged in clandestine trade with fellow students, as long as they were not found out or betrayed.

The disadvantage of this authoritarian military system of supervision was student corruption. Bribery and extortion were commonplace—as in tsarist society

in general and in many similarly run boarding schools worldwide.** Roubles bought high marks. According to the memoirs, the supplies in the legendary luggage room were valuable barter capital. Vziatka (the bribery system) was not, however, regarded as an offence, as it was not exclusive to the rabbinical school.®° Particularly spectacular cases of bribery appear in both the public records and the memoirs. In this respect the children of teachers were in an unfortunate predicament, as they were numerous at both schools, and were obviously more likely to attract public attention or were especially vulnerable because of their privileged

proximity to authority and power. Chaim Margaliot writes about his teacher Mordechai Sukhostaver’s son Shmuel, one of his fellow students at the school in Zhitomir, who got into a lot of mischief. He humiliated his father by stealing his only pair of shoes after losing his own during the night, and Sukhostaver was unable to go to work. The son was also said to have blackmailed and denounced fellow students. The supervisor then threatened the father that he might inform the curator, and the teacher was able to keep his post thanks only to intervention by one of the 83 Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 6 (1904), 85.

84 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 15/9 (1895), 108-9; Pruzhanskii, Perezhitoe, 6 (1904), 91;

7 (1904), 80-4. 85 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 15/9 (1895), 108-9.

104 Verena Dohrn students.®° A second scandal involving a teacher and his son at the school in Zhitomir appears in the state records. Here, accusing Eliezer Tsvayfel and his son Isaak of deception, a student claimed the son had paid ten silver roubles for a higher

mark for a Gemara translation. Eventually, the son confessed. Here, too, the father’s teaching post and the son’s enrolment in school were at stake.®’ Publicizing

violations of school regulations affected the students most of all. Both the state records and the memoirs reveal several cases that culminated in expulsions from the school. The Tsvayfel affair was decided by a class vote. In conclusion, the rabbinical schools may not have been the temples of scholarship dreamed of by many students and maskilim. Still, they provided many a poor bokher with a roof over his head, a bed, warm clothes, daily meals, and a Russian—

German—Jewish education in both secular and religious subjects among Jewish teachers and supervisors without needing to become Christian. In their classes and as boarders the students learned to deal with the tsarist state system with its militarist, rigid, formal, and hierarchically structured educational principles based on division of labour, including the drawbacks of corruption and bribery. None the less, this system accommodated Jewish identity, cultivated solidarity among the maskilim, and encouraged the establishment of a new and different east European Jewish way of life. Much depended on personalities, on the self-awareness of the students, and on the teachers and supervisors they came across. Both the Jewish and the Christian Polish and Russian teachers included dedicated and educated humanists and idealists who, if the memoirs are correct, generally took an interest in the students outside class as well. At any rate, the students at the rabbinical school learned the difference between the traditional Jewish and the tsarist schools _ and how to deal with these discrepancies. The rabbinical schools provided an opportunity to choose one’s course, although not without taking into account one’s past experience and being forced to make compromises to bridge the gap between the old world and the new. Translated from German by Lee Mitzman 86 Margaliot, Zikhronot, 34. 8” ‘TsDIAU, collection 707, inventory 261 (1867), file 17, fos. 1-10.

The Zhitomir Rabbinical School: New Materials and Perspectives EFIM MELAMED PRE-REVOLUTION Jewish literature devoted to the Haskalah generally assigns a

very modest place to the state rabbinical schools in tsarist Russia. This is not because these institutions failed to stimulate the maskilim into effecting a fundamental change in Jewish social and religious life; on the contrary, the nascent Jewish intelligentsia expressed great hopes that the schools would produce a new generation of enlightened rabbis and teachers. Nor does the reticence of the scholarship stem from the conspicuous shortcomings of the schools, for negative experience 1s also instructive and worthy of study. What is more, these schools ultimately played an important role in creating and shaping a secular Jewish intelligentsia.

Despite the obvious importance of rabbinical schools, they have been largely neglected in contemporary scholarship, in large measure because of the dearth of materials available to researchers. As the early Russian Jewish historian Petr Marek put it, ‘the real history of these schools can only be written on the basis of their arch_ ives’.' Yet neither Marek nor subsequent historians had access to classified archival materials, a circumstance that obliged them to rely on personal testimonies, memoirs, and newspaper accounts. Since the ‘archival revolution’ of 1991, however, the greater accessibility of archives in the former Soviet Union (especially at the pro-

vincial level) has dramatically changed the state of research, allowing historians to examine the internal life of these schools from a new perspective. Drawing upon the rich documents of the Zhitomir rabbinical school in the State Archive of the Zhitomir Region, this chapter will seek to examine this rabbinical school, one of the most controversial institutions in nineteenth-century Jewish life in the tsarist empire. The objective here is to analyse state motivations in creating ‘rabbinical colleges’, the composition and profile of the student body, and the educational backgrounds and goals of its staff and teachers.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE STATE RABBINICAL SCHOOLS The two rabbinical schools in Vilna and Zhitomir were created in conjunction with the educational reforms of 1844, which aimed to transform the religious and ! P. Marek, Ocherki po istorii prosveshcheniua evreev v Rossii (Moscow, 1909).

106 Efim Melamed educational life of the Jews and to ‘merge’ (s/zat) them with the surrounding Russian

population.” According to Count Sergei Uvarov, the minister of education, the establishment of these schools was to serve a single goal—namely, to train teachers for the state Jewish schools; they would be similar to the Jewish teachers’ seminaries in Germany. The proposal underwent slight modification following a final examination by the Jewish committee*—a group of enlightened bureaucrats charged with the task of reforming Jewish life—which added the obligation of training state

rabbis to the central mission of the schools, thereby naming them rabbinical schools.* That there were only two such schools suggests that they were to serve a special function in the system of public education for the Jews. According to the general statute confirmed by Tsar Nicholas I, these institutions were to be placed under the direct jurisdiction of the trustees of the educational districts.” Moreover,

the director (who was required to be a Christian) and the inspector (who was responsible for supervising all instruction in Jewish subjects) were to be appointed directly by the Ministry of Education.

The state opened the doors of these new educational institutions to a broad group of prospective students. In the words of their founding statute, ‘Jews of every status, no younger than Io years of age, with a propensity for knowledge in both Jewish and general subjects’ were eligible to enrol in classes.® Curiously, no maxi-

mum age was stipulated; hence not only ‘bridegrooms’ between the ages of 18 and 20, but also older students, donned the uniform frock-coats of the rabbinical schools.’ The duration of study was between eight and ten years. During the first seven years students enrolled in preparatory and general courses that corresponded to the programme of a Russian Gymnasium; additional courses in Jewish subjects conformed to the curriculum of the Jewish state schools. At the end of this period, pupils in the pedagogical department pursued one more year of specialized education in their field, while those in the rabbinical section studied Jewish law for two more years. In order to qualify as a state or assistant rabbi, students were required to take an additional year of practical training under the supervision of rabbis in

various towns. : , 2 This study only encompasses the two rabbinical schools in the Russian empire (chiefly the school in Zhitomir, but with some reference to the school in Vilna); it does not include the first rabbinical school of its kind in the kingdom of Poland, established in Warsaw in 1826 and closed in 1863. 3 The Jewish committee was formally called the Committee for the Determination of Measures for the Fundamental Transformation of the Jews.

* For a more comprehensive treatment of this subject, see Ia. Katzenelson, ‘Evreiskie uchilishcha prezhde 1 teper (do i posle polozhentia 1873 g.)’, Voskhod, 9 (1895), 165-6. The term uchilishche (‘school’), not semmmariua (‘seminary’), was used, evidently to avoid confusion with the religious semin-

13”. © Tbid., fo. 2.

aries of the Russian Orthodox Church. © Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Zhytomyrskoi Oblasti (DAZhO), collection 396, inventory 1, file 1, fos. 1-1’,

" The archival records indicate that the age of students in the Zhitomir rabbinical school ranged

from 10 to 36; students who were in their twenties numbered around thirty-seven altogether (DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 2, file 566, fos. 34°—35).

The Zhitomir Rabbinical School 107 The students were divided into two categories: stipendiary boarders, who received support from funds raised through the Jewish candle tax, and day students, who paid their own way. The former were required to live in common housing, a dormitory under the strict surveillance of the so-called supervisors; day - students, by contrast, were free to live with their parents or in private apartments. Any student who received a stipend was obliged to serve as a state rabbi or a teacher for a fixed number of years following the completion of study. One must keep in mind that the rabbinical schools in Vilna and Zhitomir were experimental projects and, at least initially, only offered preparatory classes: three

classes in Vilna (with forty-four students) and two in Zhitomir (twenty-three students). Although complete school registers have not been preserved, the documents indicate that by the end of the academic year 1862/3 there were twelve graduations from the pedagogical department of the Vilna rabbinical school and ten from the rabbinical section (116 teachers and thirty-three rabbis and assistant rabbis). That same year there were ten graduates from the pedagogical department and seven from the rabbinical section in the Zhitomir branch.® The available data suggest that the school in Vilna developed more rapidly than the institution in Zhitomir, which opened one month later than its counterpart (on 19 November 1847).? This delay resulted from a shortage of students and teachers of Jewish subjects in the provincial town of Zhitomir.’° As Marek observed, the problem of supplying teachers for the newly established schools was a direct consequence of the dearth of Jewish intellectual forces. As a result, teachers of the rabbinical and lower state Jewish schools were not professionally trained teachers (with

formal training in pedagogy), but people with a general education (to be sure, including ‘almost all well-known Jewish writers of the time’)."?

In addition to staffing problems, the schools faced an additional problem of popular opposition, especially on the part of students. Among the latter there was a deeply rooted ‘fear of schools’ (shkoloboiazn) and antipathy towards ‘compulsory education’, where the term shkolnaia povinnost (compulsory education) evoked associations with other povinnosti (compulsory obligations), such as military conscription.

® Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 16 vols. (St Petersburg, 1908-13), xiii. 259. 9? DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 1, file 6, fo. 3. The Vilna rabbinical school opened on 23 Oct.

1847. 10 Tbid., fos. 2°—3. 11 Marek, Ocherki po istorit prosveshcheniia evreev v Rossii, 189. Michael Stanislawski has aptly point-

ed out that the list of teachers of both rabbinical schools ‘read like a Who’s Who of the Russian haskalah’ (M. Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Fewish Society in Russia,

1825-1855 (Philadelphia, 1983), 103). Indeed the list of teachers at the Zhitomir branch included distinguished members of the Jewish intelligentsia such as Jacob Eichenbaum, Abraham Ber Gottlober, Hayim Selig Stonimski, Eliezer Tsvayfel, Markus Sukhostaver, Chaim Lerner, and Iosif Polichinskii.

108 Efim Melamed CREATING AN INTELLECTUAL CENTRE IN ZHITOMIR What was the character of the local Jewish community in Zhitomir and its relationship to the rabbinical school? A closer examination of these questions will further our understanding of the general problems of the Haskalah movement in Russia, which was in one way or another connected to the fate of the rabbinical schools. It is important to note that, whereas Vilna had long been a centre of rabbinical learning, Zhitomir only became the ‘Jerusalem of Volynia’ much later, thanks in part to the activities of the rabbinical school.'* Indeed, Zhitomir was an improbable

site for the experiment: it had little to offer—apart from the existence of the Russian Gymnasium, from which instructors could be recruited to teach general subjects (which occupied two-thirds of class time at the rabbinical school).'? The local Jewish population, which numbered over 10,000, consisted primarily of merchants, moneylenders, and artisans. '* Indeed, according to the unkind assessment of contemporary observers, the Jewish residents of Zhitomir represented a serious liability, for they were distinguished chiefly by their ‘boorishness’ and ‘indifference’. As a correspondent of Rassvet complained in 1860, ‘Indifference is the common trait of all the Jews in Zhitomir.’!° Another writer, in describing the first fruits of rabbinical education in his native town, dourly noted that ‘only some fifteen years ago . . . readers [in Zhitomir] who read not only non-Jewish books, but the Holy Scriptures themselves were considered flagrant free-thinkers by the local Jews’.‘© Similar views were expressed by a former graduate of the Zhitomir rabbinical school, the well-known lawyer and public figure Mikhail (Manasseh) Morgulis: “The population had no interests apart from material ones. ‘The representatives of the Jews were such utter ignoramuses, [just] like the rest of the population. In Zhitomir . . . there were perhaps two families from which one could choose the best rabbinical students.’*’ No doubt such statements probably exaggerate the state of affairs; Zhitomir surely had other ‘rays of light’ in the town apart from the two unnamed families. For example, it could boast two educators who lived there in the 1850s and 1860s, namely Losif Bernshtein and Markus Perltsveig, who enjoyed such ‘enormous fame’ that students flocked to them from afar. Both of these self-educated bearers of culture ‘organized their own circles, which assembled those who sought enlightenment’—including the future alumni of the rabbinical school.'® Still, Morgulis’s dismal picture of a

‘dark hasidic kingdom’ does not contradict what we know about the town from other sources. 12 The appellation was coined by S. A. Skomarovskii in ‘Sleptsy-prosvetiteli: Iz vospominanii o Zhitomire’, Evreiskata letopis, 3 (1924), 166. 13M. G. Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, Voskhod, 9 (1895), 117-18. 14 DAZhO, collection 71, inventory 1, file 720, fo. 18. 15 G, G-n, ‘Zhitomir, 30 iiulia’, Rassvet, 14 (24 Aug. 1860), 222. 16 M. Perltsveig, ‘Zhitomir, 26 iiulia’, Rassvet, 17 (16 Sept.? [1860?]), 271.

1” Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 119-20. 18 Skomarovskii, ‘Sleptsy-prosvetiteli’, 166.

The Zhitomur Rabbinical School 109 Thus it is not hard to imagine why the state had such difficulty in recruiting students from this stagnant cultural milieu. In the end even the three classes of the Zhitomir rabbinical school failed to attract enough students to justify their existence, and the administrators cut them to a mere two. At least initially, exemption from military conscription did not provide sufficient incentive for students to enrol, but gradually a significant number of families began to send their sons to the schools (for example, in 1872, on the eve of the forced closure of the school, there were 353 students).1° The increase in students came to the school from all three provinces of the south-western region, as well as from Bessarabia and Novorossiia (‘New Russia’). As one newspaper reporter pointed out, however: ‘If one compares the overall number of students [at the rabbinical school] with the number of local inhabitants, then the result for Zhitomir is completely unfavourable.’”°

Paradoxically, the school’s very obscurity was also a source of strength. As Morgulis once declared, ‘the school’s success was rooted in the very indifference of the Jewish community in Zhitomir, which left it in peace and allowed it to develop

its own strength’.*! In this respect Zhitomir appeared to be a more hospitable environment for a state rabbinical seminary than Vilna, where the residents began to ‘conspire’ against it from the beginning.** According to Morgulis, it was precisely these ‘intrigues’ that in 1873 induced the government to close the schools in Vilna and Zhitomir and to transform them into institutions to train teachers.7° Without challenging this analysis entirely, it is important to note that there were ‘intrigues’—even if less conspicuous—in Zhitomir, not just in Vilna. Nor should the alleged ‘indifference’ of the Zhitomir residents to the rabbinical school be overstated. Clearly, the blatant intrusion of the state into the sphere of ‘confessional education’ (with its emphasis on secular education over religious learning),“* as well as the establishment of a supervisory organ over internal Jewish life through the institution of the state rabbinate, was bound to evoke a negative reaction. Zhitomir differed only in that this reaction took on a passive character, as its Jewish community sought to combat a ‘den of unbelief”? (i.e. the rabbinical school) that seemed a principal source of contagion and a menace to traditional

Jewish culture and values. ,

Still, the authorities made some modest attempts to overcome the isolation of the school. The memoir literature notes that school officials ordered the rabbinical students to participate in general prayer on the sabbath in order to merge them with the local Jewish population. However, conspicuous in their German uniforms, with a Christian supervisor at their head, they appeared very foreign, all the more so

22 Tbid. 118. 23 Thid. "2 Kalendar iugo-zapadnogo kraia na 1873 g. (Kiev, 1872), 301.

20 Rassvet, 14 (26 Aug. 1860), 223. 21 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 120. 24 One graduate of the rabbinical school recalled that ‘despite the fact that the school was Jewish... we studied general subjects more, mainly Russian literature’ (M. P. Shafir, ‘Moi vospominaniia’,

Evreiskaia letopis, 4 (1926), 106). 25 Tbid. 107.

I10 Efim Melamed because of their irreverent behaviour in the synagogue. Not surprisingly, religious society shunned them. A synagogue official even came to the school to demand monetary compensation for the seats occupied by the rabbinical students in the house of worship.*° A similar episode occurred in August 1856, when the school authorities (on the recommendation of the Kiev educational district) sought permission for the students to pray in the city synagogue because they lacked a special prayer hall. The provincial rabbi replied in a confrontational tone that the old city synagogue was overcrowded and could not accommodate everyone; besides, he added, the construction of the building had been funded by Jews themselves, not by

the state.”

STUDENT BEHAVIOUR If the Jewish community was wary of this unwanted ‘alien’ presence in its midst, its worst fears were confirmed by the ‘scandalous and impious’ behaviour of the rabbinical students—‘the future leaders of the Jewish people’, as they were often called in official documents.2® The bursaki (‘students living in the dormitories’), even if Jewish, behaved much like the notorious bursaki in the seminaries of the Russian Orthodox Church.” They brawled in the theatre,°° engaged in thievery, frequented ‘public women’,?! and composed obscenities about the local rabbi’s wife

and daughter.” Two Zhitomir rabbinical students organized, during their holidays, a theatre troupe made up of their classmates (who played both male and female roles). The theatre and company took their name from Berdichev, the unofficial Jewish capital, where they staged a series of performances for the families of the soldiers who |

had been wounded or killed at Sebastopol during the Crimean War (1853-6). Clearly, the students realized that they needed a credible pretext in order to obtain permission from the state authorities. The plays were staged in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish; the final performance, entitled “Che Kahal in a Small Town’, was written by one of its founders, Volf Kamrash, a student of the seventh class. The play created a sensation. “The army’, wrote Morgulis, ‘extolled the bold-spirited Jews, who exposed the internal abuses of the kaha/ at the heart of Russian Jewry. The Jews were completely disillusioned with their future leaders [i.e. rabbinical

students] . . .”.°° To say the least, young men who were preparing to enter the 26 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 120-2.

27 DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 2, file 164, fo. 6-6". 28 Tbid., file 422, fo. 2. 22 For a classic contemporary exposé of the customs of the Orthodox seminary and more on the reputation of Russian Orthodox seminarians, see N. G. Pomialovskii, Seminary Sketches (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), first pub. as Ocherki bursy (1862-3).

30 DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 2, file 566. 31 Tbid., file 89, fo. 11-11”. 32 Tbid., inventory 1, file 84, fo. 14’.

33 M. Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, Voskhod, s—6 (1896), 179. |

The Zhitomir Rabbinical School III ‘spiritual profession’ were openly violating a strict taboo on men wearing women’s clothing and were a disgrace and mockery to their co-religionists. The Berdichev company almost survived in Zhitomir when it received official approval (thanks to the intercession of the general-governor).°4 That approval overcame the negative judgement of the state censors in Kiev, who, informed that this drama about the kahal was to be performed in a provincial centre, declared that it should ‘not only be forbidden for the stage, but also prohibited for its reprehensible content’.*° Asa result, the Jewish community were deeply offended and became antagonistic towards the rabbinical school.*° Indeed, did they need any more proof that the rabbinical schools were preparing people alien and even antipathetic to Jewry? An additional negative element entered the relationship between the ‘believers’ and the rabbinical students and newly created rabbis. In the words of one observer, some of them ‘ran ahead of progress’; rather than focusing on the imperceptible, daily work of ‘nurturing sensibilities’, they preferred open appeals for the rejection of traditional Jewish dress and hastening the adoption of the Russian language, which was all the more foreign to the Jewish masses who resided in the right bank or western

Ukraine, which had long been part of the Commonwealth of Poland and where Polish was still the dominant language.°*’

An ardent supporter of the latter goal was Lev Binshtok, one of the first graduates of the Zhitomir rabbinical school and local state rabbi from 1859 to 1862.°° ‘Only through the introduction of the Russian language into the religious way of life among the Jews, and through the expansion of synagogues with decorous choral services and sermons preached in Russian,’ he asserted, ‘will it be possible to make Russian the native language of the Jews and at the same time to make the Jews genuine citizens of Russia.”®? A prominent assimilationist maskil and Russian Jewish publicist, he was one of the most fervent opponents of hasidism who not only advocated the idea of merging the Jews with the Russian population in civil matters, but also tirelessly put his ideas into practice. For example, in 1861 Binshtok created in the rabbinical school a ‘sabbath school’, which, above all, was devoted to the

| teaching of the Russian language.*° Five years later he was one of the founders of - a Russian Jewish society in Zhitomir, ‘with a separate synagogue which aimed to familiarize the Jewish population with the Russian language through sermons 34 DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 2, file 126, fo. 1-1’. 3° Tbid., fo. 7-7’. 8° Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 5—6 (1896), 180.

37 Recalling the period that preceded the Polish uprising of 1863, a well-known Russian writer and native of Zhitomir wrote: ‘In the villages of the landowners [and] in the towns, the middle class was composed of Poles, or, at least, individuals who spoke Polish’ (V. G. Korolenko, /storiia moego sovremennika (Moscow, 1965), 80).

38 For more on Lev Binshtok, see E. Melamed, ‘Kto pisal pod psevdonimom “Russkii evrei”?’, Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve, 3/10 (1995), 235-6. °° L. Binshtok, ‘Evrei Volynskoi gubernii’, Volynskie gubernskie vedomosti, 88 (1867), 432. 40 DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 1, file 135, fos. 1-3’. See also L. M. Bramson, K istorii nachalnogo obrazovania v Rossi (St Petersburg, 1896), 52.

II2 Efim Melamed delivered in Russian’.** Undoubtedly, this was similarly an appeal to the enemy “camp; but it is impossible to view Binshtok’s initiative as extreme or beyond the usual methods, for it was consistent with the direction of the bitter struggle with hasidism which dominated the Zhitomir maskilim—former rabbinical students, who in part strove to carry out the fight in the Jewish press.*”

THE STAFF OF THE ZHITOMIR RABBINICAL SCHOOL However few natives of Zhitomir may have attended the rabbinical school, some did none the less study there. Despite the school’s poor reputation, it offered a preferable alternative to the hateful system of military recruitment. “These very sworn enemies of European education’, recalled one writer, ‘sent their children to the school out of necessity, out of their belief that they were choosing the lesser of two evils.’*° The same principle guided the relationship of the residents to the teachers who taught Jewish subjects in the rabbinical school. In at least two cases the local Orthodox residents filed petitions in an attempt to

have some influence on the faculty at the school. The first petition came in September 1848, when eleven Jews of Zhitomir appealed to the minister of education, Count Uvarov, to appoint the ‘learned Jew’ Isaak Bakst as a teacher of Hebrew and Bible in the rabbinical school.** He was the father of the prominent scholar and public figure Nikolai Bakst (1842-1904) and the well-known St Petersburg pub-

lisher Osip Bakst (1840-95), both of whom studied at the Zhitomir rabbinical school.

The second petition came in April 1862, when preparations were under way to open the first Jewish trade school in Zhitomir. Its organization was entrusted to Akim Tsimerman, the director of the rabbinical school. It was to him that thirty representatives of the Zhitomir Jewish community presented a petition. ‘Having been informed that one of the teachers of the rabbinical school will be appointed to teach Scripture and other Jewish subjects in the new educational institution’, they declared that it was their ‘common desire’ to elect Eliezer Tsvayfel (1815-88) to this position above all others, as a person whom they knew to be ‘more zealous regarding the religious and moral education of the students’.*° Indeed, the literary figure and pedagogue Tsvayfel, who taught Talmud at the rabbinical school, had a reputation as an ardent defender of hasidic doctrines, although he asserted that he 41 DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 2, file 422, fo. 101’. See S. L. Tsinberg, [storia evreiskoi pechati v Rossi v sviazi s obshchestvennymi techeniami (Petrograd, 1915), 127-8.

42 M. Kulisher, ‘Piatidesiatiletie russko-evreiskoi pechati’, Novy voskhod, 35 (1910), 33-4. 43 Thid.

44 See S. G. Lozhinskii, Opisanie del byvshego arkhiva Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshchenua: Kazennye evreiskie uchilishcha (Petrograd, 1920), 1. 291-2. 45 DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 2, file 280, fo. 15-15”.

The Zhitomir Rabbinical School 113 was only trying to reconcile the two hostile camps.*° His publications became the subject of criticism more than once by his colleagues at the rabbinical school and also by literary figures such as Hayim Selig Stonimski and Abraham Ber Gottlober. The young writer Sholem Abramovich (Mendele Mokher Seforim) also sharply contested Tsvayfel’s views.*’ Clearly the local Orthodox residents shared these views and were aware of the developing debate. ‘Above all others’ the Orthodox singled out the first inspector of the rabbinical school, the well-known poet and mathematician Jacob Eichenbaum (1796-1861), but with a negative purpose. After Eichenbaum’s death the censor of Jewish books in Kiev, the baptized Jew Vladimir Fedorov (Tsevi Hirsh Grinbaum, 1815-70), who was on friendly terms with many Jewish literary figures, published information about a letter from Eichenbaum of 7 October 1856 requesting intercession ‘before the district authorities on account of an accusation against him for violating the prescribed religion’. Eichenbaum, justifying his conduct, declared that the ‘literal and exclusive fulfilment of the rites of the faith would reduce him to the level of a simple melamed (“teacher”)... and would end in great humiliation in the very eyes of society itself’.4® One can understand the anxiety of the poet, overburdened with a large family, for his accusers—the banker M. I. Gorovits and the first-guild merchant M. D. Vainshtein (to whom the school was amply indebted for their generous donations)*’—-were very influential people; the latter was named an honorary guardian of the rabbinical school in December 1858.°° Emanuel Levin, who taught German at the Zhitomir rabbinical school and later

served as the secretary of the Society for the Dissemination of Enlightenment among the Jews in Russia (which was founded on his initiative), recalled an analogous case in his autobiographical notes. According to Levin, in October 1857, after his departure from Zhitomir, he submitted a report to the state authorities at the

behest of Eichenbaum and other teachers at the rabbinical school (which was supported by the ‘learned Jew’ at the Ministry of Education, Leon Mandelshtam) rejecting the unjust charges and accusations about their personal lives. It must be noted that the transgressions attributed to the Jewish teachers were typical of charges against the maskilic free-thinkers, then derisively castigated as ‘Berliners’. The informers accused them of not observing all the fast days, of not praying properly 46 Regarding the conflict in the intellectual activities of Tsvayfel, his student, the writer and peda-

gogue Abraham I. Paperna, wrote in his memoirs that his teacher’s ‘profound knowledge of the Talmud and the literature to which it gave rise provided him with the opportunity to offer a hundred verifications regarding the correctness of the teachings of hasidism and of Spinoza’s philosophy’ (quoted from S. Livshits, ‘O nekotorykh prepodavateliakh byvshego Zhitomirskogo ravvinskogo uchilishcha’, Budushchnost, 7 (1900), 142). 47 Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, xv. 774. See also Shafir, ‘Moi vospominaniia’, 106.

48 V. Fedorov, ‘O evreiskikh uchilishchakh (otvet na stati g. Z. S.)’, Kievlianin, 13 (1865), 521. 49 DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 1, files 95 and 126.

°° Tbhid., inventory 2, file 221, fos. 2—3. / 51S. Dubnow, ‘Evrei v Rossii v epokhu evropeiskoi reaktsii (1815—1848)’, in Evrei v Rossiiskoi

imperi XVILI-XIX vekov (Moscow, 1995), 326.

114 Efim Melamed (that is, three times a day), of lighting a samovar on the sabbath, of playing cards when visiting, and so forth.°* Some of these accusations were probably not groundless. Morgulis once wrote that Eichenbaum was ‘completely European, wore European clothes, shaved his beard’ (a claim confirmed by his lithographic portrait in an Odessa publication of his famous poem ‘Hakraw’ in 1874),°° and ‘adhered little to the ritual part of religion’.®*

Such characteristics could not but affect his activities as the inspector of the rabbinical school, who was directly responsible for the teaching of Jewish subjects.

For example, at the end of 1858 the school summarily abrogated the custom of covering one’s head during instruction in Jewish subjects. This repeal did not come in response to orders from above, but was initiated by Eichenbaum himself. In a report of 24 October Eichenbaum explains the controversial decision: Since the [custom] of covering our heads is not regarded as the duty of a Jew in any of our books of the law, even during the time of prayer, in which it is nothing less than a custom of piety, in my opinion the covering of heads during the teaching of Jewish subjects is completely superfluous, and, to some degree even degrading to the holiness of prayer.”?

Interestingly, the state authorities were much more cautious. They not only refused to encourage his initiative, but the trustee of the Kiev educational district even voiced apprehension ‘that the abrogation of such deep-rooted customs could have harmful consequences’ and asked for additional information about the beneficial consequences that one might expect.°° A new report by Eichenbaum on 17 November 1858 represented a ‘mini-treatise’

on this subject. He emphasized again that the custom of covering the head was no more than a superstitious prejudice that ‘reinforces the true religion in the students’ and should be disregarded; it should be permitted only during prayer, not during regular studies. He urged consistency: If it is deemed necessary to cover the head only to confirm in the minds of the people that the students [are more observant], then they should not uncover their heads at all—not during the teaching of general subjects or even in their sleep. The common people consider any uncovering [of the head], no matter where and when it occurs, as a sin.

Hence, in their view, it was just as harmful to cover their heads only during their lessons as it was to leave them uncovered all the time. Eichenbaum declared further that this custom produces. ..an unfavourable impression, particularly during visits from the higher officials of the institution, when the students feel obliged to remove their hats from a sense of respect and they consider this act as both necessary and unnecessary. It would be polite to sit with 52S. Goldshtein, ‘Emmanuil Borisovich Levin po avtobiograficheskim zametkam (1820—1913)’, Evretskaia starina, 2—3 (1916), 258.

53 J. Eichenbaum, Gakrav, trans. from Hebrew by O. Rabinovich (Odessa, 1874). 54 Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, Voskhod, 4 (1897), 76.

55 DAZhO, collection 396, inventory 2, file 203-A, fo. 1. 56 Tbid., fo. 3”.

The Zhitomir Rabbinical School 115 their heads covered in front of their Jewish teachers but impolite in the presence of other people.

The inspector also contended that the custom could have a harmful influence on the physical well-being of the students, who sit ‘in the classroom for two or three hours with a hat on their heads, causing them to sweat and then go out into the open air... which could damage their health’.*’

It bears noting that, when the director of the rabbinical school dispatched Eichenbaum’s report to Kiev (a report signed by three of his colleagues, including Tsvayfel), he deemed it necessary to point out that ‘although all the teachers are in agreement with the opinion of the inspector, some of them consider the abolition of the above-mentioned custom to be untimely’.°® It was no accident that even the trustee of the Kiev educational board, who ultimately endorsed the ‘measure of permitting students not to cover their heads during study’, utilized such cautious wording. This anecdote vividly illuminates the tendency to act prematurely and even dismiss popular opinion and sensibilities, something that was indeed characteristic of some maskilim in the 1850s and 1860s. In flagrantly violating deep-rooted and time-honoured sacred customs, the maskilim failed to realize that their actions could only provoke a vigorous reaction from the zealots of traditional life. As a result, in the end they not only failed to achieve their stated goals but also alienated the majority of the population. As the case of Zhitomir shows, one central reason for the failure of the rabbinical schools lay in the fact that within their walls the selfprofessed ‘leaders of the Jewish people’ were alienated from the very people they claimed to lead. Translated from Russian by ChaeRan Freeze

57 Thid., fo. 5-5”. 58 Thid., fo. 6.

Three Documents on Anti-Jewish Violence in the Eastern Kresy during the Polish—Soviet Conflict SARUNAS LIEKIS, LIDIA MILIAKOVA, and

ANTONY POLONSKY THE period after the First World War was marked by serious conflict in the eastern kresy. The Poles themselves were divided on what should be done with the areas east of the Polish ethnic core. The National Democrats, led by Roman Dmowski, wanted a national state. They favoured extending the borders of Poland as far eastwards as they believed was compatible with the Polonization of the native Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian peasantry. Jozef Pitsudski wanted rather to establish an independent Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine which would be federated with Poland. Poland would obviously be the senior partner in this system, but Pitsudski himself was probably sincere in his expressions of concern for the national aspirations of the peoples in the border area. He saw in Soviet Russia’s weakness following the civil war an opportunity to dislodge Belarus and especially Ukraine from Russia and link them with Poland, believing that in this way he could finally secure the country’s independence. As he put it, ‘Poland will be a great power or it will not exist’.’ By early 1919 he had established himself as the dominant figure in the newly independent Polish state, and his policies, as well as the Soviet hope of extending the revolution westwards by armed means, inevitably led to an armed clash between Poland and Soviet Russia which lasted from the spring of 1919 to the autumn of 1920. The state of war between the two countries was only brought to an end by the treaty of Riga in March 1921.

These years were difficult ones for the Jews of the eastern kresy. The Poles showed little understanding for the desire of Jews in ethnically mixed areas to maintain a neutral posture in the national conflicts there, or, as in the case of Vilna, to support the Lithuanian case. At the same time the fact that Jews constituted a significant proportion of the communist leadership both in Russia and in Poland, and that a small percentage of the Jews had welcomed the Bolshevik revolution, was

seized upon as a means of discrediting the post-war revolutionary wave as a primarily Jewish phenomenon. + Quoted in J. Kolbuszewski, Kresy (Wroclaw, 1996), 107.

Three Documents on Anti-femish Violence 117 Not surprisingly, therefore, the Polish—Soviet conflict was accompanied by a series of anti-Jewish outrages. In the areas where it was fought the towns, such as Vilna and Minsk, were largely Polish, with substantial Jewish minorities, while the countryside was largely Lithuanian, Belarusian, or Ukrainian. Inevitably Jews were caught up in the conflict that resulted from the extension of Polish power into this region. In the first place, they suffered from the widespread breakdown of law and order. In the eyes of many of the Poles fighting in these areas, Jews and Bolsheviks were identified. Serious anti-Jewish excesses thus took place as the ill-disciplined and poorly paid troops of General Dowbor-Musnicki, strengthened by volunteers from the local population and some Belarusian and Ukrainian nationalist formations, moved eastwards, driving out the Bolsheviks. These incidents are documented in the unpublished diary of Stanistaw Michat Kossakowski, adjutant of the Polish general commission for the civil administration of the eastern territories, who also refers to the many former officers of the tsarist armies who were of Polish origin and who shared the widespread view among the Russian Officer Corps that the Jews were responsible for the Bolshevik revolution.” They were explained in the following way by the socialist daily Robotnik on 12 March 19109:

Clearly a significant factor is the quality of the soldiers making up the Lithuanian— Belarusian division. They are drawn almost exclusively from the forces established in Russia [after the February revolution] by General Dowbor-Musnicki and have been seasoned by the marauding adventures of his 1st corps to play the role of brutal and ruthless troops. The special mission with which they were entrusted in Russia—the crushing of peasants and Jews—has clearly deformed them psychologically.

A particularly shocking incident took place in Pinsk, a town with a predominantly Jewish population. It was occupied by Polish troops on 17 March without any fighting. On 5 April a meeting of about 100 people took place in the local Zionist club for the distribution of charity from Jewish institutions in the United States, including matzahs for Passover. The organizers believed they had received authorization from the local military authorities to hold the meeting. The local commander seems, however, to have believed a rumour which came to him that an illegal meeting of revolutionaries was taking place. He sent out a patrol, which arrested a fair number of people on a haphazard basis. On the night of 5 April the panicky commander executed thirty-five of them, including women and children. The remainder were only saved as a result of the intercession of representatives of the principal charity involved, the American Joint Distribution Committee, with the Polish authorities in Warsaw.° 2 This is to be found in the archives of the Polska Akademia Nauk, Warsaw.

3 On the events in Pinsk, see J. Tomaszewski, ‘Pinsk, Saturday 5 April 1919’, Polin, 1 (1986), 227-51; J. Lewandowski, ‘History and Myth: Pinsk, April 1919’, Polin, 2 (1987), 50-72; La Situation des Furfs en Pologne: Rapport de la commission d étude désignée par la Conférence Socialiste Internationale de

Lucerne (Brussels and Paris, 1920), 219-30; A. Shohat, ‘Parashat hapogrom bepinsk behamishah be’april 1919’, Gal Ed, 1 (1973), 135-73.

118 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky Pogrom-type outbreaks occurred after the Poles took Lublin, Lida, Vilna, and a number of other towns. They aroused widespread shock and indignation in western Europe and the United States.* Balfour, the British foreign secretary, was even provoked to write to Paderewski in June 1919 calling on the Polish authorities to take steps to protect the Jews, to which Paderewski replied that his government had ‘taken all the necessary measures referred to by your Excellency to check antiJewish movements in Poland’. At the same time he claimed that ‘the majority of racial conflicts are due to provocation both from within and without the country’.° Indeed, the general reaction of Polish society was very disappointing to those who hoped that independence would lead to an improvement in Polish—Jewish

relations. The antisemitic groups consistently denied that any organized antiJewish violence had occurred, or claimed, if it had, that it was the fault of the Jews themselves. Attempts to publicize what was taking place were attacked as part of a campaign to blacken the name of Poland and undermine Polish territorial claims.

More alarming to the Jews was the attitude of some progressive and left-wing circles. In reply to a protest of the Swedish Social Democrats, Ignacy Daszynski, a leading member of the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Party, PPS), replied that the pogroms in Galicia were the work of Austrian marauders and that they were ‘directed against speculation’. He did concede that unfortunately some innocent people had suffered in June 1919, but denied that any pogroms had taken place in Poland and declared: ‘If somebody falls victim to street battles, in struggles as bitter as those for the possession of L’viv, Lida or Vilna, they cannot be called victims of pogroms.”° Yet in all these cases most Jewish casualties occurred after the fighting was over. These attitudes were not universally shared. In April 1919 the PPS-dominated council of workers’ delegates in Warsaw voted unanimously to condemn the pogroms, which it claimed were being organized by reactionaries. A similar motion was unanimously adopted after the Pinsk massacre, holding the army responsible for

what had taken place. Similarly, the parliamentary faction of the PPS severely censured the army for the excesses which had occurred after the capture of Lublin in April 1919. ‘The wave of anti-Jewish incidents was also condemned by the former Austro-Hungarian minister of finance Leo Bilinski, who was to hold high office in post-war Poland, by General Alexander Babianski, and by Professor Baudouin de Courtenay. The eminent Polish writer Andrzej Strug made a public protest against

what he called the ‘conspiracy of silence’ in government circles and in the press concerning the antisemitic atrocities. ’ The three documents printed here describe the anti-Jewish violence in Lida and 4 La Situation des Juifs en Pologne, 22.

© For the foreign reaction, see P. Korzec, ‘Problem zydowski w zyciu politycznym Polski 1g00—1939’ (MS in the possession of Antony Polonsky), 110-19; W. Stankiewicz and A. Piber (eds.), Archiwum Polityczne Ignacego Paderewskiego, 4 vols. (Wroclaw, 1973), 11. 219, 229-30.

© La Situation des Fuifs en Pologne, 65-6. ” Korzec, ‘Problem’, 149-53.

Three Documents on Anti-Jewish Violence 119 in Vilna in April 1919. The documents on Lida come from the collection of the supreme command of the Polish army in the holdings of the Tsentr khranentia

istoriko-dokumentalnykh kollektsii (Moscow Centre for the Preservation of Historical and Document Collections) (formerly Osobyi arkhiv, Special Archive)

and were discovered by Dr Lidia Miliakova of the Institut slavianovedenuia, Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk (Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences). This archive is a collection of ‘trophy’ documents. These documents were removed to Germany from the different European countries during the war

and then captured by the Soviet troops. There are documents of armies, intelligence services, parliaments, and foreign ministries. These documents were not available for researchers in Soviet times and it was only in the 1ggos that the archive was opened to Russian and foreign researchers. Lida was a small town about 60 miles south of Vilna, with which it was linked by rail. In 1919 its population was about 5,500, of whom the majority were Jews (67.7 per cent according to the census of 1897). Disputes arose almost immediately after the town was recaptured by Polish forces in April 1919 on the scale and reasons for

the anti-Jewish violence which followed the establishment of Polish control. On 18 April 1919 the report of the Polish central headquarters covering the military developments in Lida claimed that ‘the Jewish population assisted the Bolsheviks by shooting Polish troops’. This led to the following parliamentary question by the Jewish deputies in the Constituent Sejm to General Jozef Krzysztof Lesniewsk1, the minister of war: The report of the Polish central headquarters of 18 April 1919 claims that the local population participated in the battle on the side of the Bolsheviks; soon afterwards there were published a number of official and semi-official reports on the events in Lida. Some of them mentioned several dozen Jewish civilians who died fighting against Polish troops, others mentioned some thirty-five Jews killed by stray bullets . . . Therefore we address the minis-

ter of war with a request regarding the measures he is going to undertake in order to avoid | any future publication of unsubstantiated official reports that falsely allege Jewish treason and provoke incidents and pogroms against the Jews.®

On 2 July 1919 General Lesniewski sent his reply to the marshal (speaker) of the Sejm of the republic of Poland. It read: According to the investigation of the events and on the basis of the data collected by military, judiciary, and administrative authorities the facts were represented as follows. One part of the victims died because of stray bullets. Others were killed because communist-minded Jews fought in the battles on the side of the Bolsheviks. Several people of this type died during the military clashes; others were killed by the Polish soldiers who rushed into the town. The latter, when they come across armed civilians, who shoot the soldiers and whom the soldiers 8 Quoted by I. Kheifets, Mezhdunarodnaia reaktstia i evreiskie pogromy, 1: Polsha (Kharkov, 1925), 55. Kheifets was one of the members of Evobshchestkom, an organization which co-operated with the Bolsheviks to provide help to the victims of pogroms. He based his work on the contemporary Jewish press.

120 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihtakova, Antony Polonsky suspect of being their enemies, would naturally kill their adversaries, real or imagined, out of a sense of self-preservation. Additionally it should be mentioned that our soldiers were outraged by the discovery of corpses of our soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks the day before. The prisoners were murdered in the most barbaric manner under conditions that suggest that local Jews were involved . . . Taking the above facts into account I have to affirm that the troops had every reason to conduct military repression of the Jewish population of Lida because of the disloyal attitude of the Jews. However, that repression was not allowed. Legal restrictions curbed the natural sense of outrage of the Polish soldier. Therefore the number of victims, including those who died from stray bullets, reached only thirty-five people. The number of victims could have been much higher, if the corresponding repression, justified by the given situation, had been implemented, and if the Polish soldiers had not demonstrated exemplary discipline, enabling the officers to restrain the embittered legionaries from the excesses. . . . And in the circumstances of a street battle, when more than one soldier has fallen, murdered by a shot from a window or from behind _ by ambush, and when several soldiers have gone beyond the established rules of engagement, it is impossible to find those who bear the guilt . . . The materials from the investigation provide no grounds for establishing the responsibility of civil or military authorities in Lida.°

At the same time the local Jews had set up a committee to investigate what had happened in Lida. Its report constitutes document 1 and was found in collection 471, inventory 1, file 56 of the collections of the Moscow Centre for the Preservation

of Historical Documents. The two Jewish members of the Sejm committee summarized the findings of the document and made them public in an attempt to show the falsity of the official account. Their statement reads as follows: On the basis of the data provided in the annexe to this letter,'° we claim:

t. the disposition of the Jewish population in Lida was anti-communist; | 2. those who were shot were not the Jews captured with armaments, and not those who declared themselves the enemies of the Polish troops, but rather innocent people, who did not belong to any political party, who were not arrested during the street fights but rather afterwards in their homes [the list of the victims follows"']; 3. old people, women, and even paralytics were murdered [the list of the victims follows'*]; 4. only one Jew was killed by a stray bullet;

5. many Jews were tortured: one had his legs burned on the stove; two others were put into a ditch full of sewage and the soldiers rode over them; another was harnessed to a wagon, etc. ‘These things did not take place during a ‘fierce battle’, but a month and a half after the end of the campaign;

6. information on the discovery of the mutilated corpses of the murdered Poles turned out to be erroneous, which was confirmed by a local priest; 7. the troops who looted and murdered the Jews in their houses did not check their party membership or whether they belonged to the Bolsheviks; 9 Kheifets, Mezhdunarodnaia reaktsiia i evreiskie pogromy, i. 55-6.

10 Document 1. ‘1 Document 2. 12 Tbid.

Three Documents on Anti-fewish Violence 121 8. the Jewish population of the town of Lida was terrorized; two months after the capture of the town, the Jews were looted, and money was extorted from them.!?

The document for Vilna, which relates to the violence which accompanied the Polish capture of the city on 19 April 1919, was found in the archive of the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vilna. It was in English and had presumably been translated to be given to the commission headed by Sir Stuart Samuel which was investigating anti-Jewish violence in Poland. It was discovered by Sarunas Liekis.

DOCUMENT I On the Events that Took Place in the Town of Lida after the Entry of the Polish Legion™ The Position and Mood of the Jewish Population under the Bolsheviks Throughout the time of their presence in Lida the position of the Bolsheviks was shaky. The Bolsheviks were not unaware of this. Most of the inhabitants of the town did not believe in the stability of Bolshevik power and did not trust the Bolsheviks. Neither those who belonged to the circles of the intelligentsia nor the property owners sympathized with the Bolsheviks. Instead, the behaviour of the Bolsheviks caused irritation and hatred, especially among the Jews. Under the Bolsheviks both

trade and industry stagnated and had no prospect of revival. ‘The Bolsheviks incessantly appropriated merchandise and food from the stores, warehouses, and private dwellings. Any Jewish pedlar or wholesale merchant could expect his prop- | erty and merchandise to be confiscated from his place of business at any time. What is more, there was a considerable food crisis, which worsened steadily day by day. The income of the population dropped to a minimum. ‘The number of unemployed grew. Many businesses were expropriated from their owners and transferred to the workers’ ownership. Expropriations had a heavy toll with . . .‘° the class of owners. They were particularly burdensome for the Jews, many of whom went bankrupt. Many Jews were arrested, sometimes at night, for they could not pay the demanded amount. Those arrested were kept in prison for weeks unless they paid the money. The arrested Jews—some of them wealthy and respected town inhabitants—were treated ruthlessly and insolently. Everyday life became extremely difficult. ‘The townsmen were forced to seek employment as workers and clerks with the Bol-

sheviks, not for ideological reasons but rather out of financial need. Not infrequently the Bolsheviks conducted inventories of the food resources of the town inhabitants. During the inventory the Bolsheviks confiscated food despite there 13 Kheifets, Mezhdunarodnaia reaktstia i evreiskie pogromy, i. 56.

14 Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumentalnykh kollektsii, collection 471, inventory 1, file 56, fos.

192-214. 18 One word missing in the original.

122 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky being little available. At the same time the Red Army units deployed in the town did not maintain order; on the contrary, they provoked all sorts of incidents. Thus, for instance, in spite of an order commanding them to move from private quarters to the barracks, the Red Army soldiers remained in town and spread contagious diseases such as typhus. This was also the reason why, later, shots were fired from the windows of private houses, since Red Army soldiers were quartered in practically

every dwelling, and, taken unawares by the sudden entry of the Polish cavalry, began to fire off random salvoes.

The Morale of the Bolshevik Units Because of the approaching front and frequent attacks by Polish legionaries on the town, the position of the Bolsheviks deteriorated. All the attempts of the Bolsheviks to strengthen their positions in the town brought no results. The population, both Jewish and Christian, remained hostile to them. In addition, the dispersal of the troops and disorganization of the Red Army jeopardized the Bolsheviks’ position even further. The Red Army soldiers, military orders notwithstanding, did not want to go to the front. At crucial moments they withdrew from the front lines, retreated one by one, and returned to the town. On their return the town dwellers trembled with fear; everybody expected the insolent Bolsheviks and soldiers to

unleash a pogrom. Once the soldiers almost unleashed a mass pogrom, but it was quickly averted. Yet several stores, and leather and other workshops, were looted..Once, while bargaining in the market, a Bolshevik soldier killed a certain -Narkuzski, the son of a Jewish shohet. The incident was caused by a dispute over the kerenki [roubles issued under the Russian Provisional Government] exchange rate. This caused a good deal of unrest between the Bolsheviks and Jews.

The Last Days of the Bolsheviks During one of the last weeks of their presence in the town the Bolsheviks issued two orders: one on the mobilization of the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie and another

on the full mobilization of recruits of a particular age. However, the population of Lida ignored these orders. Being afraid of the Bolshevik mobilization, young people left the town in great numbers; those who remained hid themselves in the houses and were afraid to go out. The town died. The frequent attacks by Polish cavalry completely destabilized the badly commanded Soviet power. The power in the town passed from one irresponsible Bolshevik to another. Among them there were people of different nationalities—Poles, Jews, Russians, Latvians, and others. Simultaneously two Poles—Segen and Kolesinski—headed the Lida revolutionary committee. At the last moment the Cheka seized power in the town, and the burden of Bolshevik dictatorship was felt by the entire population, nationality notwithstanding. The social experiments of the Bolsheviks and their cruel policies turned the entire population of Lida into their enemies. Hunger and starvation, the trade

Three Documents on Anti-Fewish Violence 123 crisis and unemployment, looting and expropriations, and the nationalization of private industries alienated the Jewish population. The Jews looked forward to the restoration of a calm and peaceful life, to the retreat of the Bolsheviks and their gangs, and to the arrival of the Polish troops that were expected to reinstate rights and justice. To the great sorrow of the Jews the reality was far different from what they had hoped for. The arrival of the Polish troops resulted in the bloodshed of Jewish martyrs, of the innocent victims of slanderous accusations and national antagonism, and of innocent children and elderly people. Jewish property, accumulated through many years of honest work, was looted. On 16 and 17 April 1919 began hard and bloody days that were followed by other black days.

Events that Followed the Entry of the Polish Detachments on Wednesday 16 April 1919 Entry of the Polish troops into Lida

After a number of unsuccessful attempts to capture Lida the Polish legionaries opened an energetic offensive. Already in the week before 16 April Polish aeroplanes had flown over the town practically every day. A panic began in the town and

the population began to feel that a critical moment had come for the Bolsheviks. Having prepared the attack with prolonged artillery and gunfire, the Polish legionaries advanced, the Red Army retreated to the town centre, and the Poles took the outskirts. The most important organs of Soviet power and the army had abandoned the town in the direction of Lipniszki, yet scattered detachments of soldiers who had decided to plan a defence remained in the town. On Wednesday 16 April, early in the morning, the first Polish cavalry units entered the town. They were divided into two groups. One went down Synagogalna Street, the other down Wilenska Street. These detachments were small. A battle started inside the town. The legionaries and the Bolsheviks fought in the streets. Machine guns were placed on pavements and sometimes in houses. Indiscriminate fire raked the town. The streets constantly passed from hand to hand. One part of the Polish detachment went to Synagogalna Street and rushed into the synagogue, where the Jews were celebrating the second day of Passover. The Poles carried out a careful search, and all the Jews ran home. Another part of the detachment went down Wilenska Street, rushed into the Jewish hospital, and took a Jewish nurse, Fanni Kaplan, as a hostage. She was put in front of the troops and was forced to accompany them while the detachment was trying to make its way through to the town. She witnessed the following. 16 April

At eight o’clock in the morning the legionaries came to number 41, entered the apartment of Eliezer Polaczek, the owner of the house, put carbines to his chest, and ordered all the Jews to get out. There was Eliezer, 55 years old, his son Jakob, 19 years old, together with his wife, his daughter, and their maid. The last three were

124 Sarunas Liekis, India Mihakova, Antony Polonsky ordered to stay, while Eliezer and Jakob were taken into the street. Both were shot near the orchard next to number 37. Rumours spread that it was a certain Rudnicki,

an officer in the Suwatki regiment, quartered afterwards in the apartment of Darszon in Krzywa Street, who boasted that he had murdered the Polaczeks (numbers 28 and 29 from the appended list of casualties).

16 April |

In Lidzka Street several legionaries captured Zalman Staszynski, 16 years old, and

demanded that he indicate the address of Kaminski, an inhabitant of the town. When the boy refused, they took off his boots, lit the stove, and put his feet into the

fire. The boy started to scream. Threatened with more torture, he named the address of Kaminski (16 Policyjna Street), where Shaya, the father of Mojzesz Kaminski, lived. The next day, Tuesday 17 April, one officer and two soldiers of the Suwaltki regiment went to Shaya Kaminski, arrested his 20-year-old son Mojzesz, took him to the village of Rosladka, and murdered him there. Deep and horrible wounds were found on his corpse. Mojzesz Kaminski was the son of a shohet. He worked as an exterminator and a hospital attendant and did not belong to any political party. Staszynski himself, beaten up and with his legs burned, was put into prison and later exiled from Lida. Nothing is known of his fate. On the same day unknown people murdered a respected town Jew, Jakob Bajchwit, 60 years old. (Kaminski—number 30 on the list, Bajchwit—number 6.)

The Return of the Polish Troops | After an entire day of street battles the Polish legionaries had to retreat along Wilenska Street. After bitter fighting which took place on practically all the streets of the town, and in particular on Kamienska, Krzywa, and Wilenska Streets and in the town park, many wounded legionaries and Bolsheviks were left lying in the streets. Polish legionaries did not entirely withdraw from the town; instead, they stayed in the suburbs. However, the Bolshevik troops left the town; no more than several soldiers and sailors remained at night. The night of 16 April was calm, without bloodshed. In the morning shooting began again, but only by the Polish legionaries. The firing did not last long.

The Polish legionaries understood that the Bolsheviks had left the town and about six in the morning the former entered the town. They were followed by the Suwatki infantry. The Bolshevik soldiers continued shooting Polish soldiers from several houses. It was then that several dozen Jews were killed and a horrible antiJewish pogrom started.

The Events that Followed the Entry of the Polish Troops into Lida 17 April. The Pogrom

Immediately after the entry of Polish regular troops the soldiers were given a free

hand to loot. They immediately scattered throughout the town to loot Jewish

Three Documents on Anti-fewish Violence 125 stores. They broke the locks, doors, and windows, and stole merchandise, most of which was soon destroyed. Local Poles crowded through the town to show the soldiers which stores belonged to Jews and which to Christians. Many suspiciouslooking individuals arrived from the nearby villages to join in the looting of the Jewish property. The soldiers and sometimes the officers encouraged the population to loot. At the same time they mocked the Jews who came to complain to them of looting and robbery. The soldiers themselves distributed the stolen items, including jewellery, among the Christian population. Later, many stolen goods were found either in the market, where they were put on sale, or in private Polish apartments and peasant homes.

Searches and Robbery Groups of soldiers rushed into the Jewish apartments and under the pretence of a search started to loot shamelessly. They stole everything they found: goods, food, and money. Instead of looking for the Bolsheviks, they burrowed into the wardrobes and into drawers. They beat up anyone and threatened to shoot anyone who attempted to argue or protest. In every house they asked the owners whether they were Poles or Jews. Jews were threatened with a pogrom, robbery, or even shooting. There was hardly any Jewish home that did not suffer at that time.

Arrests en masse At the same time mass arrests were conducted in the town. The soldiers rushed into

Jewish apartments, banished the Jews into the streets, and herded them off to prison, driving them with rifle butts the whole way. On their way to prison many Jews were cruelly beaten. The dregs of Polish society went around the town and denounced completely innocent Jews, often acting out of purely personal motives. The arrested were kept for several days in dark and stuffy cells, without anything to eat. Many Jews, for example, were driven like cattle to the passage behind 60 Kamienska Street. The rabbi himself was dragged through the mud to this house, barefoot and naked. The arrested were stripped of all their money and possessions. Any request was followed by beatings. Most were later released without investigation, since they were completely innocent, peaceful people, including some who were wealthy and respected.

The Slanderous Rumours The slanderous rumours that were spread among the troops by some suspicious individuals had a great influence on further events. According to the rumours, the Jews in particular had shot the legionaries from the windows of the houses and, secondly, they had murdered a legionary and cut out his tongue. Later on it became clear that those rumours did not correspond to reality. The Jews had no weapons, for the Bolsheviks had confiscated them and did not allow private possession of any armaments. The Bolsheviks and Red Army soldiers who remained in the town were

126 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky responsible for the shooting that had taken place. Regarding the tongue of the assas-

sinated legionary, the following information is available. At 27 Zamkowa Street there lived a Jewish woman, Rivka Nowoprucka, and on the same street, at number 12, there lived a Jewish carpenter, Mojzesz Izaak Neprochski. A former sergeantmajor, Mikiaszewicz, was a neighbour of Nowoprucka. On Wednesday morning Nowoprucka and her children, having first locked the house, hid themselves in a cellar. When the Polish troops entered the town on Thursday, Nowoprucka came out of the cellar and found that the house was open, and the fence, which separated her yard from that of Miktaszewicz, was broken . . . Ina shed Nowoprucka found

the corpse of a dead legionary, with his skull broken and his tongue damaged. Groups of local Poles brought the legionaries there and showed them the corpse of

their comrade, murdered by the Jews. First they wanted to murder 60-year-old Nowoprucka, but she managed to escape. Then the Poles exposed Neprochski. The legionaries came and arrested him, drove him to the back of the Catholic cathedral, and shot him there (signs of beatings were found on his corpse). (M. I. Neprochski

number 24 on the list of those killed.) | His corpse was buried in the mud near the pond by the Dziekanski Bridge. The same legionaries took everything they could from the houses of Neprochski and Nowoprucka. Neprochsk1’s wife later saw an officer who had taken part in the robbery wearing her husband’s fur coat. A certain peasant woman also told Neprochski’s wife that her goods could be found in the house of a certain policeman. One should add that on the day after this incident Miktaszewicz himself repaired the fence between his house and that of Nowoprucka. Three days later (on 20 April) the

military chaplain reproached his flock for groundlessly accusing the Jews. He demanded that anyone who knew what had actually happened to the legionary who lost his tongue come forward and expose the guilty party. Three men raised their hands, agreed to tell every detail, and were taken away by the priest. Soon the general forbade all mention of this event. None the less this slander concerning the murdered legionary resulted in a number of other violent acts against Jews. 17 April

On the same day the legionaries came to Eljasz Cukiernik, on Wilenska Street. When asked about the whereabouts of his son the communist, Cukiernik assured them that he had not the slightest idea. Then the legionaries took him out and drove him to the forest. On their way Cukiernik asked them to ask an organist just then passing by to testify to his, Cukiernik’s, reliability. When the convoy learned from the organist and other Poles that Cukiernik had no relations with the Bolsheviks, he was taken to the prison. During the interrogation he was asked to pay 20,000 roubles’ ransom for his son the communist, in exchange for his own release. After

two days they went to Cukiernik again, and after a close search, arrested him together with Misha, his 12-year-old son, and Yudel Cukiernik, his nephew. During the arrest the soldiers confiscated their belongings, furniture, etc.

Three Documents on Anti-Jewish Violence 127 The same day, in all districts of the town, the legionaries rushed into the apartments of local inhabitants. Many were taken out, and afterwards their corpses were found, sometimes mutilated. In Bastuny, a railway station between Lida and Vilna, there lived two teachers named Kalmanowicz (aged 22) and Zelik Rieznicki (aged 20). On 17 April two cavalrymen went to the house of Kalmanowicz and Rieznicki and ordered them to lie down in a ditch filled with water and filth. Since there was in the vicinity a footbridge over which one could ride, the cavalrymen clearly wanted to ride over them while they were lying face down in the ditch. The young men were compelled to lie down in the ditch, but fortunately the horses jumped over their bodies. After this incident the nervous shock sustained by Kalmanowicz and Rieznicki was such that they had to recover in bed for some time.

Murder of Local Inhabitants Most of the murdered Jews had no connection with politics, and even less with the Bolsheviks. Among the murdered there were teenagers, women, and children. On

that and the following days thirty-nine people were murdered and buried in the Lida cemetery; five of them remained unidentified. ‘Those murdered included Nachman Murstein (no. 21), aged 55, Jehuda Zalcsztajn (no. 12), aged 25, Kalmen

Jadlowker, a visiting student from the Petrograd Conservatory (no. 13), Leib Mowszowicz, aged 34, a teacher and social activist, a Bundist (no. 22), Szlojme Stonimczyk, aged 61 (no. 25), Aron Szklar, aged 30, paralysed, stabbed by the bayonets of the legionaries, died after terrible agonies (no. 27), Jechezkiel Korn, aged 45, shot (no. 31), Szlojme Lipnicki, aged 12 (no. 16), Szloyme Bogdanowski, aged 9 (no. 7), and many others. ‘The murdered were not interrogated, were not accused of any sort of crime, and were not subjected to a trial.

New Arrests, Searches, and Treatment of the Arrested After these events there was no peace. Searches and arrests continued and became routine events. All the arrested, not to mention the communists, were beaten and mocked. ‘Thus, for example, Julyusz Ilutowicz was beaten and whipped during his arrest and during his stay in prison. Maler, who was with him in prison, said that while they were together Ilutowicz sobbed loudly for a whole day ‘like a bull’. When two weeks later he was taken for investigation, the soldiers accompanying him struck him three times with their rifles in the back (eyewitnesses, Olkienicka, Dubkowski, and the priest). Even when he was taken to the toilet, he was beaten with fists and rifle butts as he was at the investigation. Nobody could be certain he would not be arrested, as most arrests took place on the basis of false denunciations. When arresting people, no attention was paid to first names, and people with the same surname were often confused. Elderly fathers, mothers, and sisters of accused communists who had fled were arrested. Many were later taken from the town; they

128 | Sarunas Ltekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky were often robbed on the road and were only released later in Biatystok. Even today the gaols of Lida are filled with accused persons, who admit to no wrongdoing. As an example of the way the soldiers behaved, one could cite the following case.

On the night of 29 May, at 1 a.m., soldiers quartered in the Lenski Hotel came into the apartment of B. Winiacki on 2 Wilenska Street, searched the house, and de-

manded bedlinen. The frightened children started to cry out, neighbours came, and the soldiers fled. ‘That same night soldiers came to the Gotgb apartment at 2 Wilenska Street. They asked if the inhabitants were Jews and took two pillows. The same happened in the neighbouring house, 3 Wilenska Street.

Forced Labour The mobilization of Jews into forced labour has been a regular measure that until now has taken place in less harsh circumstances. ‘This measure was established exclusively for Jews, whereas the Christian population has not been mobilized for forced labour. Jews have been captured everywhere, both old people and sick men, sex or age notwithstanding. No allowances have been made for the religious traditions of the Jews: arrests have been carried out on the sabbath and during the festivals, even during prayer. They took place on the first and the second sabbath after the invasion of the Polish legionaries (they took Szyfmanowicz, Liba, and others). On Friday 17 April Polish militia went from house to house and took nobody else but Jews to clean the streets. Old Eljasz Kiweljowicz was ordered to pick up horse manure by hand and collect it into his hat and take it out into the street. This half-hour ceremony took place in front of the church in the presence of a multitude of Poles. Meanwhile, the 75-year-old Ojyzer Wotynski, impelled by whips, was ordered to sweep the street. Sometimes Jews were forced to do the most unpleasant

jobs like cleaning toilets and rubbish heaps. The militia’s attitude to the Jews during the forced labour was harsh and hostile. The military chauffeurs, who were billeted in the Bajchwit house, 2 Grodzienska Street, behaved in a particularly abusive and cruel manner. They, together with two armed youths, did not allow

any Jew to pass peacefully. They seized any passer-by and compelled him to perform various services, like cleaning their quarters or washing the floor. ‘They frequently beat those they seized until they bled. Recently the military command changed the forced labour into a profitable enterprise. They started to demand ransom money in exchange for the chance to avoid it. I'wo high-school students, Gojdo and Szternberg, aged 14, were seized to load baskets at the station: the baskets proved too heavy for them, but they were kept at the work until four in the morning. On 24 May the scribe Ezra Gotgb, aged 52, of 2 Wilenska Street, and his neighbour, Chaim Sciekolszczyk, of 3 Wilenska Street, were dragged at 11 p.m. to the house of Dr Warszawski, where they were ordered to pump water for the bath of the officer billeted there. They were kept there until 2 a.m. All artisans and workers

are compelled to do forced labour. While the Christian population is paid the

Three Documents on Anti-Jewish Violence 129 correct amount and is reimbursed with food, the Jewish workers do not get any remuneration and if they protest are subjected to beatings.

Requisition The military and civil authorities requisitioned only from the Jews. The officers, and especially their batmen, while requisitioning linen and pillows, used to pack the requisitioned items to confiscate them. This has happened frequently in the Grand Hotel and the Petersburg Hotel. This is despite the order of the commandant not to conduct any requisitions without his special permission. Arbitrary requisitions are being continued. Thus, after this order was issued, the chauffeurs we have already mentioned seized a pump and other equipment from Lejba Kotlarski, threatening him with a beating if he resisted. Intervention with the commander did not result in

the return of the goods. In the house owned by the Podziemskis on Kamienska Street a local Pole, with the assistance of a policeman, requisitioned an apartment for his own use. Three soldiers burst into the shop of Benjamin Gwieniecki, 4 Kamienska Street, at 5 a.m. and took goods worth 7 marks for which they paid 1 mark. When the shopkeeper protested they hit his wife so hard that she had to spend a week in bed under the care of Dr Gotabiowski and a medical assistant (felcher). A non-commissioned officer came to Isak Berkowicz’s smithy to have his horse

shod. After the horse had been shod, the NCO explained that he had no money on him and the smith should come with him to be paid. He took him far out of the town and gave hima piece of paper. It read ‘For shoeing a horse, twenty-five in the backside’. Signature illegible.

The Attitude of the Police The attitude of the police to Jewish citizens is coarse in the extreme, abusive, and hostile. Thus, for instance, to demand that householders clean their street, policemen ring and knock at 5 a.m., although the street concerned is usually clean. When goods are distributed, the police push Jews out of queues, and allow Christian Poles to take the first places. This can be confirmed by Goldberg, a member of the supply committee. The police generally take no notice of Jewish requests for help and frequently mock Jews.

The Conduct of the Civil Authorities The civil authorities, from the lower officials up, treat the Jews inconsistently and contemptuously, as a victor treats the defeated, as a landlord treats his serfs. In order to settle the simplest problem one has to spend hours in corridors and reception rooms waiting for a decision. Even though the burden of looting and taxes falls predominantly on the Jews, still the Jews are robbed of linen, furniture, and other things. At the same time all sorts of restrictions are introduced against them. Jewish merchants and salesmen cannot supply merchandise to the town, for they almost

130 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky never get permission to leave the town and bring the merchandise in. Effectively Jews are completely without rights: announcements are published in Polish, which cannot be understood by a large majority of Jews. ‘The following incident is revealing: on 30 May at 11 a.m. two Jewish students, Rubin and Berlowicz, were reading

a Yiddish newspaper in the street. An official and two policemen appeared and demanded that they stop reading, since it was forbidden to read Yiddish newspapers. The students refused, arguing that there was no such regulation. When the students demanded that they be taken to an office and charged, the officials left. By and large Jews are driven out of the social services; those who worked in these services have been dismissed and replaced by Poles. Thus it happened that in the town hospital, formerly a Jewish hospital, a Jewish clerk and a Jewish nurse lost their jobs. Recently an order has been published that the Jews be dismissed from various departments of the hospital, such as the sanitary department, and replaced by Poles, who are to get twice as big a salary as the Jews. The following events illustrate best of all the attitude of the authorities towards the Jewish population. When the head of state, Jozef Pitsudski, was supposed to pass through Lida, the Jewish

delegation went to meet him at the station. At the station the town rabbi told Osmotowski, the commissar of Lithuania, that the Poles oppress the Jewish population. ‘To this Osmotowski replied to the Jewish deputies that Pitsudski was coming by plane and not by train. After the Jewish deputies left, Pitlsudski arrived in Lida by train half an hour later. Thus the Jewish population did not get a chance to meet the head of state. The same pattern was repeated on 2 May, on the name-day of General Szeptycki. The mayor proposed that a Jewish delegation be invited and this was done. The Jewish delegation was present at the event and was photographed, but was not presented to the general. When the Jewish delegation complained, it was told it could present its compliments to the general in writing, but until the present this has not been made possible. To give a full picture of the situation, one should also point out that Poles who held responsible positions in the Bolshevik hierarchy (for instance Rawicz, director of the Social Work Bureau, Stankiewicz and Jankowski, directors of the Supply Depot) still hold responsible positions under the new administration. This Rawicz is responsible for the distribution of passes, Stankiewicz is in control of the Central Military Warehouse, etc. Yet Jews, who held much less prominent posts under the Bolsheviks, because they had no alternative, are persecuted and boycotted.

The Attitude of the Army towards the Jewish Population The soldiers march in the streets, singing songs insulting the Jews. When Polaczek,

Kiweljower, and Sergeant Bloumsztejn and others passed the barracks of the legionaries on 30 May, they were showered with insults, although among them was a sergeant in the Polish army, a Jew. The legionaries took Eljasz Kalman Krupski (aged 20), who lives at the corner of Wilenska Street, to their camp together with his wagon. They kept him there for five days and did not give him or his horse anything

Three Documents on Anti-fewish Violence 131 to eat. He was then seized by the gendarmes, who told him to go with them to Berdowka. When the horse would no longer pull the wagon, they harnessed Krupski himself and made him pull it for three versts (14 May).

On 1 June in the morning the following incidents took place. The uhlans of General Dabrowski stopped several old Jews and cut off their beards with swords and knives (the names of the victims: Eljasz Koszczanski, butcher, Sadowa Street, Josek Berkowicz, bookbinder, 1 Jarostawska Street, Szloma Berkowicz, 17 Sadowa). These same uhlans robbed the cafés of Kratowicz, Szysman, and others. On the evening of 20 June a policeman arrived at the village of Trykielach, 17 versts from Lida, and ordered all the Jews to get out of their houses. When the Jews came out, the soldiers put them against the wall and announced to their wives and children that they would be shot. The soldiers had already taken aim. The relatives

started to cry and scream. Their supplications persuaded the policeman and the soldiers, who decided to soften the punishment. They ordered the Jews to whip each other. A bench was brought. The policeman chose a young Jew, who was forced to beat the other Jews. The policeman himself showed the other Jews how to whip properly. After that the soldiers ordered the Jews to slap each other on the face. The

cup of Jewish sufferings was brimming over when the soldiers ordered them to bring shovels and brooms to clean the village, despite the fact that it was a sabbath evening. But the most horrible thing happened when the Jews were forced to pull up grass with their teeth. The Jews were also required to deliver eggs and other produce, for which the soldiers promised to pay the next day. The Jewish population of the village, some twenty families, was completely defenceless. ‘They had no one to whom they could take their complaints. On the way to Lida, Jews are robbed and often beaten, which makes access to Lida difficult and uncertain. On 24 June a Jew, Abram Bloch, received permission

to travel with his sick wife to Lida. When they got into the railway coach, the soldiers in it, six in number, said there was no room, and forced the Jew to stand on the platform. With difficulty he got permission to get into the coach with his sick wife. When the train started to move, the soldiers began to torment the Jew, threatening to throw him from the train into the river, pulling his beard so that they could cut it off. Then they began to burn his hands and beard. The Jew tried to hide in a corner of the coach and the soldiers continued to ‘amuse themselves’ at his expense. They stamped on his feet, pushed him in the neck and back with their bayonets, threw his hat out of the window, and stole food and money from him.

The above facts lead us to the following conclusion: the psychological, economic, and national situation of the Jews and of the Jewish population in Poland and Lithuania has been unbearable. Similar events have occurred everywhere. Examples can be provided in great numbers. The worst thing is that the situation is not improving; on the contrary, it is deteriorating even further; the acts of humiliation and oppression of the Jews are repeated on a daily basis. The Jewish population is longing for the return of peace and order.

132 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky

DOCUMENT 2 List of the Jews killed in Lida on 16—17 April 1919 1 Name: Orzechowski, Mojzesz Age 6o Address: Postawszczyzna Occupation: gravedigger Circumstances of death: An old religious Jew, former me/amed, not interested in

politics. Found murdered on the road taken by the Polish army from Lida to Piwajny. (Report no. 30)

2 Name: Iwenecki, Nochum Wolf Age 17 Address: Wilenska2 Occupation: railway worker Circumstances of death: An ordinary lad, uneducated, religiously inclined, not affiliated with a party; politics never interested him. During the German occupation worked on the railways. During the Bolshevik rule was without work due to the disruption of railway communication (he did not want to take a job with the Bolsheviks). On Thursday 17 April three Polish soldiers took him out of his apartment and executed him. They tore all the clothes off the corpse. (Report no. 14)

3 Name: Ilutowicz,Ber Age17 Address: Krypa3 Occupation: barber Circumstances of death: An ordinary lad, uneducated, religiously inclined; not affiliated with a party. On Thursday 17 April ten Polish soldiers broke into his

parents’ apartment and looted it. Upon leaving they fired shots through the window. He was hit by a bullet and killed on the spot. (Report no. 10)

4 Name: Ilutowicz,Szloyme Age 27 Address: Zakasanki 44 Occupation: horsetrader Circumstances of death: Not affiliated with any party, not interested in politics. After entering Lida, the Polish army ordered him to harness horses and go to the military camp. The next day his naked corpse was found 4 versts from the town.

(Report no. 13) , 5 Name: Ajzykowicz, MichlaCzerna Age 23

| Address: Zakasanki 26 | Circumstances of death: An ordinary uneducated woman, who had nothing to do with politics. Her husband is a painter. The legionaries entered her mother’s apartment and demanded food. Her mother explained to the soldiers that she had given all her supplies to soldiers who came earlier. The soldiers insulted her and left the apartment, and then fired shots through the window, killing the daughter, who was holding a babyinherarms. (Report no. 26)

Three Documents on Anti-Jewish Violence 133 6 Name: Bajchwit, Jakob Age 6o Address: Grodzienska2 Occupation: merchant Circumstances of death: One of the most popular citizens in the town. A longtime Zionist. On Wednesday 16 April, during the fighting in the town, he went out to close the stable gate. As he was returning home, an unknown soldier approached and shot him. (Report no. 22)

7 Name: Bogdanowski, Szlojme Ageg Address: Piaskowa 46

Circumstances of death: On Thursday 17 April two Polish soldiers were passing Mr Bogdanowskv’s house. They asked the Christian servant if any Jews lived there. On receiving a positive answer, they fired their rifles through the window. A bullet hit the g-year-old boy and killed him on the spot. (Report no. 17)

8 Name: Bezpoyasnik, Josef Mejer Age 34 Address: Krzywa 31 Occupation: turner Circumstances of death: An ordinary man. For three years was held prisoner by the Germans. He did not belong to a party. On Saturday 19 April he went out; he was surrounded on the street by soldiers and shot. (Report no. 19)

9 Name: Bedrowski, Benjamin Age 40 Address: Wilenska 30 Occupation: porter Circumstances of death: A poor man; did not belong to a party. On 16 April his body was found on the Krypow road. His teeth had been knocked out, face bruised. (Report no. 27)

10 Name: Girszowicz, Chaja Age 58 Address: Wilenskag1 Occupation: baker Circumstances of death: A poor woman; did not belong to a party. On Wednesday 16 April three soldiers broke into her apartment; they beat up everyone present and stole whatever they could. One of the assailants fired his rifle and killed Mrs Girszowicz on the spot. (Report no. 28)

11 Name: Wysmanski, Pinchas Age 22 Address: Wat 14 Occupation: tailor Circumstances of death: An ordinary man, never interested in politics. On Thursday 17 April at 8 a.m. was drafted for work together with other Jews, then arrested. On Saturday 19 April he was executed together with six other Jews. (Report no. 16)

134 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Miliakova, Antony Polonsky

12 Name: Zalcsztajn, Jehuda Age 25 Address: Krzywa 41 Occupation: hired hand Circumstances of death: An ordinary man; did not belong to a party; never involved in politics. During the German occupation worked on the railways. On Thursday 17 April taken by force from his apartment by five Polish soldiers; never returned home. After a few days it came out that the Jews serving forced labour had buried him somewhere beyond the Polish cemetery. The corpse had been robbed, clothes torn, and body stabbed. (Report no. 2)

13. Name: Jadlowker, Kalmen Age 22 Address: visitor Occupation: student Circumstances of death: A student at Petersburg Conservatory, the son of a Riga cantor; did not belong to a party. On his way from Petersburg to Bialystok on 15 April he stopped in Lida with Abram Ilutowicz, who lives on Stobodzka Street. On 17 April Polish soldiers dragged him out of the apartment and shot him. His valuables were stolen. (Report no. 24)

14 Name: Kac, Izaak Age 35 Address: Wilenska 88 Occupation: merchant Circumstances of death: An ordinary man, a religious man; did not belong to a party; was only recently released from prison. On the morning of 16 April, as the army was shelling the town, he took his children to his brother-in-law’s place on Postawszczyzna Street. During the shelling he hid in a basement together with his family. The soldiers led the people hiding in the basement to the back yard; they killed Kac and left the others alive. (Report no. 7)

15 Name: Kac, Awinodaw Age 22 Address: Ogrodowa 5 Occupation: clerk Circumstances of death: A secretary at ‘the job fair’; a left-wing social revolutionary, a relentless foe of the Bolsheviks, arrested by them as a counter-revolutionary. On Thursday 17 April arrested by the Polish authorities. After two days in gaol he was executed on Saturday outside the town. (Report no. 9)

16 Name: Lipnicki, Szlosjme Age 12 Address: Piaskowa 21

Circumstances of death: A talmud torah student. His father, a person of limited means, was in Grodno during the events; he went there in search of work. Four legionaries entered the apartment and demanded that the mother tell them where her husband was. They did not believe her claims and took her son Szlojyme, 12, out of the apartment so that he could show them where communists were supposedly hiding. Just after they left the apartment, the soldiers shot the boy. A bullet hit him

Three Documents on Anti-Fewish Violence 135 in the ear. His mother, seeing what was going on, ran out of the apartment to help her child. But the soldiers gave her a hard punch in the chest. After a short time Mrs Lipnicka moved the corpse of the murdered boy into the apartment. Another eroup of soldiers again broke into her apartment. They forced Mrs Lipnicka to leave the apartment and looted it completely of furniture and valuables. (Report no. 29)

17 Name: Lewin, Szlojme Age 21 Address: Wilenska2 Occupation: railway worker Circumstances of death: Before the war he was a pharmacist. During the German occupation worked on the railways. He was rushing to call a doctor to his wounded uncle Jakob Bajchwit. A stray bullet hit and killed him on the spot. This happened during the skirmishes on 16 April. (Report no. 31)

18 Name: Lewin, Jechiel Age 35 _ Address: Wilenska 56 Occupation: tradesman

Circumstances of death: An ordinary man; an uninformed person, never involved in politics. On Wednesday 16 April an officer leading a detachment of ten soldiers entered his house in the village of Piwonie, 7 versts from Lida. The soldiers dragged Lewin out of his apartment. His wife and sister, who wanted to go with him, were beaten with rifle-butts and chased away. Later the body of the shot Jechiel Lewin was found, wearing only a shirt. Money and other belongings were taken from Lewin before his execution. (Report no. 8)

19 Name: Lewin, Gedali Age 37 Address: Lidzka 23 Occupation: cobbler (Report no. 12)

20 Name: Lotyte, Jehoszua Age 25 , Address: Lidzka25 Occupation: clerk Circumstances of death: Before the Bolsheviks took power, he was a clerk in Mr Kantor’s brewery. As a communist, during the Bolsheviks’ rule he held a position in the food supply department, but later he left the Communist Party because he was disillusioned, and consequently stopped working for the communists. On Friday 18 April he was arrested by legionaries, who beat him inhumanly. On Saturday he was taken to gaol, and then to the commandant. From there, with no investigation, he was led to the road to Makowszczyzna, where he was killed. (Report no. 15)

21 Name: Murstein, Nachman Age 55 Address: Ogrodowa16 Occupation: clerk Circumstances of death: An extremely decent person, with the highest reputation in both the Jewish and Christian communities. Never involved in politics. He was a religious person. On Thursday 17 April legionaries broke into his apartment.

136 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky Screaming that all Jews should be slaughtered, they demanded that he go with them to the commandant. However, they never reached the commandant. They shot Murstein near the house at 60 Grodzka Street, having first made him remove everything from his pockets. This happened in full view of everyone living nearby, who watched the ‘performance’ from their windows. After the killing the same soldiers returned to Murstein’s apartment, and addressed the murdered man’s daughter Ryfka with the words, ‘We’ve killed your father, now it’s your turn.’ Then one of the soldiers aimed a revolver at her. At that moment the murdered man’s wife, Sura, pulled the soldier by the arm so hard that he was forced to drop it. In this way her daughter was saved. The soldiers looted the house and finally left. (Report no. 18)

22 Name: Mowszowicz, Leib Age 34 Address: Wilenska 81 Occupation: teacher Circumstances of death: A very decent and intelligent person, an experienced pedagogue; he was a teacher in the ta/mud torah, active in Jewish social life. A longtime member of the Bund. On Thursday 17 April he was escorted by a group of soldiers from his apartment to the back yard and executed in the presence of his ageing father. After the execution his clothes were taken away. (Report no. 25)

23 Name: Nowoprucki, Lipa Age 21 Address: Zamkowa 27 Occupation: clerk Circumstances of death: Belonged to the Communist Party; worked in a Soviet kitchen. On Friday 18 April, on leaving his apartment, he was arrested by Polish soldiers as a result of information from a Christian woman; subsequently he was shot. (Report no. 20)

24 Name: Neprochski, Mojzesz Izaak Age 48 Address: Zamkowa 12. Occupation: carpenter Circumstances of death: An ordinary person, not involved in politics. On Thursday 17 April a handful of soldiers escorted him out of his apartment, beat him up, and shot him near his house, which stands near the church. His wife, who attempted to follow her husband, was also beaten. It is noteworthy that before N. was taken out of his apartment, the soldiers subjected him to a close search. This search obviously yielded no results. After the execution the soldiers returned to the Neprochskis’ apartment, where they stole things they found there. (Report no. 21)

25 Name: Stonimczyk, Szloyme Age 61 Address: Podworze Boznicze 21 Occupation: pedlar

. Circumstances of death: An ordinary man; a religious person, never involved in politics; did not belong to a party. On Thursday 17 April a group of legionaries led by an officer broke into his apartment and stole Stonimczyk’s belongings; then they

Three Documents on Anti-Fewish Violence 137 dragged him into the middle of the street. They shot him with their rifles, killing him on the spot. Shooting in the air, the soldiers forced back Stonimczyk’s wife and daughter (who were trying to follow him). (Report no. 3)

26 Name: Sochor of Vilna, temporarily in Lida Age 22 Address: Wilenska 23 Occupation: student Circumstances of death: A member of Po’alei Zion. On Thursday 17 April he went out. First he was beaten up, and then shot. (Report no. 21)

27 Name: Szklar, Aron Age 30 Address: Piaskowa6o0 Occupation: former carter Circumstances of death: Before the war he was a carter. Recently unable to work because he was paralysed. He had no clue about political matters. On Thursday 17 April soldiers entered his apartment, threw the sick man out of his bed, and then stabbed him in the stomach with a bayonet and threw him into the basement. His family brought him back to the apartment. After two days of extreme suffering he died. (Report no. 23)

28/ Name: Polaczek, Eliezer and his son Jakob Age 56/19

29 Address: Wilenska 40 Occupation: army supplier Circumstances of death: A respectable merchant. One of the most popular citizens in the town. Nobody in his family belonged to any party. On Wednesday 16 April, about 8 a.m., soldiers led by an officer entered his apartment; they dragged Eliezer and his son into the street, and shot them. Their corpses were robbed.

30 Name: Kaminski, Mojzesz Age 20 Address: Policyjna16 Occupation: medic Circumstances of death: A decent and quiet person, religious, did not belong to a party. On Thursday 17 April an officer and two soldiers broke into his apartment, and took him to the road, where they tortured him until he died. On his head he had a deep wound open into the brain; his legs were bruised and burned; his face had wounds and marks of beating. (Report no. 5)

31 Name: Korn, Jechezkiel Age 45 Address: Ogrodowa8 Occupation: cobbler Circumstances of death: An ordinary person; did not belong to any party. During the German occupation he supervised the dairy plant. He suffered hardships during the Bolshevik period, and was kept in prison for a long time. Because of false accusations by a Christian woman who was angry with him, Korn and eight other Jews were sentenced to death without any investigation. The sentence was

carried out. (Report no. 6)

138 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihiakova, Antony Polonsky 32 Name: Kantorowicz, Szmul Josef Age 54 Address: Tyrking Occupation: locksmith Circumstances of death: A homeless man, born in Siauliai, a religious person. Did not belong to a party; a skilled technician. On Thursday 17 April soldiers escorted him out of his apartment and killed him with hand-grenades. (Report no. 4)

33. Name: Ryfkin, Ber, of Vitebsk Age 23 Address: Zamkowa3 Occupation: bookkeeper Circumstances of death: He was drafted by the Bolsheviks into the Red Guard. With a group of Red Guards he surrendered to the Polish authorities. As a Jew he was separated from his Christian comrades in arms and executed. (Report no. 32)

36 unidentified , 34 unidentified 35 unidentified

37 unidentified 38 unidentified

Documents translated from Polish by Antony Polonsky and Gwido Zlatkes

DOCUMENT 3 Report on the Occurrences in Vilna Presented to the Polish Government by the Jewish Committee of Vilna Not to conquer a hostile City did the Commander in Chief lead this army, but as he himself stated on April the 22nd in his declaration to the population ‘to free it from hostile oppression and violence.’ His declaration was one of ‘freedom and equality for all’ and the civil authorities were designated to ‘the care for all’ without distinc-

tion of nationality and religion. |

Yet, when the Commander in Chief made this important political declaration innocent Jewish blood had been flowing for three days in the streets of the City, Jewish possessions had been plundered and the work of destruction was in full swing. That work went on for a long time and has not ceased entirely until this very day.

The Jewish Population which has been greatly reduced and starved during the Document 3 had been translated into English, presumably to be shown to the Samuel Commission. The stylistic idiosyncrasies of the translation have been retained.

Three Documents on Anti-Femish Violence 139 four years of occupation and during the period of expulsion and half of which lived

on the charity of the Community, as it still lives, ruined by the invasion of the Bolsheviks who destroyed the Commerce and Industry of the City, its sole supports, has now received its most terrible blow from which it will not recover for many years. We only wish to set down those facts which since their beginning have repeated

themselves hundreds of times and which represent a part of what actually took place.

I Inthe first rank of incredible, and hitherto unparalleled horrors is the fact that a large number of Jews (about four hundred) have disappeared without leaving a trace. Some out of their residences, others from the streets. Friendly and unarmed inhabitants, old and young men and women were assembled, taken to the railway station and, without a list of names having been taken, were thrust into cars, not like human beings, but like so many things and transported without knowing for what misdemeanour nor to what destination; hundreds of families suffer in ignorance anxious as to the fates of those unfortunate victims. Despite the strongest representations to the authorities, we have so far not succeeded in securing either a list of the exiled nor any information with regard to their present whereabouts or condition. Only on the 7th of May, more than fourteen days after the transportation of these people did we obtain the possibility of receiving a license to send forth a Commission in search of these lost ones. Of this whole party all we know is that they have been thrown into a frightful condition and that they have been beaten and robbed. Hungry and far from home, uncertain about the fate of members of their families who stayed behind in that plundered City, they are not merely deprived of the opportunity of proving their innocence, but are not even in a position to establish their identity.

II Murders The number of killed already totals 60, but it will be impossible to fix the exact number of those killed until the lists of the kidnapped people spoken of above, are on hand so far as is known. There are a few people who were killed incidentally but not one of all listed among the killed took part in the battle between the Bolsheviki and the Polish Army—none of them were armed. The victims were selected according to their outward appearance by the legionaries themselves who did not know the townspeople, or were pointed out by utter strangers, often children who pointed out one Jew or another as a ‘Commissar’. There were cases of shooting and finding bombs which had been deliberately placed there. Such a quite unusual case was the shooting of Israel Benski. Benski was shot in his home; his wife and niece accompanied the corpse which the militia were taking to the burial. Both women were shot over the corpse of their husband and uncle. On the bank of the Wilija river all three victims were buried in a common grave, which Jews who were passing through nearby streets were forced to dig.

140 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky The following were shot: Reisa Stein because she protested at the arrest of her husband; Steinmann at the investigation; Pilnik because he refused to give his money. Among those killed is a big percentage of older people: Jankel Schifran 68 years old,

Mordicha Lewit 67, Daniel Trakinsky 63, Leib Chait 67; Israel Lewidow 61. Elieser Celperstein and Mordchea Gilels 58; Schumuel Taubman 51. Some were almost children: Filippowsky 16 years old; Sora Schochot 15. The following were also

killed: Jetta Schejnuk; Liba Waisbrod, Lasar Gurwicz, Moses Epstein, Nechamo Kuschis; Lina Waks, Schmuel Schepkowsky, Moses Ass, David Swirsky; Abram Rantal, Abram Aisenstein; Ruwin Schapiro; Chaim Fischermann, Gdalja Kaljansky, Ester Schepsels; Chaim Kowarsky, four unknown persons; Joseph Renkazischek, Leib Ker, Lasar Rosin, Victor Iwjansky, Sischkowicz-Potaschnick, the famous writer, Walter-Dewenischsky Aisik, Lasar Ribin; Kepel Kaufmann, Joel

| Kasutzky with his son Ber, Meer Steinmann, Leib Chait, Peissach Judelewicz, Arja Sak, Mowscha Nota Golburt, Peissach Filippowsky, Micha Garger, Ruwin Chaim Girsh Kaplan, Joseph Pumpyjansky, Salmen Chajkin, Jerchonon Schweids. None of these were found with arms in their hands. A few were shot where they were found. Others, who were arrested in their homes in the city, were taken to the suburbs and were shot without trial at all. Many were beaten and knocked about before being

shot.

III Atrocities The number of Jews cruelly beaten cannot be counted. It is tremendous. The house searches were accompanied by blows with cold steel, guns and whips. House searches, plunders, thefts were numbered by thousands. There were tortures which in their horror and system recalled the worst epochs of the Middle Ages. Those who were arrested and taken to Lipuwka were kept more than 24 hours in the belief that they were condemned to be shot. Several times they were ‘led to the wall’, rifles and machine guns were pointed at them, and they were told to

say the prayers of the dying. The whole party of 230 persons, who were taken to Lida and further, were kept three days in the consciousness that they were condemned to death and were led away to the execution of the sentence. The condi-

tions of their journey can scarcely be pictured—tortures and atrocities and humiliations without end. Four days they were without food. In the car they were compelled to lie on top of each other. Their shoes and their poor body-clothes were taken away from all of them and instead they were clad in rags. After their arrival in Lida the guards made all kinds of tricks in order to make the prisoners think that they will be shot. The poet L. Jaffe, President of the Lithuanian Zionist Association, member of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Community of Wilna, and editor of the paper which the Bolsheviki suppressed because of its counter-revolutionary policy, suffered especial mishandling. All this did not save him from the suspicion of being a dangerous bolchevik and when the whole party had been put in jail and saw in this fact their salvation from the threatened execution, he was kept two days longer in the belief that he would be shot. In all, he passed through five

Three Documents on Anti-fewish Violence I4I such terrible nights and days. What he suffered affected him so that even those very close to him did not recognise him. Furthermore he was clad in torn rags and had on shoes full of holes making the appearance of a scarecrow.

Under threat of shooting a whole crowd of Jews, about 200 people, old and young, women and children, who had been herded and hunted together in the streets were held in the Theaterplatz all day April 22nd. They were beaten and badly mishandled. The Rabbi Rubinstein and Dr. Schabad, known to the whole city, were picked up on the street and added to the crowd. They were on the way to the Chief of the State. The rough crowd, made up of rowdies and street boys, pointed them out as the chief rabbis, who had fired on the Legionaries. They were beaten and mishandled like the rest. The rabbi received a few blows with guns on his back and head. He was seized by the beard, his head thrown up, and beaten on the chin with butts of guns. When the Legionaries heard a shot in the distance, they fired on this captive crowd of peaceful inhabitants, who in order not to be shot all lay flat on the earth. The captive Brojt was driven to Lipuwka and ordered to say the prayers of the dying, then stood against a wall to be shot, but he was finally set free. Goldin was given a spade and told to dig his own grave. Aberinsky was driven by a Legionary

into the forest where he was put before a pit in which he fortunately fell and was saved. The four brothers Bukstalsky were stood up before the wall in presence of their mother in order to be shot. Afterwards, they were released. About fifty Jews were driven two or three versts along the Novgorodstrasse, past the slaughterhouse and had to hold their hands up. One had a wounded hand, but he had to hold it up too. They were driven forwards and beaten with gun butts. Chaim Warmian was bound by his hand with a rope to the horse of a legionary and in that fashion driven at a gallop through the streets of the City. The 2oth of May the glassworker Hirsh Strash in Nowowilejsk was tortured and received fifty lashes on his naked back. Afterwards he was brought to the Jewish Hospital in a grave condition. Moisej Blachs was submitted to the same tortures by the legionaries in the vicinity of Leonishki. The 70-year old Aranonwicz, the 60-year old Katz and the 55 year old Rabbi Choddes, who were arrested in Landwarowa, were driven to the city in terrible condition. Their beards were torn and burned, they were stripped off and everything they had stolen from them. A. Basschczansky had

his face spit into. :

Aron Waks, Abram Salmann, Zodek Bukstalsky, Berel Kazan, Barnamow Chonon and fifteen more, who are still unidentified, were shipped in a horse stall on the Georg-prospekt, opposite to the Koozan house, where they were arrested. ‘Two

women, an artist Lewinssohn, the student Resnitzky, Chaim Marmut, Greschen Katz, Shapira Rafael, Shumuel Krawetz and Dweira Linkower were similarly mishandled. They were beaten with whips on the third floor of this house. When the house of Commissarow was plundered his wife, who was in childbed, was beaten. Dr. Libo was beaten with the butt of a gun and with a rubber stick by a Legionary

142 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky of the 8th company of the first regiment. A sick boy of Yente Schannik, a girl sick with typhus was beaten in Wainer’s house. Mandel Krensky was wounded by a legionary and taken to the hospital in a bad state. Ruwin Bojarsky, 67 years old, was beaten into unconsciousness. From the first to the fourth of May the following dealers were systematically

beaten by the militia: Schatz, Pergament, Rischdretsky, Katzelnik, Einbinder, Weinstein, Goland, Pergasin, Abramowicz, Arluk, Rabin and Czarne. Almost all the Jews, who were stopped in the street and searched, were more or less badly beaten.

IV The plunderings and extortions went on to a tremendous extent from the first day and they have not yet wholly ceased. One may say that the population of the Jewish quarter was almost completely robbed. Under the pretense of search the legionaries and militia emptied purses and portfolios, stole pocket watches and tore the rings from the fingers of all Jews, who showed themselves on the streets in the first days after the capture of the city. Under the pretense of seeking weapons they forced themselves into the houses by night and by day and took everything with them that they could carry. Finally without any excuse they plundered shops and warehouses in broad daylight. Many charitable institutions were plundered. The colony for sick children at Antokol, the Children’s Home Achiezer at the Sparrkasstrasse were robbed 800 pounds of Matzoth or unleavened bread, 1320 pounds of potatoes, 560 pounds of herring and other food was taken from the kitchen of the Committee for War Victims. The watches of all the people praying in the synagogues were stolen. At the Eljasheff synagogue were robbed the boxes for collections of their contents. In some synagogues the holy Torahs or Scrolls of the Law were desecrated. The slightest opposition to the robbery brought blows, arrests and sometimes

shooting as its consequences. |

Many were the cases of extortion under threat of whipping and shooting. Goldstein and Pemoschcznik, who were arrested in the house Koczan on Georgstrasse, were taken to the Trokerstrasse and there held for a ransom of 1000 rubles each. Rutenberg paid to rubles in order not to be arrested a second time. Many were

robbed several times, Seldman was robbed eight times and they threatened to violate his wife. Mrs. Nechame Gilinsky was robbed eight times. Morduch Patz, Abram Ber, Schmuel Kremer, each six times. About twenty legionaries did the robbing of Lichtenstein. For three quarters of

an hour they kept him in the face of twelve guns and demanded 10.000, rubles. After bargaining they agreed on 5000 rubles which he went to borrow from a neigh-

bour accompanied by the robbers. During the robbing one of the Legionaries sat down and played cheerful songs on the piano. Besides money, table silver, watches and other things were taken away. Dr. Slonimsky was robbed of 100.000 rubles; he and his wife were beaten. Zalkind’s shop was robbed of 600.000 rubles, from Eisen-

Three Documents on Anti-Fewish Violence 143 stadt’s shop two wagon loads of goods to the value of 115.625 rubles were taken away in two trips. Almost all Chane Niczunsky’s grocery goods of the value of 30.000 rubles were stolen. Poselver’s clock-store lost 85.345 rubles worth of goods: Kopeliewicz’s shop lost 76.000 and Chane Kubelnik 40.000. The goods were found in the house of Poselver’s janitor, who was arrested but soon released on the pretense that the goods had been given to him by a soldier.

The fourth police section also released one of the robbers, who plundered the warehouse of Mr. Doktorowicz, the Seventh Police released the robbers, who robbed E. Munitz and the eighth section released Skinder’s janitor at whose place the goods of Friedmann were found. When Schmuel Krawets was being robbed he went to the militia on guard to ask for help, but was refused. Mrs. B. Wirschup asked the militiaman, who stood near the Hotel Venezia, for help, he came and helped to steal. All the inhabitants of the Waiss house were robbed on indications given by the janitor of the house. He was armed with a flint gun and the stolen goods

were taken together to his house. Receipts were given to Daiches, Czarnussky, Swirsky, Atrakun and Klotz, who were robbed and Mrs. Chane Gorfinkel was given a receipt which entitled her, in place of the money taken from her, to receive a | hundred strokes of the whip. In all reports are now at hand about the following robberies:

Shops. Salkind 600.000 rubles, Etinger 2910 R.; Derczansky 20.000 R.; Weksler, 40 lbs. cocoa, 100 Ibs. confectionery 2000 R Schochor, 700 R. Glasmann, merchandise, Masur, merchandise, Baier, 7.800 R. money and goods, Beiges 600 R. Klotz 500 R., Salkind 31.000 R. money and goods, Broide 32.85 money and goods; Bank 13.600 money and goods; Schapiro 15.000 R., Milchiker 10.000 R. and goods 10.000 R., D. Schapiro 6655 R; Gorburg 2000 R. and goods; Schak, money and

goods 10.000 R. (robbed several times); Delaititzky money and goods 9.469 R. ,

Blacher 3.000 R. and goods, 5.000 R.; Kaplan money and goods 11.000 R. | Mleikowsky 8.358 R.; Kotljar 485 R. and goods; Showles 500 R.; Wildstein 3.600 R. and goods 12.400 R. Kopelewicz 13.355 R. and goods 2075 R. Freidman 25.000 R.

(robbed several times); Trotzkin 600 R. and goods, Scheibuk, goods 10.000 R. Podbereski 470 R. and goods; Josefowicz 3.000 R.; Kalans shoes 5040; A. Schpiro, money and goods 2.644 R.; Kurgen goods, Usechopsky, money and goods 8.880 R. Furman 340 R. and goods, J. Lewin 2346 R. and goods 21250 R. J. Lewin 7800 R. money and goods; Zuckermann 50.000 R. Baron 4.000 R. Wirnischk 2.500 R..; Sorokin, 3.400 R. and goods 4.100 R. Kuritzky robbed several times, Funk 5.000 R. Lew 10.000 R. Musnik 2.800 R. & goods 2.700 R.; Gelfant 6.200 R. and goods to 3.800 R. Schuk 1.900 R. and goods 1.000 R. Schneider 9.750 R. Britanischky 3.000 R. and goods 3.000 R. Kybelnik 1.830 R. and goods, Fliss 700 R. Lewin 16.000 R. Rubel, Gleser 9.525 R. Mazzkewicz, goods 40.627 R. L. Lewin 1.200 R. and goods . 3.480 R. Sosnowik tooo R. and goods 3.000 R. Pecziste 1.600 R. Rabunin 2.800 R. and goods 2950 R. Bretzky 3000 R. Bobrowicz money and goods 4.500 R. Minsker

144 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky money and goods 955 R. Dubowsky 2.200 R. and 4.800 R. goods Kljuecz goods 2.150 R. A. Epstein 5500 R. money and goods, Stolow 10.000 R. Goldin 2660 R. Ginsburg 8010 R. money and goods 3385 R. Nemenczinsky money and goods 675 R. Bauschansky 600 R. money, Masel money and goods 2000 R. Bernstein 3.000 R.

Milstein money and goods 13.800 R. Ratzan 475 R. money and goods 425 R. Namiot money and goods 10.000 R. Rudenski 32.500 R. money and goods 27.700 R. Klebanski money and goods 9.000 R. Lewin, money and goods 6.000 R. eighty clocks which had been given to repair, Koldobski 3.000 R. Scwarzmann money and goods 5850 R. Galpern 160 lbs. flour, 60 Ibs. rye and 60 lbs. bread. Tiktin money and goods 30.000 R. Schemjawicz 4.000 R. Menerizer 790 R. and goods, Glasser 25.000 R. Schneider and Goldin 7.000 R. and goods, Fainberg 70.000 R. Gelman products goo R. Schriro 300 R. Broide agricultural implements and a horse, Newjer |

15.000 R. Persky, money and goods 2.000 R. Gursus 1.600 R. Rachit 7oo R. Rudnitzki 38.000 R. Clitowicz, goods, Mischelewicz, 1750 R. Konek 4000 R. Galpern 1500 R. money and goods, Jochelszik 1315 R. money and goods too R. Kowner 800 R. Pager 5000 R. money and goods 5000 R. Neczunsky received a receipt signed by ‘Kobylinsky’, Ginsburg 16.000 R. and a clock, Sabludowsky, money and goods, 1600 R. (stolen by a legionary of a machine-gun company); | Fleckser money 2800 R. and goods 1920 R. Chonowicz 2900 R. Slowensky money and goods 710 R. Fischermann 4.000 R. Jochelson goods, Sobol money and goods,

Kilstein money and goods 6527 R. Schapiro money and goods 2500 R. Friskin money and goods 7.000 R. Maisel 3200 R. Gorkljan 30323 R. and gold rings, Michelses 2000 R. Daitz money and goods 800 R. Kagan 500 R. (immediately divided up by the thieves), Afstreich 8000 R. and goods 300 R. Wain 1200 R. Slawin 1080 R. and a jewelled ring; Lain money and goods 2900 R. Walner money and goods 5450 R. Kargmer money and goods 4000 R. (robbed twice) Rosin 3900 R. Senderowicz, money and goods 3540 R. Kuritzky 4521,50 R. and goods (broke in through the window) Lichtenstein money and goods 10.000 R. Teretz 8000 R. Gendelberg 2000 R. money and goods, Korobocznik, money and goods 700 R. K. Katz money and goods 3135 R. Rosing money and goods 4700 R. Wirschup 500 R.

money and goods, Brushanch money and goods 4000 R. the inhabitants of the Waise House 15.000 R. and goods, Patrikmacher 1625 R. and goods 375 R. Gerschenowicz 1895 R. Okun goods 2056 R. Rubinstein 5020 R. money, Kljaczko

, 300 R. money and goods, Schulmacher goods 2000 R. Pren 20.000 R. Altman 290 R. money, Gratz 13300 R. Strakun 2550 R. and goods, Broit 2340 R. money and goods 3900 R. Melzer 7000 R. and goods 1200 R. Karsan money and goods 200 R. Nudel 22.000 R. and goods 3000 R. Kowenski 500 R. and goods 2845 R., Kaplan 500 R. and goods 4285 R. Winogradow 825 R. and a gold watch, Minusky, valuables and other objects, J. Schapiro rooo R. and several objects, Reisenberg goods 40.000 R. Edelsrein money and goods 6000 R. S. Schapiro 4000 R. and goods 1700 R. Bakst 4000 R. and goods tooo R. Aronowicz tooo R. money, Kremer 3000 R. and goods 2500 R. Kinik 5500 money, Zesl money and goods 10.000 R. Sandberg

Three Documents on Anti-Fewish Violence 145 400 R. money and goods 2600 R. Gelfand 13480 R. valuable papers and goods 49.000 R. Wain 2500 R. and goods, 3300 R. Radin 1860 R. and a gold watch with a chain worth 300 R. Neuhaus goods 8000 R. G. Epstein goods 500 R. Spor 3500 R. and goods 2500 R. Mener goods 300 R. Schames goods 11.000 R. Talejshansk1 35.000 R. Wolk 35 pairs of shoes, 12 finishing pieces too R. Gougold 13.000 R. Drujan 16.000 R. Gordin Feitwush 220 R. Gilenskaja 4500 R. Davidson 4000 R. Wirskanskaja 3000 R. Stern 12.000 R. Motelson 4500 R. Meltzer 1300 R. Trotzky Lea 1500 R. Rabinowitz Morduch 10700 R. Schukstulsky, all goods and 500 R. Abramson 4000-5000 R. Doktorowitch 3000 R. Strunin 12.000 R. Samerkitzk1 1000 R. Nikulkin 3220 R. Wain 40.000 R. Daisches 20.000 R. Gilinsky 4000 R. Katz 12600 R. Reidborn 10250 R. Zinman 5550 R. Baran 20.00 R. Zalikowski 200 R. Brudne 10360 R. Tcharnussky 8000 R. Ginsburg 60.000 R. Eisenstadt 115625 R. Steinberg 5000 R. Tiktin 48.000 R. Joffe 8000 R. Choson 32337 R. Sarezky 20.000 R. Lidsky 20340 R. Rimshenjata 10.000 R. Goldberg 109 lbs. of flour, Nochewitch groceries 1500 R. and 500 R. Gurwitch goods 2575 and 1500 R. Zukerman goods

1400 R. and 3100 R. Wolk a golden watch, Chonock 7800 R. Ass 200 R. Kopelewitch 76750 R. Lewin 17000 R. Welner 15000 R. Mandel 7200 R. Oshniyan 1250R. Gorfinkel 50000-60000 R. Neft 5000 R. Kagan products and goods 6500 R. silver and cash 6500 R. Kawlin 4000 R. Paramon the whole store, Maisels different goods, Strashun clothes for officers; Drausin goods 3350 R. 3600 R. Podgura goods 15.600 R.

Public Institutions. The colony for weak children in Antokol (twice), the Achiezer Asylum, the synagogue of the Gaon from Wilna, the kitchen of the relief committee for the victims of the war, the synagogues and the asylums for the refugees. Apartments. Lap 520 R. and 20 Ibs. of Mazos (unleavened bread) Brotanishskaja 1400 R. and various things, Pupko Chaja 3000 R. Buzgan Lea goods for a few hun-

dred R. Kaplan 2700 R. Katzew 2750 R. Kagan almost the whole property, Sragewitch 1980 R. and goods for 520 R. Kaganowitch 5400 R. Rems 10500 R. Schapiro lankel 10.000 R. Stefan 1788 R. Sheer 2300 R. Rabinowitcz Braina 6500 R. Kaplan Mowsha 17850 R. Krensky 1500 R. (three times) Zuk 210 R. and goods for 600 R. Kagan Doba toooo R. Katz T. 20.000 R. Lipnik 5500 R. Kowarsky A. 2450 R. Dartchansky 5400 R. Katz 8000 R. Lip 7810 R. Sterskuss 3000 R. Szluger 4000 R. Lande 823 R. and goods 2000 R. Anish Tenta 3000 R. Zechnowisk 4000 R. Josselson 2270 R. and 208 R. were taken away from the servant girl; Trozki Berr 30.000 R. Krinskaya 8000 R. Weber 3000 R. Swirsky 500 R. and goods 4800 R. Birsansky 1300 R. Gelfare 500 R. and goods, Dworetzky 343 R. and the second time 1250 R. and 60 lbs. bread, linen etc. .. . Dr. Jochelson goo R. and a golden watch

Kunisky 2725 R. and goods, Sapirrstein 2000 R. Schapiro Benzion 4000 R. Schapiro Moses 3000 R. Schoffer 1300 R. and leather, Panarsky 20 pairs of shoes and a watch, Sh. Kowarsky 1445 R. Lifshitz Slata 350 R. and goods, Krawitz 4000 R. and goods, Becholewsky precious things, Pagers 2000 R. Oshmana 1475 R.

146 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky Pilnik 5000 R. and goods, Chayet money and goods 20.000 R. Kopelewitch money and goods 9926 R. Kremer and Leberman money and goods 20.000 R. Bushkaney money and goods 8000 R. Sayeta 4650 R. & goods 7350 R. E. Musher money and goods 26710 R. Berger money and goods 2800 R. Rinekind money and goods 15185 R. Kagan J. 7120 R. Kuritzky 475 R. and sweets; Lemishlamis money and goods 12.000 R. Berman 8000 R. Rudensky 15.600 R. and goods 20000 R. Colomba goods 5400 R. Pupko goods 7000 R. Sobol 3000 R. Prlyanetzky 3000 R. Rudoshewsky

30000 R. Don, money and goods 20.000 R. Ostorhinsky 3400 R. Podberewsky money and goods, Freidstein 4000 R. and goods, Bunimewitch two horses and harness 4000 R. Gleser horse and harness 6000 R. Alperowitch money and goods 2400 R. Radziwilowsky 1850 R. and goods, Podkow 2000 R. and goods 500 R. Prushan T. money and goods 7650 R. Boruchowitch 2735 R. Fain 15640 R. Garberowitch 452 R. and goods, Lipow 2200 R. goods 2000 R. Barishnik 20000 marks and 37500 R. and goods, Sawitch 600 R. and goods 1500 R. Prushan B. money and goods 6000 R. and 80 watches which were given to him for repairing. The following were robbed on the street: Stein 469 R. Scher 440 R. Gendlin 190 R. and 40 lbs. of groats, Chodosch 700 R. 60 lbs. Groats and peas, Permann 20 lbs flour and peas, Berlin 357 R. Krewer 1940 R. Katzelnik 1000 R. Abel 350 R. Germann 600 R. worth of bread, Miklischanzki 600 R. Calpern, a watch and chain, Lipkind 300 R. Mutterperel 355 R. Lipkowicz 2600

R. and a gold watch worth tooo R. Progalin 3620 R., a watch and a gold chain Mogilnik, a purse containing 1215 R.

| The enumeration is far from being complete. It is increased every day. Not only rich people were robbed, but also poor people were bereft of their last farthing. ‘To give an instance, all the inhabitants of the house J.Ka.3. containing only cheap lodgings, & situated on Sirotskasstrasse were robbed. The beggar Goldberg was bereft of 28 R. The refugees Radnikow, Guller and Gokman were robbed. Many people

did not report having been robbed, because they did not see the possibility of getting back the things of which they were robbed: many are silent about what happened. Other serious plunderings took place, amounting to several thousand roubles and they have not been reported. In all instances the information about the robberies is confirmed by numerous witnesses. In nine cases out of ten the different acts of violence and plunderings are perpetrated under the pretext of searching for arms, in some cases also the plunderers justify themselves by inventing the charge that Jews had fired on them from the windows in spite of the fact that windows are nearly everywhere tightly closed. V_ The misfortune of those who have been arrested is as great as the misfortune of those who have been robbed, as great in number as well as in cruelty.

About 1000 people were arrested. They were arrested only on their outward appearance, in doubtful cases they were only asked ‘Are you a Jew?’ In some houses all the male inhabitants and sometimes women were also arrested. In the Hospital

Three Documents on Anti-Fewish Violence 147 for Contagious Diseases, No 5 of the Red Cross, all the Jewish sisters of charity &

sanitary attendants were arrested. This unfair way of treating the Jewish part of the staff provoked a protest from the Red Cross Society which gave full powers to Dr. Marchewsky for expressing their indignation. People were arrested in their houses on denunciations issuing from ambiguous men, belonging to the lowest rank

of Polish society, some of the denunciators seized the opportunity for personal revenge, some of them were prompted by antisemitic fanatism, which had been kindled by the lowest kind of street agitation or by the press. The conditions under which the arrested people are kept in prison are appalling. They sleep herded together. From April oth to May 3, they were only allowed a quarter of a pound of bread a person, daily, and now they do not have bread every day. On certain days bread was given to Christians but not to Jews. The sanitary conditions of prisons are dreadful. ‘There is vermin in the rooms, there have already been three cases of spotted fever. The prisoners are very roughly treated. They are most of the time accosted with the appellation of ‘dirty Jew.’ Now and again they are lashed (Porubinsky) a prisoner was shot dead because he did not go away from the window (Dreysenstok). This is the treatment inflicted upon people who are known to the authorities as Jews and who cannot be incriminated for anything else. Among the prisoners are intellectuals such as teachers, journalists, etc. ... The authorities do not seem to have any intention of freeing those who are innocent, to most of the prisoners there not only is not attached the slightest proof of guilt, but no suspicion whatever, and yet they must give proofs that they have taken no part in Bolchevism. ‘'wo commissions which have been formed two days ago, in order to enquire into the matter, have worked very slowly and not satisfactorily, but they have freed some of the prisoners on written guarantees, these guarantees are being personally submitted to interrogations on the part of these new commissions. This manner of proceeding will greatly delay matters, for the number of prisoners is very great so that people will have to wait endlessly until their turn comes. A great number among the prisoners are the only supports of their families which are condemned to starvation if they have to live without it.

The fury which accompanied the searches did not stop even at offending the most sacred feelings. The most venerated graves of Wilna Jews were torn open in the whole cemetery. Even the coffins on the way to the cemetery were searched. VI During the last days, there came a new misfortune: forced labour. ‘This would have awakened no opposition, if it had not been for the following circumstances: 1. Only Jews were seized and forced to work. 2. When 25 people were needed 200 persons were called. So that 175 of them could by paying money be freed from work, this is a method employed by the militia to increase their income.

3. Those who work are robbed.

148 Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Mihakova, Antony Polonsky VII Notonly Wilna was exposed to acts of violence and plunder, but all the towns and hamlets around Wilna which were in the war zone. Not only did the soldiers

plunder, but the peasants of the neighbourhood joined them. Among the little towns or villages situated around Wilna, Njementschiny, Ogorodniki, Neshwjesh and others suffered especially. In the village of Podberesa the whole Jewish population, women and children included, were brought together and every third person was pointed out to be shot under the pretext that the telephone was damaged. Every fourth person was pointed out and they were all ordered to dig a common grave with spades which were brought for that purpose. The condemned were stood before the graves under the menace of the aimed guns. Afterwards they were released. But the Jewish inhabitants of that village, who are only in the number of 50 families, were compelled to pay a one time contribution 10.000 rubles in order to prevent further assaults and another time 5000 rubles for the repairing of the telephone, as it was said before they required 18.000 R. At Zarki-Jerusalimek an old man, 60 years of age, was shot. At Njementschiny the father and son Zinmann, Lafer and Rudaschewsky were shot. Among those, who were shot, was also the son of Rudaschewsky. The bullet did not reach him, but he fainted with fright and was left unconscious among the bodies of those who had been shot. When the legionaries were out of sight, he crept out and hid himself. Victuals were stolen from the houses, but notwithstanding this, the inhabitants were not allowed to go into the streets to buy the food they needed. At Rudomin, the houses of Lewin, Tatarsky Dumowan and many others were plundered. In Lewin’s house two typhus stricken persons were beaten with butt ends, although they were in a state of semi-consciousness. All the Jews who went to the Synagogue, were beaten. At the station of Reislcrowo, Osik, an old man of 70 years was cruelly beaten and robbed. The little town of Neshwjesch was almost totally robbed. At Skowbjansky 2000 R. and 20 pounds of sugar were taken, Basse Nissolowicz’s shops were robbed of 20.000 R. Scheine Nisselowicz of products, materials and valuables amounting to 13.500 R. Rachil Lebodowa 6180 R. Kort 10.000 R. Knell 2000 R. Mussel 1180 R. in the village of Ogorodniki, at Aron Nisselocitz valuables to the amount of 15.000 R. Benski 5.000 R. in Jerusalemski at Stepelnawski’s 10.000 R. Chajet 20.000 R. in the village Gury-Chutor, in the house of Krensburg, victuals, a horse and other valuables were stolen amounting to 12.000 R. at Rudnik’s a calf, at B. Chayst’s bread for 20.000 R. Moshel Chajit, 24.900 R. money and various things. Abramovicz 30.000 R., money and 29.500 R. victuals, cattle and other valuables, Abramowitz P. 300 R. money and a calf, Gurdue the things which he had with him, Abramowitz G. 10.000 R. victuals and cattle 13.200 R. This enumeration of facts can be continued. The Jewish population feels even today as if it were living on the edge of a volcano which might burst forth at any moment. And the more so, because nothing is undertaken against the malicious, defamatory and venomous agitations of the

Three Documents on Anti-Femish Violence 149 Polish press against the Jews. The newspaper ‘Nasz Kray’ in its first numbers & in its eleventh number and especially the ‘Dziennik Wilenski’ invent nearly every day

imaginary charges in order to incite readers against the Jews and to make them believe that Jews are identical with Bolshevists. But they are careful not to mention that among the Bolsheviki of the red army there are many more Poles than Jews.

They forget also that Poles from the Red Army have fought against their own brethren in greater numbers than the Jews. These papers go on publishing falsehoods and pretending that the peaceful Jewish population fired at the Polish army and poured hot water on it from the windows. The representatives of the community protest solemnly against the false accusation that the entire Jewish population belongs to the Bolsheviki and that they offered resistance against the Polish armies.

We declare that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population had a hostile attitude to the Bolsheviki, the resistance against the Polish armies that entered into the city, was offered exclusively by communists, without distinction of nationality. The Jewish population is quite terrorized by the things which have happened. In spite of the appeal of the Commander in Chief, the Jews feel themselves unprotected. In spite of the appeal of the mayor, the Jewish population does not feel able to resume its former life and to begin rebuilding what the war has destroyed.

Until the most elementary conditions of the life of human communities are restored, until citizens are sure to be protected in their lives and property, life will remain in the state of stagnation and the country will be condemned toa slow death.

The Policies of the Sanacja on the Jewish Minority in Silesia, 1926—1939 JACEK PIOTROWSKI THE coup d’état of May 1926 greatly affected the situation of Jews in the Second Republic. The anxieties which had plagued them when confronted with the nationalistic right gradually began to disappear. By removing the programmatically antisemitic National Democrats from power, Piisudski gained the support of a significant sector of the Jewish community in Poland.! The marshal made the policies he adopted towards national minorities in the borderlands of the new Polish state dependent on their attitude to that state. His government attempted to carry out real changes in this area without causing major upheavals. In Silesia, however, with its very distinct character, they were faced with grave difficulties both from the opposition and as a result of treaty obligations which limited Poland’s freedom to formulate policies towards minorities.” After the nomination of Michat Grazynski as voivode, the autonomous province of Silesia found itself under the overpowering influence of Pitsudski activists and their party, the Union for the Reform of the Republic (Zwiazek Naprawy Rzeczypospolitej). Both their former links with the Polish national movement in Silesia and the specific sociopolitical situation of this region forced the adherents of the Silesian Sanacja into rivalry with the opposition in ‘national vigilance along the borderlands’. The very name adopted by the ruling camp in Silesia—the National Christian Union of Labour—indicated the direction of programmatic changes.” In their attempt to overcome the dominant influences of the Christian Democratic Party, the Reformers presented themselves as the most active defenders of the Polish character of Upper Silesia. They considered the German minority to be their main political enemy on the western borders. The question of relations with the Jewish minority—whose links with German cultural circles were particularly strong in this region—was of great importance to 1 Archiwum Panstwowe w Katowicach (APK), Urzad Wojewodzki Slaski (UWS), Wydziak Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego, Konfiskaty druk6w miejscowych, sig. 665; ‘Pilsudski und die Juden’, Tygodnik zydowski—fuidisches Volksblatt, 16 Nov. 1934. 2 A. Chojnowski, Koncepcje polityki narodowoSsciowe rzqdow polskich w latach 1921-1939 (Wroclaw,

1979), 109-13. (These restrictions were a result of the Treaties for Minorities signed together with the Versailles Treaty and Geneva Convention.) 3 E. Dlugajezyk, Sanacja slaska 1926-1939: zarys dziejow politycznych (1983), 139.

Sanaca and fews in Silesia, 1926-1939 151 them. The Silesian Sanacja described the de facto union between these two minorities as an alliance between forces hostile towards the Polish state.* Pointing out the lack of Jewish independence in this alliance, the ruling camp’s journalists sharply

critized both minorities. The alliance was based, in their view, on a hatred of independent Poland. The Pitsudski camp followed the pre-election political consultations of their representatives with great interest.? The participation of the Jews in the National Minorities’ Electoral Bloc, formed in autumn 1927 and headed in

Silesia by the detested Germans, constituted a huge disappointment for local Sanacja activists.

In these circumstances attempts to strengthen the Polish orientation amongst the Jews of Silesia by the publishers of a Polish-language Jewish weekly brought no significant results. After only a few issues Przeglqd slqski collapsed in the face of strong competition from the German press. Those Jews who were loyal to the state

did not have the support of the voivode, Grazynski, with whom they were not at that time on easy terms. Disillusioned, they reproached his group for endeckos¢— toeing the National Democratic line—with regard to the Jews.° This first attempt to foster a pro-Polish stance among the Jews of Upper Silesia did not pass without repercussions. Clear divisions gradually began to emerge within Jewish society in Silesia. As economic integration of Silesia into the republic progressed, a stream of Jews flowed into the province from the former Congress Kingdom and from Matopolska. They were, for the most part, supporters of Zionism, which the local Jews decidedly opposed. The latter even appointed a special Committee for the Battle against Zionism. However, a delegation sent by this committee to the voivode, Grazynski, had no official support from the local administration,’ and the voivode remained neutral, despite a vociferous demonstration by the Zionists against antiJewish violence in Palestine held outside the British consulate in Katowice. The commotion they caused, and the resulting broken windows at the consulate, certainly did not help to make the local authorities well disposed towards them.®

Taking advantage of the current mood, towards the end of 1928 the Germanlanguage press, which also represented the interests of those Jews already resident in Silesia, demanded a halt to the influx of Jews from other parts of the country. The argument put forward most frequently at the time was that local trade was weakened by “dishonest competition’ introduced by these newcomers. The local Polish opposition, and also the Silesian Jews, who remained under the overwhelming 4 S. Kapuscinski, ‘Blok mniejszosci narodowych’, Polska zachodnia, 23 Nov. 1927: ‘Daily realities contradict their assurances of loyalty. . . . This is a bloc of elements hostile to the state.’

° APK, UWS, sig. 561, report on the state of affairs on 10 Dec. 1927, the Jewish minority and the elections: ‘For more than a month the local Jewry has been convulsed by a lively discussion on the subject of the Minorities’ Bloc which has been created for the forthcoming elections on the initiative of Deputy Griinbaum. Until now negotiations with the Germans have not been successful.’ ® ‘Silesian Jewry and “Western Poland”’, Przeglad Siqski, 1 Sept. 1928. ” APK, UWS, sig. 563, report on the state of affairs, 22 Dec. 1928. 8 APK, UWS, sig. 567, report on the state of affairs, 7 Sept. 1929.

152 Jacek Piotrowski influence of German culture, were strengthened in their conviction that this was the result of deliberate policies on the part of the Silesian Sanacja. Stung by these criticisms, Polska zachodnia, the sem1-official organ of the Silesian provincial office, explicitly rejected the accusation: “The claim that elements in the local administra-

tion support the migration of Jews to Silesia at all costs to further the union of Silesia with the motherland is a falsehood . . . The Jews will not support changes to the former face of Silesia. They do shady deals with the Germans and are happy to use the German language.” Distancing themselves from any accusations of supporting the migration of Jews to Silesia, the Sanacja presented to the electorate their ‘national’ views with regard

to the republic’s borderlands. ‘This did not prevent them from expressing their satisfaction when the Jews again declined to participate in the National Minorities’ Electoral Bloc in the elections of 1930. A change in the Silesian Sanacja’s attitude towards the Jews came only with the increase in antisemitic attitudes caused by the infiltration of national socialist ideology from Hitler’s Germany. In Silesia there was a decided repudiation of support for the antisemitic excesses, which ‘undermined law and order’. The position of the local authorities, however, was characterized by a general indifference towards con-

crete demonstrations of intolerance. On the other hand, the Sanacja press made much of information on the fate of Jews in Germany. The persecution in the Third Reich of hitherto loyal citizens presented one more propaganda argument against the orientation towards German culture manifested by the Jews of Silesia. ‘The public was reminded that it was only thanks to the Geneva Convention ratified by Poland in 1922 that racist legislation was not binding in the German part of Upper Silesia. In practice, of course, the German government’s sabotage of international treaties limited the real advantages gained by Jews from these regulations.'° It did, however, provide a serious argument against those among the Jewish minority who until then had supported the German minority in Poland. The Jewish boycott of German goods, launched in 1933 and received with satisfaction by the local authorities, was seen as distinctly belated. The widespread abandonment of a pro-German orientation among the Jews of Silesia met with a cool reception in the Sanacja camp, which doubted the sincerity of these moves: ‘Without wishing to question the good will of those German Jews converting to Polishness, we consider, however, that effective support of the Polish way . . . is best given by those Jews whose Polishness has not been newly acquired.”!?

| Pitsudski’s followers maintained an attitude of reserve towards the popular anti9 ‘Silesian Jewry’, Polska zachodnia, 12 Sept. 1928 (reply to the articles in Przeglad slqski, Slaski gtos poranny, 15 Sept. 1928, and other opposition papers); M. Wanatowicz, Ludnosé naplywowa na Gornym Slasku w latach 1922-1939 (Katowice, 1982), 139, 234. 10 F. Polomski, ‘Polozenie ludnosci zydowskiej na Slasku’, Studia Slgskie, 40 (Katowice, 1967), 64. 11 “Nowy gios krytyki w sprawie Izraelickiej Gminy w Krolewskiej Hucie’, Polska zachodnia, 2 May 1934.

Sanaga and fews in Silesia, 1926-1939 153 semitic slogans inspired by the fascist movement in Europe. Even in the official declarations of Ob6z Zjednoczenia Narodowego (the Camp of National Unity, OZON), the pro-government political organization created in 1937 which was closer than earlier Pitsudski-ite groupings to the position of the National Democratic right, the use of force was categorically ruled out. The elimination of Jews from Polish life was to take place en route to awakening national sentiment among the Poles, but the use of violence was discounted. It was hoped in this way to counter the growing popularity of organizations openly voicing antisemitism. Great sympathy and support in Silesia was gained by Zionists propagating the need for the mass emigration of Jews from Poland. The well-known activists Itshak

Griinbaum and Vladimir Jabotinsky were particularly respected in Silesia. The Silesian Sanacja did not interfere in the internal political disagreements of the Jewish minority as long as Polish affairs were not directly concerned. The conflict between

general Zionists and Zionist revisionists against the background of the argument over the policy of emigration to Palestine brought no response from them, and it was only after 7 ygodnik zydowski had published several articles criticizing the situation of Jews in Poland that the paper was seized. ‘The sympathetic attitude of the local authorities encouraged the Zionist revisionists to organize a series of public lectures throughout the province. One such meeting in Bielsko, attended by about 300 people, was addressed by one of the group’s young activists from Warsaw, Menachem Begin.’* While supporting the propaganda activities of the Zionist organizations, the local authorities remained cool towards the Jewish minority in Silesia. At the same time the Sanacyja side did not cease to condemn the deeply rooted

links between the German and Jewish minorities established over years of close co-operation. In the second half of the 1930s Sanacja journalists presented these as an ‘inexplicable link’ between executioner and victim. The increase in antisemitic excesses which were also taking place in the Silesian area forced the Silesian Sanacja to make a clear and unambiguous declaration on the subject. In an article in Polska zachodnia it was stated categorically: ‘We truly aim to respect both the catechism

and the constitution.’!° This was an unequivocal stance taken in an atmosphere of increasing legal discrimination against Jews in Europe. It was no doubt partly determined by the possible propaganda value of the policy against the background of persecution in the Third Reich. In reply to the frequent provocation by journalists from the German minority, the Sanacja press was able—despite agreements concerning the press which were binding in both countries—to publish the following report from the Reich: “The national court in... sentenced a 45-year-old Jewish merchant, Juliusz Hanna, for the “continual commission of racist crimes” to five years and loss of rights.’!4 12 APK, UWS, sig. 578, report on the state of affairs, 9 July 1937. 13 A. Dobrowolski, ‘K westia zydowska w Polsce’, Polska zachodnia, 20 June 1937.

‘4 “Nasze ostatnie upomnienie pod adresem “Katowicerki” i czynnikéw za nia, stojacych’, Polska zachodnia, 30 Jan. 1938.

154 Jacek Piotrowski The Pitsudski camp remained critical of the barbaric persecutions in the ‘Third Reich, and stressed the need for Polish support for Jewish aspirations towards independence in Palestine. Sanacja journalists emphasized that the creation of a Jewish state in the historical Jewish homeland could help significantly to bring about a real solution to the Jewish problem in Poland. They also canvassed other territorial solutions, suggesting Madagascar as a future seat of the Jewish nation, for example. This proposition was treated very seriously in Poland at the time. Its main architect was the well-known writer and traveller, Pitsudski’s former personal aide-de-camp, Captain Mieczystaw Lepecki. His trips to Africa and researches undertaken with this aim in mind were publicized throughout the country. The question of ritual slaughter provoked strong emotions and intense activity within the Zionist organization in Upper Silesia. Legal regulations unfavourable to the Jewish minority on the issue provoked numerous public demonstrations by Jews in the spring of 1936.° Silesia’s regional press published ever more reports of antisemitic demonstrations in Europe. The huge scale of this phenomenon meant that the Sanacja press, which had hitherto maintained restraint in this respect, now sometimes published similar information. Antisemitic incidents in Bielsko in the autumn of 1937 provoked violent polemic from the Jewish minority, who laid the blame exclusively at the feet of the Poles, while with increasing frequency the ruling camp in Silesia put the excesses down to the ‘provocative’ stance of the Jews themselves. This view was undoubtedly connected with the general ideological

evolution of the Pitsudski camp in the direction of right-wing groups, as was clearly indicated in the programmatic declaration of OZON in February 1937. OZON’s subsequent announcement of a plan to regulate Jewish affairs in Poland—

ruling out excesses—envisaged the imposition of administrative measures to facilitate the displacement of Jews from cultural, economic, and political life. As ever, the ideal solution for the Sanacja camp remained the mass emigration of Jews. Local decision-makers were also troubled, mainly by the significant growth in the Jewish population within the autonomous province of Silesia. In the years between 1922 and 1939 the number of Jews increased from 12,262 to 23,571. To be sure, on the scale of the entire region the Jews made up barely 1.1—1.7 per cent of the population, but in the area of Cieszyn the figure was 4.6—5.1 per cent. The overwhelming majority—about 85 per cent—lived in the towns, especially Bielsko, Cieszyn, Katowice, and Krolewska Huta. This growth in population was accompanied by the establishment and development of many Jewish associations,'® with the Cieszyn area seeing a particular flowering of such associations. These favourable circumstances were brought to a close only by President Moscicki’s decree suppressing freemasonry. As a consequence, the Jewish humanitarian association © APK, UWS, sig. 577, report on the state of affairs, g May 1936. 16 W. Jaworski, Zydzi w wojewédztwie Slgskim w okresie miedzywojennym (Katowice, 1991); APK, UWS, sig. 798.

Sanacja and Jews in Silesia, 1926-1939 155 Concordia B’nai B’rith, which mainly brought together representatives of the liberal professions, was liquidated in Katowice amid great publicity.‘ The socio-professional structure of the Jewish population was typically urban in character. Its dynamic growth was perceived by the Silesians as a setback to their possible social advancement. This led to frequent conflicts, exacerbated by economic considerations, between those Jews assimilated into German culture and newcomers from other regions of Poland. Initially, a decisive role was played in Jewish kehilot by pro-German assimilationists, but they gradually gave way to Zionists, who had the support of recent immigrants. However, because they were generally well-to-do, the assimilationists were able to maintain their position in many small and medium-sized communes. With time the Zionists, who enjoyed the support of the local Sanacja authorities, came to dominate the political life of the Jewish minority in Silesia. The authorities continued to view emigration as a panacea for all the problems of the Jewish minority, a development they also saw as closely linked with Poland’s colonial territorial aspirations. Only the threat of war with the Third Reich, which was felt particularly acutely in Upper Silesia, interrupted public debate on the issue. The emergence of a common enemy brought about a clear consolidation of Polish and Jewish citizens as they united in the cause of defending Polish independence. However, to the end, the problem of the Jewish minority continued to play an instrumental part for the Silesian Sanacja in the basic contest between the local authorities and the German minority over the Polish character of the western borders.'® The fall of the Second Republic opened a new, tragic chapter in the centuries-old history of the Jews on the lands of Silesia. Translated from Polish by Anna Zaranko

lv APK, UWS, sig. 823, the liquidation of masonic associations 1938. . 18 “Mniejszosci narodowe subskrybuja Pozyczke Obrony Przeciwlotniczej, Zydzi przestaja méwi¢ po niemiecku’, Polska zachodnia, 19 Apr. 1939.

The Vilna Years of Jakub Rotbaum ANNA HANNOWA

Many historians have written about the Vilna Troupe, the best-known Jewish theatre company in Europe, but few have had much to say about its director and longest-lived artist, Jakub Rotbaum (1901-94). In his essay ‘Teatr Zydowski w Warszawie w latach miedzywojennych’ (‘Jewish Theatre in Warsaw between the Wars’) Marian Melman writes about the character and development of the Vilna Troupe, and the two stages of its repertoire, but he gives short shrift to the man who served as both artistic director and principal producer of the company from 1929 to 1936, initiated the changes in its repertoire and artistic and ideological image, directed its groundbreaking performances of six plays, and won for the troupe the collaboration of the noted scenographer Andrzej Pronaszko. Melman tells us only that the Vilna Troupe ‘performed AKrzyczcie, Chiny! ‘Scream, China!’) in the Warsaw theatre Scala under the direction of Jakub Rotbaum, who had worked with the Vilnians since 1929’.' Yet critics of his own time considered Rotbaum a pioneer of social theatre and an innovator in stagecraft, as well as a transformative figure in Jewish literary theatre. The graphic quality of his stage conceptions and his use of pantomime and of rich musical accompaniments earned him public admiration and the acclaim of connoisseurs of both Polish and Jewish theatre.” Jakub Rotbaum returned to Poland in 1949 on the invitation of Ida Kaminska, who entrusted him with the position of director of the Jewish theatre in the now Polish city of Wroclaw. The theatre was created there immediately after the Second World War in the terrible ruins of what used to be the German city of Breslau. I first met Rotbaum in 1953 in the Teatr Polski during the rehearsals of Bieg do Fragala 1M. Melman, ‘Teatr Zydowski w Warszawie w latach miedzywojennych’, in E. Borecka, M. Drozdowski, and H. Janowska (eds.), Warszawa II Rzeczypospolite], 5 vols. (Warsaw, 1968— ), 1. 383-06. 4 J. Apenszlak, Nasz przeglgd, 2 Mar. 1932: “The artistic truth and harmony of composition of the performance are sufficient justification for the quite extensive intervention of the director. The effects achieved in the artistic arrangement of groups of actors are worthy of those of Habima.’ I. M. Najyman, Haynt, 4 Mar. 1932: ‘J. Rotbaum is not just a director; he is a co-creator of the play. His staging is un1-

formly exquisite; he develops the dramatization by changing and broadening the text.’ B. Szefner, Naye folkstsaytung, 2 Mar. 1932: ‘Rotbaum creates perfect peformances, full of intense action and dynamics. He uses crowd scenes magnificently (for example, in Krzyczcie, Chiny/); he has an unusual ability to compose picturesque tableaux. The audience viewing the stage is charmed by this artistry, as if one were looking at the paintings of old masters.’

The Vilna Years of fakub Rothbaum 157 (‘Run to Fragala’) by Julian Stryjkowski. I was working as a young radio journalist for the Polish Radio station in Wroctaw and was responsible for the station’s theatre reporting. Years later, in 1985, I had the privilege of being invited by Rotbaum to conduct a series of interviews with him. For me it was a great chance to better under-

stand and embrace the personality and rich artistic life of my interlocutor. The interviews continued, with interruptions, until Rotbaum’s death on 31 January 1994. The conversations contained many autobiographical details and comments about facts and people—exceptional personalities of his time, people of the theatre and literature, artists, and politicians.° Jakub Rotbaum came from a famous theatrical family: his elder sister acted first at Reinhardt’s theatre in Berlin and then in Moscow in the theatres of Granovsky,

Meyerhold, and Mikhoels; his younger sister Lia Rotbaumowna was a choreographer and operatic director. Rotbaum’s education, however, was thoroughly traditional and did not initially include the study of theatre at all. He studied first in a heder, then at the Krynski Gymnasium in Warsaw, followed by the Mitosz Kotarbinski School of Decorative Arts, where he worked with Wtiadystaw Skoczylas,

Henryk Kuna, and Tadeusz Pruszkowski, and later he studied at the First Film School in Warsaw. Rotbaum’s paintings were first exhibited in Zacheta in Warsaw in 1925, and in 1927 he made the first Polish film about Jewish folklore.

Film, however, proved little more than a prologue to theatre. He began his theatrical career at amateur theatre schools and studios in Warsaw and then went to Moscow to study with Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and Tairov. In 1929 he passed the director’s exam and returned to Poland, as he would later recall: , I came back from Russia with my head overflowing with new ideas. In Warsaw I prepared a lecture [which I called] “Theatrical Culture in the Soviet Union’, and I toured with that lecture all over Poland. I presented it in Warsaw, 1.6dz, Krakow, Danzig, and Vilna. I even discovered that people were becoming nervous about me because I was saying such revolutionary things.* Mordechaj Mazo, the manager of the Vilna Troupe, came to one of my lectures. He listened with great interest, and then he asked Alter Kacyzne about me. It is to Alter that I owe my first foray into theatre; he ‘supervised’ my first works in studio companies, he advised me to go to Moscow, and gave me letters of recommendation; he cleared the way forward for me, and he was my first critic and adviser in matters of directing. Maybe a week had passed after the talk with Mordechaj Mazo, maybe two weeks. I got a cable, sent from Alter Kacyzne’s address: ‘We cordially invite director Rotbaum to work with us—the company and the directors of the Vilna Troupe.’ Kacyzne handed me this cable, which was to prove so important in my life, saying with great affection, ‘Mazel tov!’ [‘Good luck!’] I went to Vilna.°

> Excerpts from these interviews were published in later years in Teatr, a Warsaw theatrical monthly,

under the title ‘Jakub Rotbaum czyli dwa teatry’ (Teatr, 7-8 and 9 (1994)), which Rotbaum himself read and authorized before publication; and in Odra, a Wroclaw literary monthly (Odra, 4 (1996)). * See A. Hannowa, ‘Jakub Rotbaum czyli dwa teatry’, pt. 1, ‘Teatr Zydowski’, Teatr, 7-8 (1994), 51.

> Conversation with Jakub Rotbaum, 17 June 1992.

158 Anna Hannowa Alter Kacyzne, who as a close friend played such a crucial role in Rotbaum’s decision to accept the job with the Vilna Troupe, was a playwright, director, and critic who had been working with the company for many years. Following his advice, Rotbaum became both its artistic director and principal producer. The Vilna Troupe began with naturalistic theatre, performing plays by the Jewish playwrights David Pinski, Leon Kobrin, and Peretz Hirshbein, as well as works by the German and Russian playwrights Sudermann, Leonid Andreev, and Lev Tolstoy. Then, after 1920, it went through what Zygmunt Tonecki called ‘a great paroxysm of mysticism starting with the famous performance of the Dybbuk directed by Dawid Herman’,® which marked the start of the troupe’s fame. Rotbaum describes the troupe as he found it: My collaboration with the Vilna Troupe lasted six years without a break, and for me as a young director it was an exciting and creative workshop for theatrical work. It was a company of young, talented actors. I considered it a great stroke of luck that I could work with the troupe. Vilna was an important cultural centre in Poland. It was called the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’. Poles and Jews had their own scientific institutes, their own schools, their own theatres. The Vilna Troupe was in a period of great prosperity; during that time Aleksander Zelwerowicz was directing a Polish theatre at Mata Pohulanka; famous actors like Irena Eichlerowna and Marian Wyrzykowski were performing there. Zelwerowicz did not miss a single premiere of the Vilna Troupe.’

Rotbaum intended to change the artistic profile of the theatre by shifting its

transition thus:

focus from Jewish folklore to a social and even political repertoire. He explained the

For perhaps too long we were stuck with tradition, always sidelocks, always a kaftan, and always a Jew from a shiet/. I brought over from Russia the play All God’s Chillun Got Wings, by the American playwright [Eugene] O’Neill, about discrimination against blacks. ‘All God’s chillun got wings,’ so all are equal before God. But how were things in reality? Everybody knew there was racism. The blacks were separate from the whites; the blacks were oppressed. I had visited Vilna before, but I hadn’t known that the students there organized frequent anti-Jewish riots. I translated O’Neill’s play into Yiddish, and I gave it the title 7he _ Black Ghetto. Mazo, the manager, asked me to invent a title, short but to the point. So I thought: for a Jew—a ghetto. The thing is about blacks, so it must be a ghetto for blacks, Czarne getto, ‘The Black Ghetto’. And this title stuck. The news spread that the play was about blacks on the surface, but it was really about discrimination against Jews. Part of the Jewish press opposed the production of The Black Ghetto because [they were afraid | it would be a provocation and worsen the very tense situation in the city; besides, [they said that|

a Jewish theatre should popularize Jewish culture and literature instead of producing American writers. Luckily, the extraordinary and militant young people of the Vilna Troupe

backed me, and they issued a proclamation demanding something new in the theatre. In addition, Polish actors, in particular Zelwerowicz, strongly encouraged us to perform The Black Ghetto.® 6 See Z. Tonecki, ‘Teatr Zydowski w Polsce’, Wiadomosci literackie, 33 (1932), 3.

” See Hannowa, ‘Jakub Rotbaum czyli dwa teatry’, Teatr, 7-8, pp. 51 ff. 8 Ibid.

The Vilna Years of fakub Rotbaum 159 Henoch Kon composed music to accompany the play and Rotbaum’s sister Lia choreographed dances. But Rotbaum’s greatest coup was bringing in Andrzej Pronaszko, an outstanding Polish painter and scenographer, to collaborate with him on

the production. Pronaszko came to Vilna to design the set and costumes. The evocativeness of his artistic vision strongly influenced the staging, the style of the actors’ performance, the lighting, the music, and the final artistic and ideological content of this emotional play. He introduced moving platforms, balconies, and railings arranged so as to place the actors on many surfaces and at many levels where they could act different scenes simultaneously. All this was previously unheard of in Jewish theatre, especially in Vilna. The three-dimensionality that this achieved added considerably to the artistic value of The Black Ghetto. Rotbaum later described the context in which The Black Ghetto opened: The mood in the town was such that we felt uneasy. | remember once Miriam Orleska, who played the main part, and I were walking home from a rehearsal three days before the opening. Suddenly a group of students attacked us with canes that had razor blades attached. They beat us up and maimed us; we barely managed to escape alive.? Despite this horrible experience, Miriam played in the opening.’°

The play opened on 1 January 1930 at the Zydowski Teatr Ludowy on Ludwisarska Street in Vilna. The programme included ‘A Word of Introduction’ from Rotbaum explaining the ideas behind the play, pointing out its relevance to contemporary Polish life, stressing the educational role of theatre, and calling on the audience to participate actively: This [racial] conflict can be translated into the relations between Semites and Aryans. .. . We have to understand the tragedy of the artist [i.e. the playwright] who uncovered the horrors of racial baiting, but did not have enough courage to reach its causes. It is essential to attempt a courageous critical analysis of the play. We demand this of our viewers.'!

In the course of the ‘Word of Introduction’ Rotbaum went on to discuss the innovative and surprising nature of the set design for a Jewish audience accustomed to traditional realism: The intention to generalize the theme prompted us to use abstract and constructivistic scenery. [he function of the scenery and set is not to be ‘scenic’; it is primarily a workplace | ? In ‘Jung Teatr w Wilnie’, Pamietnik teatralny, 3-4 (1995), 466, Rafat Wegrzyniak writes, ‘In Rodzina Europa Czestaw Milosz describes how antisemitic skirmishes and the introduction of ghetto benches brought new members to communist organizations from among students of Jewish origin. . . . The strapping Polish youth . .. organized games of chase after passers-by . . .”. The ghetto benches were an area of segregated seating imposed on Jews by Polish universities at the instigation of right-wing

students. 10 Hannowa, ‘Jakub Rotbaum czyli dwa teatry’. 11 Programme notes (in Polish and Yiddish): “The Vilna Troupe, Year XVII. Managed by M.

Mazo. Czarne getto (All God’s Chillun Got Wings), a play in three acts by Eugene O’ Neill. Translated,

staged, and directed by Jakob Rotbaum. Stage design and costumes by Andrzej Pronaszko, music by Henoch Kon, dances by Lia Rotbaumowna. Managing director B. As. Zydowski Ludowy Theatre, Ludwisarska St. 4, Vilna, 01/26/1930. Printed by “Rekord”, Warsaw.’

160 Anna Hannowa for the actors, a performance space. The construction has no independent value. It is not an aim in and of itself; on the contrary, it is a means to allow the actor freer, stronger, and better

self-expression.” , The ‘Word of Introduction’ is Jakub Rotbaum’s ideological manifesto, and as such it strongly reflects his Moscow lecture notes; he uses terminology widespread in the Soviet Union, including such language as ‘the cynical justice of the land of dollars’, ‘Working people, white and black, forced the repeal of the sentence’, ‘Class

replaced race’, and ‘A flash of lightning destroyed the darkness of racial prejudice’.!°

The play was extremely well received by critics and by both the Jewish and Polish audiences, among them the actors from Mata Pohulanka, and their director, Zelwerowicz, who mounted the stage to congratulate Rotbaum publicly. Building on its success in Vilna, the Vilna Troupe went on tour with The Black Ghetto to many towns in Poland. A critic from the Krakow daily Czas wrote: The Vilna Troupe, well known in our city for its previous performances, performed a ‘black-and-white’ political play at the Bagatela Theatre. [It was a play] in seven scenes by the acclaimed American playwright O’ Neill, who is so far unknown here. These scenes, lean in

content, capture us with their presentation, which uses rich pantomime, almost balletic sequences, and picturesque scenery. We have seen such ‘techniques’ at the Reinhardt and Schiller [Theatres] but we have to acknowledge that the Vilna Troupe executes them in a precise and spectacular manner. As an example of psychologically deep individual acting we

may point out the great character that J. Wajslic created as Jim in the third scene. The coloured lights projected onto particular figures increased their vividness and [deepened their] mood.'*

Similarly, Wilhelm Fallek wrote about the Vilna Troupe’s new image, high artistry, innovativeness, and ideological value, calling Rotbaum ‘a born director’ and praising his technical craft and artistic talent.'° Rotbaum’s triumph with The Black Ghetto changed the repertoire of the Vilna Troupe for several years. The company became famous throughout Poland for its

Yiddish performances of worldwide repertoire, its focus on social and political issues, its innovative staging, its painter’s perspective on theatre, its constructivist set and scenery, 1ts choreographed crowd scenes, and its simultaneous acting of different scenes on various levels and platforms. The troupe started to receive invitations for guest appearances, and it performed in almost every major Polish city and town. Exhibitions of Rotbaum’s paintings usually accompanied the openings and guest appearances. These paintings depicted scenes from the life of Jewish

12 Programme notes (see n. 11). 13° Tbid. 4S., ‘Teatr M. Maro [sic] w Bagateli’, Czas, 95 (30 Apr. 1931). 19 W. Fallek, ‘Jak6b Rotbaum: Tworca zydowskiego teatru spolecznego’, Nowy dziennik, 3 Jan. 1933: In Czarne getto Rotbaum demonstrated his natural ability as a born director. He strongly underscored the struggle between the two races. .. . The dramatic tension gradually increased and intensified ... [he whole production had pathos, force, and great expressive power ...’.

The Vilna Years of fakub Rothbaum 161 shtetls, images of Jewish Warsaw, and portraits of distinctively Jewish subjects, and served to increase the impact of the famous Jewish company’s performance as an artistic event. Rotbaum told me about that period of his work in Vilna in 1930 and 1931: I had further plans. After what had happened to me—that great luck and great opportunity that allowed me suddenly to become the professional director of the best Jewish company in Europe, the Vilna Troupe, with a [degree of| success that not everybody achieves, and because of the perspective and ideological baggage I had, especially after my return from the Soviet Union—I decided to continue in the direction I had already chosen. In Vilna I had a group of young actors who had just completed the Studio Dramatyczne, directed by Dawid Herman. These young people accepted my proposals and the changes [I had made] in the repertory of the Jewish theatre, and [they agreed to] the presence of a social current with a definite ideological bent. They wanted to perform a contemporary Jewish play. I had such a play, one that I had brought over from Russia, The Mill by David Bergelson. Bergelson lived in Moscow; he was among the group of writers who were executed by Stalin in 1952.'°

In The Mill Bergelson depicted a Jewish shtet/ before the Russian revolution of 1905 as a scene of fierce class conflict between rich and poor Jews, a scene of strikes and police repression, with revolution in the air. Again, Rotbaum invited Andrzej Pronaszko to collaborate with him. Pronaszko designed an original set to allow the simultaneous acting of different scenes on various levels. He painted the scenery himself, laboriously mixing ground glass with sawdust to approximate the texture of a mill interior covered with flour. The political situation in Poland at the time strongly resembled that of Russia in 1905. Work on the play went on amid growing tension; there were protests and strikes in the theatre itself much like the ones in Bergelson’s play. Three days before the opening the technical staff, underpaid by the management, stopped work. Then, to make things worse, one of the machine operators damaged the scenery with a knife, destroying Pronaszko’s painstaking work.!” Mordechaj Mazo, the manager of the Vilna Troupe, decided to give Rotbaum a single day in which to arrange an exhibition of his paintings and prepare a lecture for the opening, where they would hold an auction to raise money to pay the salaries of the technical staff. Rotbaum described the event: I set up the exhibition in the Jewish Library on Kolejowa Street, and I delivered a lecture on “Theatrical Culture in the Soviet Union’. The words ‘theatrical culture’ concealed the strong political undertones of my lecture. At that time Abraham Morewski, a prominent Jewish actor, was in Vilna, in the Vilna Troupe; he had just returned from Moscow. At some point [during the lecture] he sent me a note written in Russian: ‘Comrade Rotbaum, with each word of your propaganda you are killing one more customer.’ Why did he call me comrade

when I had never been in the Party?! But things went exactly as he predicted. When I *6 Cf. Hannowa, ‘Jakub Rotbaum czyli dwa teatry’, Teatr, 7-8, p. 51. 17 See J. Rotbaum, ‘Wspdlpraca Andrzeja Pronaszki z teatrem zydowskim: Gars¢ wspomnien osobistych’, Pamietntk teatralny, 1-2 (1964), 53-9; repr. in Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 79 (1971), 69-74, and in Teatr, 7-8 (1972), 26-8.

162 Anna Hannowa finished my lecture on theatrical culture in the Soviet Union, only two people remained in the room: Morewski and Dr [Daniel] Jedwabnik, a laryngologist and the president of the Towarzystwo Mifosnikow Teatru [Society of Theatre-Lovers]. The doctor, a great connoisseur of theatre and art, started to argue with me: ‘Why did you criticize the rich so strongly? You should have waited until after the opening. Who will buy the pictures now?’ But he bought two of them, and the voivode, [Ludwik] Bocianski, who was also a theatre connoisseur, bought two, and a few more people from the Vilna intelligentsia purchased some pictures. We had the money to pay the wages and end the strike.'®

Rotbaum’s next exhibition, held in the Union of Graphic Artists building, excited great interest. The reviewer from Kurier wilenski praised Rotbaum’s work highly: The exhibition of the very talented painter Jakub Rotbaum consists entirely of portrait studies showing cheerful dispositions, often with undertones of gloom. They stand out because of their richness and technical subtlety. ... Mr Rotbaum reveals an exceptional command of form and technique, and a very interesting, well-thought-out, and profound approach to his subject. It is rare that a relatively small number of works (forty-two) can condense so much artistic and even philosophical material. The material is so inspiring that I would gladly write much more about it.'®

Saved by the successful sale of Rotbaum’s art, 7he Mill opened as planned at Vilna’s Zydowski Teatr Ludowy,”° where it was warmly received and unanimously regarded as an artistic success. It played more than a hundred performances, and the troupe took it on tour all over the country. The critic from the Krakow daily Czas wrote, ‘Jewish actors from Vilna recently put on The Mz// on Bochenska Street with great success despite its gloomy content and message. A mill apprentice was

crushed by the stones of the capitalistic mill.’21 Two reviews in Nowy dziennik emphasized the political aspects of the play: Mojzesz Kanfer wrote about the ideology conveyed by the performance and the innovative means used by the director to achieve precision and clarity in his artistic message,?” and Wilhelm Fallek stressed the social message of the Vilna Troupe’s production as compared to a different production of The Mill: 18 J. Rotbaum, ‘Zydowski teatr w Polsce’, address delivered at the International Scholarly Conference, Warsaw, 18 Oct. 1993; typescript ed. A. Hannowa. 19 Sz. K1., Kurier wilenski, 13 May 1931. 20 ‘Mityn, a play in three acts by Dawid Bergelson. Staged and directed by Jakub Rotbaum. Stage design and costumes by Andrzej Pronaszko. Choreography by Lia Rotbaumowna. The Vilna Troupe.

Managed by Mordechaj Mazo. Zydowski Teatr Ludowy in Vilna, Ludwisarska 4. The cast: Miriam Oleska, Estera Goldenberg, Chewel Buzgan, Dawid Licht, Daniel Szapiro, Nachum Melnik, Jakub Mansdorf, Jakub Kurlender, Symche Natan, Jakub Wajslic, Ajzyk Samberg, Jozef Widecki, Zalmen

Hirszfeld.’ 21 S., ‘Teatr M. Maro w Bagateli’. 22 M. Kanfer, ‘Goscinne wystepy Trupy Wilenskiey’, Nowy dziennik, 117 (1931), 11. As Mirostawa Bulat noted in her manuscript “Teatry jidyszowe w Wilnie 1 ich wystepy goscinne w Krakowie w latach 1918~—1939’, to which she was kind enough to allow me access, “The director arranged the action in such

a way ...as to compel the spectator to choose openly on which side of the barricade to be. . . . The concrete constructions engrave themselves in the spectator’s imagination, and they become a symbol of capitalism reshaping life’ (pp. 12—13).

The Vilna Years of fakub Rothbaum 163 When producing the same play, Dawid Herman focused on the character of “The Deaf’, whereas Rotbaum underscored . . . the elements of class struggle between the gluttonous ‘Bull’ and the starving workers. In his interesting realization the director expressed his idea that in the class struggle the means is not individual terror, but the common, co-ordinated, and conscious protest of masses.7?

But a few weeks after the opening the Vilna Troupe found itself in a critical situation. Theatre seats were unfilled, the box office was quiet, the hotel bills had not been paid for a month, and, to make matters worse, in March 1931 a new cold spell paralysed life in the town. Rotbaum wrote in his notebook: We owe Palast Hotel a month’s rent. We have an invitation to go to £.6dz, but no money [with which] to go. I had to give another lecture and sell some [more] paintings. It is a difficult situation. .. . This morning everybody left the hotel. They escaped and left me as a pledge for payment. Also, some private belongings are left, including those of Orleska and Mazo. I have no money. ... What can I do? .. . Three days later Mr Marek Juwiler, the secretary of the Jewish Actors’ Union, came from Warsaw to bail me out. In seven days I have to present the premiere in 1.6dz.*4

The historian Marek Web has summed up such crises as the price the Vilna Troupe

had to pay for its persistence.”° |

As the political situation in Poland grew ever more tense, Rotbaum decided to return to the calmer themes of Jewish classics. He chose Sholem Aleichem’s comedy 200,000, later retitled The Great Jackpot. Rotbaum characterized Aleichem and 200,000 by saying, ‘Sholem Aleichem, the Jewish Gogol, doesn’t laugh at his heroes, he laughs with them. The hero of 200,000, an optimistic tailor, is a poor guy who never loses his faith that one day things will be better.’2© Rotbaum would stage this play many times in Poland and abroad, both before and after the war. Andrzej Pronaszko designed a colourful array of costumes and a magnificent set

with his trademark multi-level platforms allowing different scenes to be acted simultaneously, Moshe Broderson wrote the lyrics, Henoch Kon composed the music, and Lia Rotbaumowna choreographed the dances. The play opened in 4.6dz on 15 July 1931 at the Teatr Miejski. As Nachum Majzel wrote in Literarishe bleter, “The audience was enthusiastic. After the first act, the applause and calls of “Rotbaum, Rotbaum!” forced [the director] to appear on the stage. He came from his box on the first balcony. The audience was ecstatic. There hadn’t been such applause in the City Theatre for a long time.’

23 Fallek, ‘Jakdb Rotbaum’. , ** Quotation from Rotbaum’s notebook, which was shown to me in his apartment at 5 Wlodkowica Street. It is now in the Zydowski Instytut Historyczny, Warsaw. 25 “The example of the Vilna Troupe that survived almost until the end of the two decades between the wars is entirely unique; this ensemble paid for its tenaciousness with many crises, after which it suspended activity for a while, only to resurrect itself in a new form and with new members’ (M. Web, ‘Organizacja i samopomoc: Z historii ruchu zawodowego aktor6w zydowskich w Polsce’, Pamietnik

teatralny, 1-4 (1992), 141). 26 Conversation with Rotbaum, 17 June 1902.

164 Anna Hannowa Nowy dzienntk’s Wilhelm Fallek, though charmed, expressed surprise at such a departure from the themes and genres of the previous repertoire. None the less, he found it excellent fun, at once touching and thought-provoking, and he compared it to Italian commedia dell’arte, noting the role of music and pantomime in the performance. ‘The stereotypic assumption that Jewish theatre is meant to be light entertainment rather than serious drama led him to regard this play as more representative than those the troupe had previously performed, and so Fallek concluded that ‘if Polish theatres have to stage a Jewish play, light, characteristic, and full of charm, they should first of all perform the comedy 200,000’.?" Rotbaum bitterly recalled that Andrzej Pronaszko, in reward for his beautiful work and stalwart attitude (he supervised the execution of his stage projects while bedridden with flu), had to leave for Warsaw without a penny in compensation, but only reimbursement for a third-class train ticket.?° The brilliant success of 200,000, which won the Vilna Troupe full acceptance in £,6dz, created an atmosphere of sufficient goodwill that Rotbaum decided to risk returning to a political repertoire. He chose Bunt w domu poprawczym (‘Riot in the Reformatory’) by Peter Martin Lampel, a contemporary left-wing German writer.

The action, as the title indicates, takes place in a youth correction house in Germany and exposes the Nazi system of ‘justice’. Mazo and Rotbaum translated the three-act play, and Konstanty Mackiewicz designed the set. The performance was prepared in great haste amid extremely unfavourable conditions; the Teatr

Kameralny in 4.6dz, where the play was scheduled to open, was undergoing restoration, and a tragedy occurred in the family of Miriam Orleska, the leading actress. The rehearsals lasted eighteen hours each day, and the premiere took place as scheduled in the autumn of 1932.”” There were eighteen performances at

the Teatr Kameralny and twenty on tour. An anonymous critic wrote in Der Moment:

The bourgeois audience boycotts such art but the workers, the most devoted viewers of Rotbaum’s performances, completely approve of it and fill the theatre every evening. Bunt w domu poprawczym is an important piece, very relevant; it predicts evil coming from the west.

It’s very good that the Vilna Troupe has put together such a play. It marks an important point in the renewal of the repertoire of this theatre.

Similarly, Nachum Majzel in Literarishe bleter spared no praises: The performance had to stop many times because of the applause. The action is set magnificently, with dynamism and internal tension. The young and talented Vilna Troupe com-

27 See Fallek, ‘Jak6b Rotbaum’. 28 See Rotbaum, ‘Wspdlpraca Andrzeja Pronaszki’. 29 ‘Bunt w domu poprawczym, a play in three acts by Peter Martin Lampel, translated by Mordechaj Mazo and Jakub Rotbaum. Stage design and costumes by Konstanty Mackiewicz. The Vilna Troupe. Dir. M. Mazo. Premiere in the space of Teatr Kameralny in Lodz. The cast: Miriam Orleska, Debora

Rosenblum, Chewel Buzgan, Daniel Szapiro, Jakub Kurlender, Nachum Melnik, Jakub Mensdorf, M. Potasinski.’

The Vilna Years of fakub Rotbaum 165 pany is an important trump card in this performance. Their ardour and youthful enthusiasm increases its value. Played by such a company, the riot is authentic and convincing for the audience; it draws [one] into [its] dramatic conflicts and does not allow [one] to remain neutral. .. . The text of the play, indeed a press report about a German youth correction house, evoked some doubts in me, but Jakub Rotbaum and the Vilna Troupe company’s production is magnificent! It is another one of this director’s important productions.*”

Leon Schiller, who had already seen Czarne getto and 200,000, watched the performance at the Teatr Kameralny and was impressed. He was staging his own presentation of Tretiakov’s Krzyczcie, Chiny! at the same time at the City Theatre of

Stanistawa Wysocka in .6dz. Rotbaum described his relations with Schiller, and Schiller’s inspiring him to try Krzyczcie, Chiny! with the Vilna Troupe:*! I had known Leon Schiller for many years, I admired his theatre, his productions, [and] I considered him a great Polish director and a great theatre artist. | was honoured when he watched my performances of C'zarne getto, 200,000, and Bunt w domu poprawczym, and his reaction was very positive; he praised me. In 1932 or 1933 someone at the Vilna Troupe recommended that I see the play he was staging; it was enjoying enormous success. Daszewsk1 was the set designer. After the play I went backstage to congratulate Schiller, and I said that it was my manager Mazo’s dream to produce a play like Krzyczcie, Chiny! in a Jewish theatre, but we didn’t have the stage or the company for it. Schiller answered in a friendly man-

ner that the time would come when a Jewish theatre would also perform it. We went to Warsaw. Mazo told me that if we put it on stage in Yiddish we would be saved (the Vilna Troupe was again in dire financial straits), the entire proletarian world would come to see it, we would perform it 150 times! Zwiazek Zydowski [The Jewish Union] arranged a space for us. Who would design the set? Schiller had already engaged Pronaszko for Pocigg pancerny [The Armoured Train] at the Teatr Polski. So the architect Szymon Syrkus made sketches for the design in a single day. Mordechaj Mazo and I translated the play from the Russian original into the Yiddish as Shrai, Chine!, and we included the author’s description of the play as ‘an event in nine sequences’ as a subtitle. That was how it was printed in the programme of the Vilna Troupe published in Polish. *” We performed the play 150 times in Warsaw alone! It’s obvious that this couldn’t have happened without the permission of Leon Rechtleben’s Agencja Teatralna [Theatre Agency]. All ofa sudden Wiadomosci literackie published a strange text by Master Schiller accusing us of plagiarism [and maintaining] that we had no right to stage his play, which we had seen in £,6dz. [This article claimed that Schiller] had exclusive rights [and] that some red impostor (that was me, this red impostor) had taken [the play and] that the Vilna Troupe was playing

it in a barn on Dzielna Street. (The Scala Theatre was that ‘barn’.) It was published in 30 N. Majzel, review of Bunt w domu poprawczym (‘Riot in the Reformatory’), Literarishe bleter, 12 Dec. 1932.

31 Qn the conflict between Jakub Rotbaum and Leon Schiller over the production of Krzyczcte, Chiny!, see L. Schiller, Droga przez teatr, ed. J. Timoszewicz (Warsaw, 1984), 169-80. 82 “Sergei Tretiakov, Krzyczcie, Chiny! Trans. Jakub Rotbaum and Mordechaj Mazo. Directed by Jakub Rotbaum. Stage design by Szymon Syrkus. Music by Henoch Kon. The cast: The Vilna Troupe

with students from Warsaw University playing passers-by. Opening, March 16, 1933 at the Scala Theatre at One Dzielna St. in Warsaw.’

166 | Anna Hannowa Wiadomosci on Friday and [just] two days before that, on Wednesday, I had met Schiller ina

café. He had spoken very cordially with me, hugged me, [and] asked how the work was going; I told him about the problems, that I did not know what the outcome would be, and the opening was in just days. ‘My opening in the Ateneum theatre is in only two weeks,’ Schiller answered. But on Friday this article appeared! How could he know whether my performance was plagiarized if he hadn’t seen it yet? It turned very nasty. In his article he made some very strange insinuations. I respected Schiller highly; he was a great director, a great talent. I learned a lot from him. When I was younger, I never missed even one of his performances, and suddenly he showed that strange side of himself. How could he sit with me in that café and have a friendly talk when this article was already going into print (it was due to appear on Friday)? It is [still] a very unpleasant thing for me and I do not want to talk about it any more. So many years have passed. At the time a great many people responded to it, and the Polish and Jewish press stood up in my defence.*?

The play was not performed in Vilna for more than a year because of the political circumstances and the unfavourable climate for Jewish theatre, and because of the

deteriorating attitude of the authorities towards Rotbaum, whose activities as a popular lecturer throughout Poland caused them considerable anxiety because of his tendentious descriptions of Soviet theatre and his glorification of Soviet patron-

age of the arts, and not least because of his criticism of Polish antisemitism.** Krzyczcie, Chiny! was finally performed at the Zydowski Teatr Ludowy in Vilna from 28 July to 29 August 1934, where it played to full houses and met with enthusiastic applause. Rumours circulated that the play had a subversive, communist

message, and the police kept the theatre under close observation, patrolling Ludwisarska Street near the theatre and thereby heightening the emotion of the audience.*° The police suspected that box-office sales were supporting the Miedzynarodowa Organizacja Pomocy Rewolucjonistom (International Organization for Support of Revolutionaries) and accordingly interrogated many people connected with the theatre, including Rotbaum,” and even arrested some.

A few months after these events, in the spring of 1935, the Warsaw Teatr Miodych (Youth Theatre) visited the Jewish theatre Unzer Teatr at 8 Nowoerddzka Street in Vilna to perform another play under Rotbaum’s direction. The play, Zycie wota (‘Life is Calling’), by Vladimir Bill-Belotserkovsky,®” had won a 33 Hannowa, ‘Jakub Rotbaum czyli dwa teatry’, Teatr, 7-8. Compare the editorial in Literarishe bleter, 24 Apr. 1933, 209 (“The “Strange Behaviour” of the Polish Director Leon Schiller’) as well as the editorial note ‘Skandaliczny konflikt w polsko-zydowskim srodowisku teatralnym’ (‘Scandalous Conflict in Polish Jewish Theatrical Circles’), Der Moment, 1 Mar. 1933. 34 Documents relating to the position of Jewish theatres in Vilna in 1935—9, together with a penetrating analysis, were published by Rafat Wegrzyniak in Pamietnik teatralny, 3-4 (1995), 459-89. 35 Conversation with Rotbaum, 17 June 1992. 36 Wegrzyniak, Pamieinik teatralny, 3-4 (1995), 460. 37 ‘Zycie wola by Viadimir Bill-Belotserkovsky. Translation and direction by Jakub Rotbaum. Set design and costumes by Henryk Blum. Performed by the Teatr Miodych from Warsaw under the artistic direction of Michat Brandt (a.k.a. Dr Michal Weichert). The cast: the part of Prof. Chadov, Jozef

Glikson; other parts: Zygielbaum, Hajblum, D. Fakie ... Wolowczyk, Symche Natan.’ .

The Vilna Years of fakub Rothbaum 167 Soviet playwrights’ competition. It showed contemporary Soviet life and the moral-

ity of the new Soviet citizen, and accepted Soviet views on love and the family. Above all, it idealized sacrifices for the sake of the future, the new tomorrow that was being forged today. By early May the Ministry of the Interior had banned the play and cancelled its remaining performances for the same reasons for which Krzyczcie, Chiny ! had been banned.*®

The last play Jakub Rotbaum would direct for the Vilna Troupe was Rekruci (“The Recruits’), a comedy by Israel Askenfeld reworked by A. Kushnirov, and dramaturgically prepared by Lipe Reznik. Jézef Sliwiniak designed the set and the costumes, Henoch Kon composed the music, and the cast featured Kurlender, Samberg, Landau, Wolfsztadt, Rajchglas, Wiener, Szerman, Buzgan, Lemberg,

, Szapiro, Wajslic, Mansdorf, Handelsblit, Hirszfeld, Brakarz, Potasinski, and Wronski. Rekrucit opened in June 1935 at the Abraham Kaminski Theatre on OboZna Street in Warsaw, because the Vilna Troupe and its director found Warsaw safer than Vilna. Warsaw could not offer the company refuge for long, however. One year later, in 1936, the urzad wojewodzki (‘voivodeship office’) sent the following note to the

starostwo grodzkie (‘town office’) in Vilna: ,

At the end of March of this year, one Rotboym [sic], an artist and theatre troupe director, came to Danzig and installed an exhibition of his paintings in the Klub Zydowski [Jewish Club] there. He also gave several lectures and recitals at the invitation of the JUG organization. In one of his lectures, Rotbojm, along with discussing the reform of the Jewish theatre, addressed the Jewish question from a universal point of view. Speaking about relations [towards Jews] in Poland, Rotbojm expressed his regret that the Polish government subsidizes Jewish theatres so meagrely, in contrast to Soviet Russia, where Jewish theatre did not have to struggle with such financial strains. At the same time the lecturer touched very cautiously on the problem of antisemitism in Poland. The office of the voivodeship is providing information about this with the request that the starosta, in the event of Rotbojm’s coming to the city of Vilna, kindly submit detailed information to us, for it is not impossible that he may use his visit to Vilna for pro-Soviet agitation among the Jewish population, and to promote an idealized view of the situation of the Jewish population in the USSR. ...On _ behalf of the voivode, A. Birkenmayer, director of the section. Vilna, 1 May 1936.°?

Jakub Rotbaum was in Vilna for the last time in 1938. Michat Brandt (Michat Weichert), artistic director of the Teatr Mtodych, asked him to put on a contemporary play at Vilna’s Unzer Teatr. Rotbaum proposed his own version of Dreiser’s Tragedia amerykanska (‘American Tragedy’), adapted by Mikotaj Bazylewski. The architect A. Dobruszkies designed the set and Eliasz Teitelbaum wrote the music. Rotbaum went from Warsaw to Vilna via Danzig, where once again he presented his lecture on theatrical culture in the Soviet Union. In Vilna the preparations in 38 See Wegrzyniak, ‘Jung Teater w Wilnie’, 472. 39 Thid. 474.

168 Anna Hannowa Unzer Teatr were proceeding apace.*° The play opened on schedule, accompanied, as usual, by an exhibition of Rotbaum’s paintings, most of them portraits. Rotbaum later described what followed: One day, shortly after the opening, I received a message that the voivode had received a letter from the police with an order to arrest me immediately. I went to the voivode to clear the matter up. The voivode was a very nice young man, a theatre connoisseur who knew my performances and my paintings, and was very fond of them. So he was embarrassed, and explained to me that he did indeed have such an order, because there had been information from Danzig about my lecture “Theatrical Culture in the Soviet Union’. I was suspected of communism and of spreading hostile propaganda. I had been under surveillance for some time, and my lectures in different cities of Poland had aroused such anxiety that it could result in my arrest. The only solution for me was to go abroad. Immediately. It was 1938. I had no illusions. The talk of war was louder and louder; [there were] predictions of Hitler’s aggression against Poland. I decided to leave. The kind voivode Ludwik Bocianski, a theatre and art connoisseur, prepared a passport for me to leave Vilna for France. One way, without the right to return to Poland.*!

And thus ended the Vilna period of Jakub Rotbaum’s career. Despite its abrupt termination, however, it proved a period of great creativity and innovation that was to have a profound influence on both Jewish and Polish theatre for many years to come. His work in this field merits further exploration, not only by historians but also by students of theatre. Moreover, the respect and support he won from the Polish public, including notable members of its cultural élite, deserves further investigation. His work created an arena for Jewish—Polish cultural co-operation and mutual influence exceptional in its time. Rotbaum left Vilna for Paris. There he directed The Mill by Bergelson, 200,000 by Sholem Aleichem, and a number of other plays for the avant-garde company

PIAT. In 1940 he left for New York, where he worked at the Jewish Artistic Theatre under the direction of Maurice Schwartz. Among the pieces he staged were plays by Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Halpern Leiwik (Leivick), and Abraham Goldfaden. Between 1942 and 1948 he directed in New York (at the Folksbine—“‘People’s Theatre’), Canada, Brazil, and Argentina, as well as in London and

Paris, and in Israel. At the same time he painted, mostly portraits and theatrical masks. Opening nights of his plays were often accompanied by exhibitions of his painting. In 1949, as has been mentioned, in response to an invitation from Ida Kaminska, he returned to Poland, where he became the principal director of the Dolnoslaski 40 “T was very happy that I was able to do. An American Tragedy with that highly talented company on

the small stage of Teatr Nowogrodzki. It was only thanks to the inventive and practical set created by the engineer A. Dobruszkies that I could produce that complex performance in full and according to my plans’ (conversation with Rotbaum, 17 June 1992). 41 Conversation with Rotbaum, 3 Feb. 1993: Hannowa, ‘Jakub Rotbaum czyli dwa teatry’, Teatr, 7-8, Pp. 53-

The Vilna Years of fakub Rothbaum 169 Teatr Zydowski (Jewish Theatre of Lower Silesia) in Wroctaw. In 1952 he accepted an offer to lead Teatr Polski in Wroctaw, the highest-ranked (and biggest) literary

theatre in Wroclaw and in fact in western Poland. He served as artistic manager (and principal director) there for the next ten years. Among the plays performed under his direction were: Cztomiek z karabinem (‘The Man with the Gun’) by Pogodin, I kon sie potknie (“Even a Horse Will Stumble’) by Ostrovsku, Wesele (‘Wedding’) by Wyspianski, Volpone by Jonson, Shakespeare’s Othello, and The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht. He was forced to leave Teatr Polski in 1968. He then directed in western Europe, the Americas, and Australia, limiting himself to a Jewish repertoire. In October 1993 he took part in an international conference in Warsaw devoted to the Jewish theatre in Poland. It was there he gave his address on the Vilna Troupe. He never directed again in a Polish theatre, although he continued to live in Wroclaw until his death in 1994 at the age of 93. Translated from Polish by Gwido Zlatkes

JUSTIN D. CAMMY IN the decade preceding the outbreak of the Second World War a group of young, unknown Yiddish poets, writers, and artists helped turn Vilna into the dominant Yiddish cultural centre in Poland. These young men and women, the majority of them from Vilna itself or its neighbouring towns, emerged at a moment when Jewish Vilna’s culture was defined by its commitment to Yiddish culture and youth. Drawn together under the rubric Yung Vilne (Young Vilna, 1929-40), the group synthesized the aspirations of individual members for artistic experimentation and freedom of expression with a collective concern for the social, political, and cultural life of the city. In doing so, Yung Vilne earned the distinction of being both the last of the major Yiddish avant-garde movements in inter-war Poland, and the literary group most evocative of the pressures of time and place. Yung Vilne included almost a dozen artistic personalities who relied on their association with the group for personal support, professional co-operation, and competitive fun.' Its members published widely in the leading local, national, and I have drawn my title from Elkhonen Vogler’s poem “Tsevorfene bleter’ (“Scattered Leaves’), published in Yung vilne, 2 (1935), 33. This chapter is an expanded version of a talk delivered to the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, Mass., 19-21 Dec. 1998. It is my pleasure to

acknowledge the generous assistance of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University towards my doctoral research. My thanks to Ruth Wisse for her comments on an early draft of this chapter, and to Rachel Rubinstein for her suggestions. ' To my knowledge, Yung Vilne never compiled a list of all the formally accepted members of the group. From their printed letterhead, group photographs, and those individuals published in the Yung vilne journals, we know that the following young creative artists formed the group’s membership in its period of greatest productivity, from 1934 onwards: the poets Chaim Grade, Elkhonen Vogler, Leyzer

Wolf, Perets Miranski, Abraham Sutzkever, and Shimshon Kahan; the writers Moyshe Levin and Shmerke Kaczerginsky; and the artists Rafael Chvoles, Bentsie Mikhtom, and Rokhl Sutzkever. In addition, we may include several more associates of the group, such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Shloyme Belis, Henekh Soloveytshik, Falk Halperin, and Sheyne Efron, who were close friends of those in Yung Vilne at one point or another, but did not remain involved with the group long enough to be included among its core membership. After the Second World War Leyzer Ran, the most prolific bibliographer of inter-war Vilna, compiled a list of the entire ‘Yung Vilne generation’ that includes dozens of young writers, poets, plastic artists, playwrights, actors, and musicians who made up the broad cultural life of Vilna during the 1930s.

The Emergence of Yung Vilne I7I international Yiddish newspapers and journals of the day, most regularly in their own journal Yung vilne (1934-6), the city’s intellectual Yiddishist daily newspaper, the Vilner tog, Warsaw’s Literarishe bleter, and such leading American Yiddish literary periodicals as Tsukunft, Zamlbikher, and Inzikh. Many of its most active writers and poets published their first books as members of Yung Vilne.* The group regularly contributed materials to special literary collections celebrating Yiddish litera-

ture and culture in Vilna and across Poland; such efforts include the group’s significant representation in the anniversary volume of the Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Vilna® (which had only recently accepted the Yung Vilne writers

as members), and Yung Vilne’s joint publication with their young literary colleagues from Kaunas of a special literary collection on the eve of the Second World War, Bleter 1940. Yung Vilne members frequently read from their latest writings at collective literary evenings in Vilna, its neighbouring communities, and larger | centres such as Warsaw and L.6dz. The combination of Yung Vilne’s public accessibility, its willingness to reach out to readers by addressing topical subjects 1n its writing, and its recognition in both Poland and abroad as an important new force of artistic innovation resulted in the group’s emergence as a symbol of cultural confidence in a period of mounting political and physical uncertainty. As its name suggests, Yung Vilne’s aesthetic possibilities were determined by its presence in and relationship with the cultural and political life of Vilna. Although its members sought to assimilate artistically the legacy of their city—in terms of both its physical and social realities—into the ideals of progressive Jewish youth and modernist creativity, each poet, writer, or artist accomplished this in his distinctive way.* Moreover, although the sense of place, moment, and generation pro-

vided the group with a unifying creative framework, it chose not to articulate a literary manifesto that might limit the artistic freedom of its members. In the intro-

duction to the first issue of its journal in 1934 its goals were articulated in the vaguest and most concise of ways: ‘Yung Vilne—a young artistic group—was founded five years ago. The goal was to gather together in one circle the young Vilna

2 These include Elkhonen Vogler, A bletl in vint (1935) and Tsvey beriozes baym trakt (1939); Leyzer Wolf, Evigingo (1936), Shvartse perl (1939), and Lirik un satire (1940); Chaim Grade, Yo (1937) and Musernikes (1939); Moyshe Levin, Friling in kelershtub (1937) and A denkmol baym taykhl (1937); and Abraham Sutzkever, Lider (1937) and Valdtks (1940). 3M. Shalit (ed.), Almanakh fun yidishn literatn un zhurnalistn farayn in vilne (‘Almanac of the Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Vilna’) (Vilna, 1938).

4 The critic Yosef Teper commented: ‘Vilna, the city with the most original Yiddish cultural climate, has had a great influence on the work of the group. This is reflected in its motifs, through the group’s synthesis of tradition and the present moment, or in its representation of our intersection with the cultures of the other nations living in our borders’ (‘Yung vilne’, Literarishe bleter, 26 (26 Feb. 1937), 134). By contrast, Mikhoel Natish complained about the lack of overt regional flavour in the eroup’s first publication: ‘We were presented with almost nothing . .. Not Vilna’s special colour, not its manners, not its landscape, not its urban dynamic, all of which ought to have been bursting through its poets’ (‘ “Yung vilne” un ir zamlhelft’, Literarishe bleter, 34 (24 Aug. 1934), 560).

172 Justin D. Cammy poets and artists to create possibilities for self-development.’° This proved important in allowing Yung Vilne to absorb a broad temperamental mix of young talents who experimented loosely with a broad variety of genres, styles, and themes. In addition to the group’s artistic inclusiveness, Yung Vilne never officially committed itself collectively to any one political programme, a radical move in perhaps the most politicized Jewish moment of Jewish life in inter-war Poland. Nevertheless, many group members were politically leftist in both their writing and their communal activities. Much of this had to do with their common social origins. They were all products of the same generation, born between 1905 and 1913. All came from poor families, several were orphans, and many were forced to support their literary ambitions through manual labour. With the exception of Chaim Grade and Abraham Sutzkever, the group’s members were educated in the city’s newly established Yiddish secular school system, imbibing a rigorous intellectual diet of Yiddish and European culture. They were affected through the 1930s by mounting Polish antisemitism, the threat from Nazi Germany, and Jewish Vilna’s increasing impoverishment. The promise of the Soviet Union across the border resulted in several early members leaving Vilna for the USSR, while others are known to have either joined the communist underground in Vilna,° or harboured intense procommunist sympathies. Others, suspicious of opportunities for the free development of Jewish life under Stalin and committed to the Jewish presence in the Polish territories, were drawn towards more moderate forms of socialism or the Free Land

movement (Frayland bavegung), which sought to settle the Jewish masses in sparsely populated areas where they would be free to develop autonomously according to their own culture and religion.’ ° For those who looked forward to a bold statement of purpose from the new literary group, something that they had come to expect from their reading of earlier European and Yiddish literary move-

ments, Yung Vilne proved a disappointment: ‘Vu iz der programatisher artikl?? (“Where is the manifesto?’) (Natish, Literarishe bleter, 34 (24 Aug. 1934), 560). © ‘The writer Henekh Soloveytshik was the earliest member of Yung Vilne to be drawn to the USSR,

fleeing in the wave of illegal mass emigration of young people in 1932-3. Although Shmerke Kaczerginsky was the only member of Yung Vilne who was a confirmed active participant in the underground Communist Party of Poland, Yung Vilne’s publications and activities were closely monitored

by the Polish authorities because of their frequent revolutionary sympathies and allegedly inflammatory content. For instance, Chaim Grade’s ‘Velt in nayntsn fir un draysik’ (“The World in 1934’), which exhorted, ‘Rise up, proletariat, like a phoenix | from blood, and dust, and resignation’, caused the confiscation of Yung vilne, 2 (1935). The poem was pulled and the journal was reissued with Grade’s ‘Yekhezkel’ (‘Ezekiel’) in its place.

* Leyzer Wolf and Abraham Sutzkever were friends of Michael Astour (Tshernikhov), one of the young founders of the Free Land League in Vilna. Astour contends that Sutzkever participated in meetings of the Free Land movement from the mid-1930s, though perhaps more for its social opportunities than out of firm ideological convictions. In 1938 Wolf became actively involved, going so far as to run for the local city elections on the Free Land ticket in 1939. At an open symposium of the Free Land movement in Jan. 1939 he explained: ‘At first I was a cosmopolitan. But later, after immersing myself in the cultural problems of nations, I came to the conclusion that each people must live normally in its own culture. And one’s free culture can only exist and develop when a people is geographically concentrated

The Emergence of Yung Vilne 173 In what proved to be the exception to the rule, young Abraham Sutzkever, who emerged in the mid-1930s as Yung Vilne’s model of poised poetic refinement in an age of political turmoil, found his initial application for membership in Yung Vilne rejected in 1932 because his nature lyrics seemed irrelevant to the social needs of the moment.® Despite this brief moment of ideological exclusivity, Yung Vilne remained committed to artistic and political inclusiveness. Even in later years, as

group members gained confidence and recognition, it resisted the pressure to articulate a manifesto outlining a shared artistic or ideological programme. Instead, the group attempted to break down regional and programmatic barriers, as in this public statement of 1936: To All Young Yiddish Writers and Artists in Poland:

There are dozens of Yiddish writers and artists spread throughout the land. Despite extraordinarily difficult conditions, we manage to live and create. But we barely know anything about one another. We have decided to call all young writers and artists to Vilna for a conference. What are its goals?

1. ‘To organize a union of young writers and artists. 2. To publish a journal representative of our members.

3. To establish a publishing house. 4. To publish a volume in which all the participants who attend our conference will be represented.°

Although this effort to foster a sense of national Polish Yiddish literary comradeship among young authors did not materialize owing to financial constraints, the very idea suggests that Yung Vilne saw itself more as a literary-artistic fraternity designed to foster creative competition and mutual support than as a cohesive literary movement.!° and free of foreign influences’ (see Leyzer Ran’s introduction in L. Wolf, Lider (‘Poems’) (New York, 1955), 18). For a history of the Free Land movement, see Mikhoel Astour, Geshikhte fun der fraylandlige un funem teritorialistishn gedank (‘History of the Free Land Movement and of the Territorialist Idea’) (New York, 1967). ® ‘There was no such concept as ‘art for art’s sake’ in the minds of Yung Vilne’s idealistic members at this early stage. Shmerke Kaczerginsky explains: “To us, nature was only a narrow footpath in our writing. But to Sutzkever, the natural element was a broad highway, which we looked at with fear. Why should we be interested in the green of the earth and the blue of the skies when greyness and darkness were all around us? .. . We did not understand him’ (Shmerke Kaczerginsky ondenk-bukh (“Memorial Volume in Honour of Shmerke Kaczerginsky’) (Buenos Aires, 1955), 308-0). 9 Yung vilne, 3 (1936), inside front cover.

, ‘0 Although the conference never materialized, Yung Vilne did attempt to synthesize some of the stated goals in its own activities. For instance, although it did not establish its own publishing house, it

did lend financial support to several of its members, who then published works under the rubric of Yung Vilne. Moreover, it was a custom for Yung Vilne to organize a public literary evening whenever one of its members published a major work or new book. As for efforts to establish links with other young poets, Yung Vilne’s relationship with a group of writers from Kaunas in the late 1930s resulted in their joint publication of Bleter 1940 (‘Pages 1940’) and several joint public appearances.

174 Justin D. Cammy THE NAME ‘YUNG VILNE’ Vilna’s most respected Yiddish daily, the Vilner tog, headlined its special Friday edition of 11 October 1929 with the title: ‘Der araynmarsh fun yung vilne in der yidisher literatur’ (“Yung Vilne’s March into Yiddish Literature’). In an unsigned introduction the paper’s editor, Zalmen Reyzin, proclaimed: With today’s issue, especially dedicated to the work of our young Yiddish writers in Vilna, many of whom have never before appeared in print, our newspaper fulfils its duty to our young vanguard by allowing them to appear in public before an eager audience. Vilna would not be Vilna if its soil did not produce any literary offspring. Let us hope that we will derive much pride from these young literati, whom we introduce to our readers today. Then the Vilner tog will have the privilege of having been the guide and helper in the development of young Yiddish poetry in the Jerusalem of Lithuania."!

Such was the influence of a weekend edition of the Vilner tog that overnight the very concept of a young Vilna and the names of its literary newcomers were the talk of

the town. While Zalmen Reyzin’s patronage of young talent served to put their names on the literary map, the emergence of a ‘Yung Vilne’ would also serve to bolster the efforts of the established secular Yiddish intelligentsia to claim Vilna as the world capital of Yiddish.?” In contrast to increasingly Polonized elements of the Jewish intelligentsia in Warsaw and Krakow, Vilna’s intellectuals and leaders promoted Yiddish as the language of a distinct and unified Jewish civil society.!° The presence of a young, native literary group became a crucial new element in the city’s already impressive network of Yiddish social, educational, religious, and cultural _ institutions. Vilna’s leadership and people alike could pride themselves on belong-

ing to the most active Yiddish cultural centre in inter-war Poland.'* Despite Warsaw’s sheer weight of numbers as the most important Jewish centre in eastern ‘) “Der araynmarsh fun yung vilne in der yidisher literatur’, Vilner tog, 11 Oct. 1929, 4. Fora reprint of the entire section devoted to Yung Vilne, see Di goldene keyt (“The Golden Chain’), 1o1 (1980), 66-76. '2 In choosing a name for the group it is clear that Reyzin must have had in mind such late 19thcent. groups as Young Germany, Young Scandinavia, and especially Young Poland. Reyzin’s decision to coin a derivative of these for the new group was designed to evoke echoes of similar national creativity among Yiddish-speaking Jews, while embedding a local geographic element in the group’s name so as to draw attention to the influence of Vilna. In any case, Reyzin could not have chosen ‘Yung Yidish’ as the name for the group since it had already been used as the title for the first post-war modernist Yiddish journal published in Poland (1.6dz, 1919). 13 In response to the German occupation of Vilna during the First World War Vilna’s Jewish leadership rallied behind Yiddish as part of their effort to demonstrate the distinctiveness of the Jewish

community and forward a claim for national recognition and rights. Because of the discrimination against the Polish majority in Vilna, the assimilatory pull there was much less strong than in other Polish centres. 4 See the classic summary of Yiddish culture in this period by Arcadius Kahan, ‘Vilna: The Sociocultural Anatomy of a Jewish Community in Interwar Poland’, in his Essays in fewish Social and Economic History, ed. R. Weiss (Chicago, 1986).

The Emergence of Yung Vilne 175 Europe, Vilna sought to assert its leadership through both the quality and the breadth of its Yiddish cultural life. The aspiring young writers received valuable encouragement from the city’s Jewish cultural leadership. Moyshe Kulbak, then perhaps the most popular living Yiddish poet in Europe, was a teacher at the Yiddish Gymnasium and the Yiddish teachers’ seminary. It is impossible to read memoirs from this period without coming across the influence of Kulbak on an entire generation of aspiring writers. In his memoirs of a trip to Vilna in 1928, David Lazer recalls how his encounter with

Moyshe Kulbak came to represent for him, an outsider, Vilna’s cultural atmosphere: We were a large group of young people, boys and girls, out for a walk one Sabbath morning with Moyshe Kulbak at the head . . . Kulbak presided over everyone like a rebbe over his followers. The mood was light, everyone was involved in a lively conversation, one young man began to sing from the [Vilna] choir’s repertoire. Suddenly, we heard a few words in Polish—from one of the girls in our group. Kulbak became very serious and admonished us with words and ina tone that I remember to this day. ‘I beg you children,’ he said, ‘for God’s sake do not speak Polish now. There are non-Jews all around and I am ashamed!’ And why do these few words remain with me still? Because I, a kid from Krakow, was accustomed to the exact opposite. In Krakow respectable Jews, Jews with a national consciousness, were embarrassed to speak Yiddish when a non-Jewish acquaintance passed them in the street. I remember an incident in which an established Zionist and Jewish activist was in the middle of a conversation with a friend in Yiddish while out on a walk. He was suddenly frightened when he noticed a non-Jewish acquaintance with whom he conducted business approaching in the distance. He turned to his friend: ‘I beg of you, here comes a non-Jewish acquaintance of mine and I am ashamed to speak Yiddish in front of him. Let us switch over to Polish.’ That was the difference between Krak6éw and Vilna. And that was Moyshe Kulbak.!°

Kulbak’s passionate, forward-looking refrain about ‘the bronzed youth’ from his revolutionary poem ‘Di shtot’ (“The City’, 1919) still resonated as a generational clarion call in Vilna.'© His distinct style of declamation and his poetic manner energized students with a love of Yiddish literature, and transformed the figure of the Yiddish poet into a community icon. Most importantly, Kulbak’s ode to Vilna, published (ironically enough) in Warsaw’s Varshever shrifin in 1927, demonstrated how place could become a metaphor for the way of life of its inhabitants, and how 15D. Lazer, ‘Mit Moyshe Kulbak in Vilne’ (“With Moyshe Kulbak in Vilna’), Di goldene keyt, 77 (1972), 36-7. ‘6 Kulbak’s ‘Di shtot’ bore witness both to the literature of revolution in Yiddish and to the revolution in Yiddish writing that took place in light of the events of the First World War and its aftermath.

The poem galvanized readers, particularly youth, in its expression of the excitement of being part of such monumental times: ‘Un bronzene yungn | bafaln iz demolt a viln | tsu shtiln | der tsorn | fun yorn | vos zaynen farlorn. | Uns’hobn di gleker geklungen! | Hey, lomir geyn! Lomir geyn! | Lomir do iberlozn di shvakhe’ (‘And a will has overcome | bronzed youth | to still | the anger | of the years | that were lost. | And the bells tolled! | Hey, let’s go! Let’s go! | Let’s leave behind the weak’) (M. Kulbak, Oysgeklibene shrifin (‘Selected Works’) (Buenos Aires, 1976), 78-91).

176 Justin D. Cammy Vilna, in particular, embodied the richness of a modern Jewish culture that drew on a complicated past.'’ Kulbak, more than anyone else, legitimized the imagining and reading of home as text.

While Kulbak was hammering home the uniqueness of Vilna in verse, Max Weinreich, director of YIVO (the Jewish Scientific Institute) and the city’s foremost Yiddish linguist, founded a non-partisan Yiddishist scouting organization, Bin. Its oath—‘I swear to serve Jewish culture, I swear to help those around me’— was but another example of how the city’s cultural leadership sought to instil an ethos of collective social action and cultural confidence in the next generation.’®

Present and future members of Yung Vilne such as Leyzer Wolf and Abraham Sutzkever were early members of Bin, participating in its outings into the countryside and attending its summer camps. This opportunity to leave behind their urban lives and to celebrate both the local environment and Jewish culture in Yiddish with other young people was a valuable lesson in the importance of landkentenish—

knowing one’s physical and cultural landscape.'? The attention bestowed upon young people by such leading local figures as Moyshe Kulbak, Max Weinreich, and

Zalmen Reyzin signalled to young people that respect for language, lineage, and place were the defining elements of Jewish Vilna. Although they never rejected the name with which Zalmen Reyzin introduced them in the pages of the Vi/ner tog, Yung Vilne’s ‘march into Yiddish literature’

was more a literary fiction orchestrated by the establishment than a generational invasion. Early member Moyshe Levin recalls that though few of the group’s initial participants were enthusiastic about the appellation Yung Vilne, they were not yet sure enough of their own artistic direction to replace it with some original concept of their own.”° By the time group members began to attract attention on their own in the early 1930s, the identification ‘Yung Vilne’ was already a familiar and attractive invitation to readers searching for local flavour or literary innovation from one of Europe’s most traditionally creative centres. Whether or not Yung Vilne initially appreciated the localism embedded in its name, Vilna—with its network of Yiddish schools, youth and sports clubs, five daily Yiddish newspapers, publishing houses, and YIVO—advertised the quality of the young writers even before they proved it. What distinguished Yung Vilne most from fellow Yiddish avant-garde groupings of the inter-war period was the encouragement and organizational support it got from the local establishment. This was very much in contrast to the young 7M. Kulbak, ‘Vilne’, Geklibene verk (‘Collected Works’) (New York, 1953). Nathan Halper’s translation of the poem is included in I. Howe, R. Wisse, and C. Shmeruk (eds.), The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York, 1987).

8 For a brief history of Bin, see L. Ran, Bin: Di geshikhte fun a stam kinder organizatsye (Bee: The History of a Youth Movement’) (Vilna, 1934). ‘9 For examples of how such ideas about /andkentenish were formalized in Poland, see D. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), 54-5. 20 M. Levin, ‘to yor yung vilne’ (“Ten Years of Young Vilna’), Literarishe bleter (26 Feb. 1937), 136.

The Emergence of Yung Vilne 177 avant-garde Yiddish cultural movements in Poland in the immediate post-war period, revolving around such publications as Yung yidish, Ringen, Khalyastre, and Albatros.** These earlier aesthetic Yiddish circles in Poland presented themselves as literary-artistic orphans determined to bring entirely new modes of expression to Yiddish literature. ‘We, the Genesis-makers,’ begins one such declaration published in Yung yidish in 1919, ‘we are on guard .. .’. Such groups were among the first in Yiddish to combine effectively the work of plastic artists and writers into attractive, avant-garde publications, a pattern that Yung Vilne would later adopt. But as the following programmatic statement from Yung yidish reveals, they were also openly seduced by their reading of European, Russian, and American cultural modernism:

‘In our turn towards impressionism, expressionism, cubism, we will combine all the perspectives with the name futurism.’*” Such expressions of belated kinship with currents in Western art and writing were deliberate reactions against the legacy of Peretsian folkism and naturalism which they perceived as the dominant but tired styles at work in Polish Yiddish writing. To Yung Vilne, however, mottoes such as ‘We, the young, a happy, boisterous gang off on unknown roads’ (adopted by the Khalyastre circle from a poem pub-

lished in Yung yidish by Moshe Broderson) smacked of unrefined defiance and rootlessness. If resistance to, or rebellion against, the reigning literary culture were the very conditions of existence for earlier Yiddish modernist circles in Poland, a very different dynamic was at work in Yung Vilne. In agreeing to appear together first in an organ as established as the Vi/ner tog under a name chosen by one of the community’s most respected literary figures, the group conceded that it would not necessarily seek to make its name by claiming to be the new vanguard of Yiddish literary culture. Most significantly, whereas the Yiddish literary circles of the preceding decade had emerged at a moment when the politics of revolution and the art of rebellion could galvanize young writers, by the late 1920s and especially into the 1930s this post-war revolutionary mood of idealism had been tempered by renewed political uncertainty and doubts about the promise of the revolution, whether in politics or in art. If earlier Polish Yiddish modernist groups had set out, at their moment of origin, to revolutionize Yiddish literature, their artistic innovativeness often had a price. Their individual members’ drive for radical poetic experimentation often alienated audiences to such an extent that they proved unable to sustain a local readership. Their thirst for vibrant artistic communities that were aesthetically in step with the latest trends in Europe or America meant that many of their members lost interest in their lives in places like Warsaw or L6dZ, which, when compared with Berlin, Paris, London, or New York, seemed like parochial backwaters. With the exception of the Inzikhistn (Introspectivists) in America, no Yiddish modernist group managed to 21 Yung yidish (£.6dzZ, 1919); Ringen (Warsaw, 1921-2); Khalyastre (Warsaw, 1922—Paris, 1924);

Albatros (Berlin, 1922—Warsaw, 1923). 22 Yung yidish, 2-3 (1919), n.p.

178 Justin D. Cammy sustain a collective existence over any significant length of time.?? The key to Yung

Vilne’s longevity was to lie in its moderation. In attempting to synthesize both aspects of its name—the condition and creativity of youth with the cultural inheritance of place—it rejected poetic rebellion as its artistic raison d’étre. Consequently, the group was able to enter into dialogue with both Yiddish and Western literary traditions, which prompted audiences to recognize Yung Vilne as a force for both cultural continuity and generational creativity.

EARLY ORGANIZATION Although Yung Vilne’s public launching dates from Zalmen Reyzin’s formal introduction of the group and the publication of their poetry in the Vz/ner tog of October 1929, the opportunity for an unofficial gathering of aspiring literary and artistic talents had presented itself several years earlier. The event that led to the founding

of a creative group for young people was a local art exhibition in 1927, ‘Fun | shulhoyf biz glezer gas’ (‘From the Synagogue Courtyard to Glazier’s Street’). A group of young Vilna writers and artists encouraged exhibitors to submit works that best represented the range of the Jewish cultural landscape in Vilna. ‘The show attempted to bring together representations of the crooked, narrow alleys and archways that were the symbolic heart of traditional Jewish life in Vilna, with more modern, industrial representations of Jewish life. In contrasting depictions of the old shulhoyf (the synagogue courtyard which included the fabled Gaon of Vilna’s study, a multitude of smaller prayer houses divided by sect or guild, and one of the

best Jewish libraries in eastern Europe) with representations of Vilna’s secular working class, the exhibition presented a holistic portrait of Vilna as a community that prided itself on both its tradition and its modernity. The artist Bentsie Mikhtom,

one of Yung Vilne’s earliest and most long-term members, took a cue from the exhibition in his subsequent design of the group’s emblem. It depicts one of Vilna’s winding, cobbled streets with two archways that were the familiar symbol of the traditional Jewish quarter. Sprouting upwards and out of the archway in the fore-

eround is a young, blossoming tree. The name of the group appears below the emblem in bold, futurist type. In having as its central image a symbol of youth and growth emerging from the archways of the Jewish ghetto, Mikhtom signalled the rootedness of Yung Vilne in the environment from which it emerged.** 23 See A. T. Alt, ‘Ambivalence toward Modernism: The Yiddish Avant-Garde and its Manifestos’, Yiddish, 8/1 (1991), 52-61; and S. Wolitz, ‘Between Folk and Freedom: The Failure of the Yiddish Modernist Movement in Poland’, Yiddish, 8/1 (1991), 26-51. 24 Mikhtom’s designs for the first two covers of Yung vilne (1934, 1935) show a similar effort to reflect the origins and direction of the group in a concise image. The cover of the first issue is dominated by a sun rising from behind a brick wall, a set of smoking chimneys, and abstract skyscrapers designed to evoke industrial urbanism. The bottom left of the page portrays a crooked alley and series

The Emergence of Yung Vilne 179 Inspired by the success of the art exhibition and by the public’s enthusiastic response to Vilna as an evocative subject for artistic treatment, the young writers Shloyme Belis and Shimshon Kahan sought to establish regular gatherings of authors, artists, and musicians and to create a permanent nurturing, creative environment for young talent. Despite the encouragement of Zalmen Reyzin and the advice of Falk Halperin, an older, published local poet, the idea was only partly successful. Initially, it proved more difficult than expected to find a core group of young writers interested in such an artistic fraternity. Instead of the anticipated eclectic gang of painters, plastic artists, musicians, poets, and prose-writers, what emerged was a much more modest collection of several writers and even fewer artists. The early gatherings were unpretentious, often held over tea and cakes in the family kitchens of such early members as Belis, Kahan, and Mikhtom. Although these gatherings allowed members to read their poetry, display their art, and debate

artistic and ideological issues of common interest, no natural leader emerged between 1927 and 1929 to help pave the way for the group’s further growth and recognition. This was due both to a lack of real poetic and prose talent among most of the group’s early members, and to its transitional membership. Of its earliest participants—figures such as the student-poet Avrom Yehoshua (later Abraham Joshua Heschel), Arn Pyudik, Leyb Stotski, Yehiel Shtern, Moyshe Basin, Shloyme Belis, and the prose-writer Henekh Soloveytshik—none was still a member by the | time the group published its first journal in 1934.2° Most importantly, of those individuals who would go on to assume the organizational and aesthetic leadership of the group through the period of its greatest productivity—-Shmerke Kaczerginsky, Leyzer Wolf, Chaim Grade, and Abraham Sutzkever—none was a founding member of Yung Vilne.

of archways symbolic of Jewish Vilna. The name of the group in large, square letters appears at the top. This artistic combination of a recognizable local Jewish particularism and an abstract, universal mod-

ernity is a gesture towards the cultural, chronological, and literary worlds into which Yung Vilne imagined itself. The rising sun represents the group’s self-conscious youth and its predilection for a political utopianism that might, one day, come to outshine both their grey, impoverished, modern urban present, and their traditional Jewish past. The cover of the second volume is dominated by a stylized human figure, drawn with sharp angles. Its arm and head are raised towards the heavens, symbolic both of youthful striving and ofa revolutionary impulse. The figure’s feet, however, are firmly planted in a row of crooked homes and cobblestones scattered along the bottom part of the page that might evoke the Jewish homes and courtyards of Vilna. The name of the group curves around the top-right

part of the cover in a sweeping bow. The top part of the Yiddish letter /amedh in the word ‘Vilne’ is elongated, forming a dramatic counterpoint to the raised arm of the human figure. Both words and lines on the page are combined to form a single image of progressive youth rooted in a familiar urban geography.

25 For the most comprehensive memoir of the early days of Yung Vilne, see S. Belis, ‘Bay di onheybn fun yung-vilne’ (‘Regarding the Origins of Young Vilna’), Di goldene keyt, 101 (1980), 11-05.

180 Justin D. Cammy ‘THE NIGHT IS BROWN LIKE PUSHKIN’S FACE’:6 A DEFINING VOICE In June 1930 a young poet in Vilna set out to break the world record for poetry writing. By the end of the month he had composed 1,001 untitled poems at a rate of more than thirty a day. One such lyric went: Un din vi a zaydene kleyd iz mayn libe tsu dir, un klor, vi tsvey mol tsvey 1z fir. Nor nit klor, vi a narisher vits, iz dayn libe tsu mir,

| un nit praktish, vi hering papir in a gevelbl fun grits. (And delicate as a silken gown is my love for you, and clear, as two times two is four. But unclear as a foolish joke is your love for me, and impractical like wrapping-paper for herring in a shop selling grits.)

The poem’s unexpected yoking together of seemingly incompatible elements— unrequited love and the uselessness of wrapping-paper for fish in a cereal shop—

became a trademark of Yung Vilne’s first true star, the impudent Leyzer Wolf. Though his desire to break a world record in poetry writing seemed strange, even aesthetically irresponsible, to his literary colleagues in Yung Vilne, its very achievement had a profound effect. For here was one of their own, asserting that a Vilna boy writing in Yiddish could mount a (mock) challenge to that standard of world literature A Thousand and One (Arabian) Nights with a Yiddish equivalent of 1,001

poetic fantasies. Such literary presumption served a useful purpose in the early development of a literary movement. For although fellow Yung Vilne poet Elkhonen Vogler at the very same moment was producing highly sophisticated verse about his native Lithuanian landscape under the influence of European symbolism, Vogler’s experimental nature poems could never appeal to a mass audience 1n the same way. Wolf’s earthy images seemed a more familiar, accessible part of the tradi-

tion of Yiddish satire and folk language, even when they were startlingly new. It proved to be his whimsical lyrics, grotesque parodies, and trenchant political criticism that first drew and then sustained public interest in the work of the group, and 26 The first line of Leyzer Wolf’s parodic crime lyric ‘A mord’ (‘A Murder’), [nzzkh, 20 (1936), 46.

The Emergence of Yung Vilne 181 created anticipation every time Yung Vilne announced it was to stage a local reading. At one such event he delivered deadpan a mock-nostalgic love lyric, even as the audience howled in their seats: “The night is white as a banana, | the shadows are sweet as tarts; | where are you my dear Mariana? | The goats are singing sweetly in the garden.’?’ On another occasion Yung Vilne sought to publicize its forthcoming collective public reading by publishing one of Wolf’s mock-philosophical lyrics, ‘Farvos’ (‘Why’), with a promise of more for all those who attended: Farvos bilt a hunt af der levone?— Vayl er meynt: S’iz a royt shtikl fleysh. Farvos shlogt a melamed di kinder?— Vayl zey kenen nit keyn alef-beys. Farvos faln arop di shtern?— Vayl s’iz zey umetik mit got. Farvos hakt men oys di velder?— Di khayes zoln kumen in shtot. (Why does a dog bark at the moon? Because he thinks it is a red piece of meat. Why does a teacher beat his pupils? Because they do not know the alphabet. Why do the stars fall? Because it is gloomy being alone with God. Why does man chop down forests? So that the beasts may invade the town.)”®

If Leyzer Wolf marched—as Zalmen Reyzin would have us believe—along with the other members of Yung Vilne into Yiddish literature with a confident voice, then it was certainly a conscious act of literary self-invention. Biographical sketches and his own memoir of childhood (submitted to the first YIVO autobiography com-

petition for youth in 1932) paint a strikingly different picture of the poet, born Leyzer Mekler in 1g10.*” Mekler grew up in a working-class family in the Vilna suburb of Shnipeshok, across the River Vilye from the traditional Jewish quarter. He was a sickly, shy child, for whom, as he writes, “communal life was burdensome’. He avoided company as a student at his Leyzer Gurvitsh Yiddish folk school, retreating instead into an imaginary world where ‘my best friends were books’.2° Too weak and nervous to hold down a regular job, he spent most of his days helping his sister sew the fingers on leather gloves in their apartment, reading Yiddish and world literature in the Strashun library, and writing. Mekler’s choice of poetic pseudonyms—which were to include Leyzer Wolf, Bestye Kurazh (Beast 27 A. Sutzkever, ‘Leyzer Volf: A bintl zikhroynes vegn a yung-farshnitenem poet fun yung vilne’ (‘Leyzer Wolf: A Few Recollections about a Poet from Young Vilna Cut down Prematurely’), Di go/dene keyt, 26 (1956), 45. The poem was subsequently published in Yung vilne, 2 (1935), 63. 28 Vider a kurts (‘Again Something Brief’) (Vilna, 17 Feb. 1934), 3.

29 L. Wolf, ‘Otobyografye’ (‘Autobiography’), in id., Lider. 30 Tbid. 37.

182 Justin D. Cammy of Courage), and Herts Nakht (Heart of the Night)—indicates just how aggressively he willed a voice of poetic assuredness. Despite his own admission that he shunned communal life, evidence suggests that this reserved personality thrived as a leader when provided with the opportunity. When a doctor suggested that his weak disposition might benefit from physical activity, he joined the local football club in Shnipeshok, Hanesher, and became one of its leading scorers. Moreover, as a frequent presence in the activities of Bin, Wolf brought younger boys into the organization, foremost among them his neighbour the future Yung Vilne poet Abraham Sutzkever. Far from being a lonely, shy presence, Wolf went from penning lyrics to a popular anthem sung by Bin members during their walking excursions through the local countryside*! to helping stage an internal uprising in 1931 against Bin’s leader, Max Weinreich, demanding that the organization embrace a more openly socialist ideology. Wolf first attracted the attention of the young writers and artists who had begun gathering in 1927 when the Vi/ner tog published two of his sentimental grotesques in 1928. By this term I mean poems that sought a strange fusion of poetic moods, one in which the writer’s language and descriptions shocked and amused, while still evoking a certain amount of compassion for the poem’s subject. In his ‘Di bulvanske moyd’ (“The Coarse Old Maid’) and ‘Vilner shulhoyf’ (“The Vilna Synagogue Courtyard’) he wove together exaggerated, even mocking descriptions of characters

and the urban landscape of Vilna with moments of deep feeling. ‘Di bulvanske moyd’, for instance, opens with a startling self-description by its female speaker: Punkt vi in a balagole boyd leb ikh—di grine, bulvanske moyd alt gebakt fun soldatskn broyt. Af der geler terkisher mashin ney ikh, shtep 1kh, fun bagin biz der ovnt blutikt afn shpin. Bay a shvartsn shtinkndikn knoyt fres ikh broyt mit kroyt, mit burik-royt fartrinkndik mit biter zalts a loyt. (Exactly as if it were in a shed or pen I live—a mouldy-green and coarse old maid, a crusty bit of soldier’s bread, baked God knows when.

I sit at my yellow Turkish machine—and thread, sew, stitch and unstitch, from the first crack of dawn till evening bleeds upon my spindle; then, 31 “Tifin vald baym fayer | yunge binen zingen | funa velt a nayer | un di funken shpringen. | Hey, hey, voyl di binen | voyl iz zey un gut | velder hobn zey in zinen | blumen-zaft in blut’ (“Deep in the forest around the fire, | young Bees sing | about a new world | as sparks explode. | Hey, hey, happy are they, | happy and enjoying themselves, | with forests on their mind | and flower nectar in their blood’) (‘Tifin vald baym fayer’, in Binishe lider (‘Bee Songs’) (Vilna, 1932), 38-9).

The Emergence of Yung Vilne 183 beside a black and suffocating wick I gulp my cabbage, red beets, and dry bread and take a dose of salts to wash them down.)*?

These opening triplets, tightly constructed and rife with internal rhyme, introduce

the monologue of a simple-minded woman whom society has left behind. Its speaker is confined to a life of poverty and monotonous manual labour. She presents herself in terms as coarse as her appearance. By her own admission, she is green and stale—like an old piece of soldier’s bread. Rather than simply eating her meagre daily ration, she uses the more animalistic term fresn (‘devour’). The repeated use of sounds such as ‘ay’ and ‘oy’, alongside a highly regulated, predictable

metre, correspond to her personal experience of suffering and boredom. Yet, unable to recognize her own undesirability, the speaker holds fast to the dream that one day ‘a true love from a good family, silken and flaxen’ will come to carry her away from her misery. As she cries repulsive ‘broyne leber-trern’ (‘brown-as-liver tears’), Wolf’s readers are at once delighted and discomfited by the unexpected images. ‘The baseness of his speaker’s language and self-description draws attention simultaneously to the economic deprivation of Jewish Vilna and to the universal phenomenon of human longing. Abraham Sutzkever suggests that Wolf did not just invent the subject of his poem, but drew on his personal observations of an unattractive, unmarried seamstress who lived in his building. When she read his poem in the Vilner tog, she was convinced that the young poet was announcing his devotion to her, and was despondent when she discovered that she was only the stuff of his poetic fantasy.*? The reader’s encounter with this coarse old maid introduced the marginalized, suffering, lonely individual as an integral part of the local people-scape that had too often been overlooked in literature about Vilna owing to the community’s proud self-image as the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’. Wolf punctured this aestheticized cultural élitism by demonstrating the extent to which material exigency debased the community’s religious aura. Wolf employed the same technique of the sentimental grotesque in his ‘Vilner shulhoyf’.*4 In choosing as his subject the Gaon’s courtyard—long the symbolic

and communal heart of Jewish Vilna—he was staking a territorial claim to his corner of Jewish eastern Europe, even as he sought to deflate the myth of Vilna that Moyshe Kulbak’s ode to the city had recently rekindled. If, just two years earlier, Kulbak could serenade Vilna as a ‘dark cameo set in Lithuania’ whose ‘every stone was a book, parchment every wall’, then to Leyzer Wolf it was the habitation of lunatics, beggars, and hungry wives with infected, running noses. Kulbak, who had lived in post-war Berlin prior to returning to Vilna, experienced his reintroduction to Jewish communal life in Vilna as a dark Eden of holistic culture and muted

spiritual beauty. But Vilna represented the entirety and limitation of Wolf’s 82 ‘Trans. Robert Friend, Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (Harmondsworth, 1988), 620-2.

33 Sutzkever, ‘Leyzer Wolf’, 44. 34 Wolf, Lider, 133-6.

184 Justin D. Cammy personal experience. His synagogue is filled with apocalyptic visions such as a painting in one of the small study houses depicting the end of days; a portrait of Moses Montefiore hangs above one of the Gaon, a not-so-subtle indication that despite the myth of Vilna as a centre of traditional Jewish learning, what really mat-

tered to its inhabitants was their material well-being. Whereas Kulbak’s speaker unites his very self with his subject in a dramatic, concluding outburst, ‘I am the city’, Wolf’s poem ends with solitary, unsettling images: ‘the dreamy kabbalist still ponders there, the last remaining hasid dances alone in his prayer house’. His antiromanticism was designed to refocus local readers on the importance of engaging with the moment, rather than living in an apolitical, heady relationship with the myth of a past spiritual glory. In reflecting the current mood of political, material, and spiritual insecurity, Wolf offered up an alternative perspective of Vilna that directly contradicted the inflated one presented to them by Kulbak. Wolf thus invited the writers of Yung Vilne to treat their native city and its

| inhabitants as open, malleable artistic subjects while resisting the temptation to mythologize. The literary critic Max Erik was one of the first to proclaim the teenage writer’s talents. At a lecture in the Vilna Realgymnasium in 1928, Erik read and reread these two poems to his students, analysing their language, satire, and new images, proclaiming that the young writer might just become Vilna’s equivalent to

American Yiddish poet Moshe Leib Halpern, then among the most popular | Yiddish poets in Poland.*° Wolf’s early poetic successes established a privileged position for poetry over prose within the artistic hierarchy of Yung Vilne, proving the poetic medium popular among audiences and amenable to both serious and light-hearted experimentation. A few years later he became the first member of

Yung Vilne to win recognition in international Yiddish literary circles when Abraham Liesin agreed to publish several of his poems in 7sukunft.°° This opened the first important avenue of co-operation between established American Yiddish

writers and editors in New York and Yung Vilne’s emerging talents, one that reached its fruition in the mid-1930s when Abraham Sutzkever became a regular contributor to Inzikh.*’ Although Inzikh published several poems by Wolf and 35 Sutzkever, ‘Leyzer Wolf’, 36.

36 Wolf wrote to Liesin in 1931 asking him to consider his poems for publication. His poetry first appeared in Tsukunft in June 1933, a publishing relationship that was maintained until 1939. Liesin’s support for the young writer was a crucial factor in his development as a poet, since the local critical reception of Wolf was not universally positive. Itsik Manger, for one, was put off by the young man’s bombast. In commenting on one of Wolf’s mock love lyrics, which included such lines as ‘I love you, I

hope you come to a quick end | I love you, may a fire consume you’, Manger wrote: “These are the high point of Leyzer Wolf’s love diatribe, and instead of being published in the Vilner tog, this poetic schoolboy ought to be dragged back to school by the ear. This newspaper is making room for vulgarity which is certainly not poetry .. .’ (I. Manger, ‘Der vilner petrarke’ (“The Petrarch of Vilna’), in Getseylte verter (‘A Few Words’) (Krakow, 30 May 1930), 4). 37 ‘Wolf was not the only member of Yung Vilne included in Tsukunft during the 1930s. Liesin later

published the writing of Shimshon Kahan, Elkhonen Vogler, Chaim Grade, Moyshe Levin, and Abraham Sutzkever.

The Emergence of Yung Vilne 185 Grade in its pages between 1934 and 1936, its editors, Arn Glants Leyeles and Jacob Glatstein, were most attracted to the poetry of Sutzkever, whom they published twenty times between 1935 and 1940. Glatstein later commented: ‘Wolf sent many things to /nzikh but he was still in a transitional period. He sent us raw experimental poems which we could not publish. It is quite strange that as early as 1933 Liesin recognized Wolf’s talent. Liesin was not known for his poetic taste. How he came to the modernist Leyzer Wolf remains a profound riddle.’*® The approbation of such esteemed editors as Liesin, Arn Glants Leyeles, and Joseph Opatoshu of Zamlbikher greatly boosted the group’s prestige in its native land. Wolf’s ‘Napoleon’ was granted a place of honour in Yung Vilne’s official inauguration in the Vtlner tog of 19209: Di erdvelt muz tsu mir gehern vi heysn dort di zilberdike gliveres in himl? Shtern?— zayt eydes, shtern: di erdvelt muz tsu mir gehern! Un ale kinign, melokhim un keysarim zog ikh on ikh, Na-po-le-on: tsu mir gehert der erdvelt tron! (The earthworld must belong to me What are those silver glimmers in heaven called? Stars? Bear witness, stars: the earthworld must belong to me! And I hereby warn all kings, rulers, and emperors I, Na-po-le-on: The earthworld throne belongs to me!)*°

These opening lines by the 19-year-old poet are as impudent as they are startling. Taking on all reigning sovereigns, the speaker proclaims his primacy over the universe. He pretends that he does not even know what the glowing objects in the heavens are called, and therein cavalierly disposes of the transcendent universe.

The stars are useful to him only in so far as they are witnesses to his complete mastery over the earthly world below. Later in the poem he refuses even to recognize God, declaring: ‘You are not of my disposition!’ The desire to write in the voice of Napoleon functions as a way for Leyzer Wolf to (over)compensate for the narrowness of his own environment and parochial experience, and imagine himself a writer in command of the European experience. Yet in deciding to use this poem as his formal introduction as a member of Yung Vilne, he leaves it open to be read as parodic self-portrait. For while it may be written in the voice of Napoleon, it is also a strange type of poetic self-assertion in which a barely published writer vaults onto a literary throne, prematurely anticipating his displacement of all reigning poetic voices with his own arrogant bombast. Moreover, in dismissing both the heavens and God—symbols that point towards the more refined, transcendent possibilities 388 J. Glatstein, ‘In tokh genumen’, Idisher kempfer, 16 Nov. 1956, 12-13. 39 Repr. in Di goldene keyt, 101 (1980), 68.

186 Justin D, Cammy of art—1in favour of his own dominion over ‘the earthworld’, Wolf’s speaker affirms a preference for an aesthetic of grit, earthiness, and direct confrontation with reality. Such efforts to appropriate the personae of the most esteemed figures of European

history were to prove more than just acts of youthful presumption. In having them speak Yiddish, Wolf at one and the same time parodied the parochial nature of Yiddish in the larger European context and staked a claim for his language as one which was able to take in and possess the entire universe. Over the course of his career Wolf appropriated the voices or artistic styles of several of the leading figures of the Western intellectual and artistic tradition, from Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, and Byron, to Goethe, Heine, and Longfellow.*° His 1935 poem “Di veber’ (“The Weavers’) is among his most serious in this vein 1n its ability to model itself in both form and content after Heine’s similarly titled poem of almost a century earlier. Whereas Heine’s lyric protest, part of his poetic series ZLeitgedichte (‘Poems of the Times’), was occasioned by a brutal Prussian crackdown

on a revolt by starving Silesian weavers, Wolf invokes Heine to rally his readers against the German threat in his own time.*! Mir arbetn unter der erd, in der shvarts, mir vebn di fone di royte vi harts, mir kemfn, mir kumen, mir lebn! Mir vebn di nets farn broynem vampir, Alt-daytshland—mir vebn takhrikhim far dir, Mir vebn, mir vebn! (We work underground, in secret, We weave the flag, red as a heart, We fight, we are coming, we live! We are weaving the net for the brown vampire, Old Germany——we are weaving death shrouds for you, We weave, we weave!)*”

Such efforts to update and Yiddishize well-known motifs of world literature demonstrated that Yiddish poetry could absorb all forms, rhythms, and content, even as it addressed immediate political or social concerns. Wolf’s 1936 poem Evigingo, published in the Latin alphabet and modelled on Longfellow’s Hiawatha, was the most radical of his experiments in naturalizing foreign modes of writing 40 For instance, see ‘Bayron’ (‘Byron’, 1932), ‘Nitshe’ (‘Nietzsche’, 1932), ‘Goethe’s toyt’ (‘Goethe’s Death’, 1932), ‘Beytoven’ (“Beethoven’, 1932), ‘Leonardo da vintshi’ (“Leonardo da Vincv’, 1933), Bayron un keyn’ (‘Byron and Cain’, 1934), ‘Daytshishe folkslider’ (“German Folksongs’, 1934),

‘Hayne un goete’ (‘Heine and Goethe’, 1936), ‘Eyropeishe sonetn’ (‘European Sonnets’, 1936), ‘Pushkin’ (1937), ‘Sergey yesenin’ (‘Sergei [Aleksandrovich] Esenin’, 1937), ‘Mefisto redt’ (“Mephisto Speaks’, 1937), and ‘Buda’ (‘Buddha’, 1937). Several of these are published in Wolf, Lider.

41 The final stanza of Heine’s ‘The Weavers’ reads: “The shuttle flies in the cracking loom | And night and day we weave your doom | Old Germany, listen, ere we disperse | We weave your shroud with a triple curse | We weave! We are weaving’ (L. Untermeyer, Heinrich Heine: Paradox and Poet

(The Poems) (New York, 1937), 318). 42 Yung vilne, 2 (1935), 64.

The Emergence of Yung Vilne 187 into Yiddish verse.** His epic follows the quest of a solitary, ageing hero to rekindle his taste for life when he realizes that, without an heir, his life is meaningless. He goes off in pursuit of the restorative powers of the elusive Evigingo, a trek that takes him from the centres of Western culture to the Soviet Union. But when the promise of progressive Soviet science is revealed as a sham, the poem concludes with his realization that no ideology or social system, no matter what its promise, can magically satisfy man’s thirst for companionship. Although the poem’s thematic exoticism, often impenetrable symbolism, and Latinized Yiddish alphabet prevented it from becoming a popular success, its musical and linguistic inspiration from Wolf’s reading of Hiawatha showed a writer willing to push the limits of where Yiddish could be made to go.*#

If Leyzer Wolf was interested in bringing home literary influences from the European and American sphere that he encountered in his reading, he was equally interested in joining the Yiddish literary tradition. He often adapted the style of popular Yiddish writers while modernizing their subject so as to address contemporary social concerns. One example of this is his reworking of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman in 1935, in which he imitates the comic mistranslations of liturgical material readers had come to expect from Tevye.* ‘Ashrey ha-ish’, comments Wolf’s Tevye, ‘vos hot a shtiler vayb baym tish’ (“Happy is the man who has a quiet wife at the table’). The familiar framing scenario of Tevye confessing his troubles with his children to Sholem Aleichem is also preserved. Yet, having outlived his wife, Golde, and watched his daughters grow up, Wolf’s Tevye emerges remarried, bemoaning a new set of troubles. This time it is the behaviour of his teenage son Leybke that proves most challenging. A passionate revolutionary, Leybke is worrying his father sick with his increasingly bold activities. The son proves a talker equal to his father, giving voice—as did his fictional elder stepsisters—to continuing ruptures within Jewish society caused by ideological gaps between the generations. Whereas Tevye’s daughters in Sholem Aleichem’s version repeatedly insist to their

father that he cannot possibly understand their challenges to Jewish tradition, Wolf’s parent-child relationship is confronted with a more threatening communicative gap: ‘My son,’ I say to him, ‘have pity on your old father, stop playing with fire. Are not your parents dear to you?’ 48 L. Wolf, Evigingo (Vilna, 1936). Wolf self-published this poem at great personal expense, as the play on the name of its publisher, Gerangl (‘Struggle’), indicates. It was a diminutive, sixteen-page book, printed on thin newsprint and bound ina thick, pink cover. Wolf was disappointed when it failed to attract any critical interest. ** A transliteration of Evigingo into Yiddish script can be found in Chulyot: fournal of Yiddish Research, 3 (Spring 1996), 209—19. It is doubtful that Wolf read Hiawatha in the original. His likely source was Yehoash’s translation of Longfellow’s epic into Yiddish in 1g1to.

* L. Wolf, “Tevye der milkhiker: Naye monologn’, Abraham Sutzkever Archive, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, no. 100, Leyzer Wolf file.

188 Justin D. Cammy ‘Parents are a good thing,’ he says, and then thinks some more. ‘But even more important than parents are the peasants who toil for seventeen hours a day for only a piece of bread.’ ‘But you are still only a child! . .. lought to take you and teach you a lesson!’ ‘Father,’ he answers with a deep breath, ‘you are still living with old ideas. If you hit me, I would hit you back!’

With the generational repartee suddenly shifting from the more tender father— daughter relationships in Sholem Aleichem’s source-text to a possible physical confrontation between father and son, violence inside the family threatens to bring down one of Yiddish literature’s most beloved heroes once and for all. Most incredibly, 1t is not the contemporary threats from the anti-Jewish Polish right or Nazi Germany that Wolf chooses to highlight as Tevye’s greatest challenge. Rather, the threat lies within a Jewish community so politically disunited that meaningful dialogue has grown almost impossible. And, just as his Tevye had foreseen, when his Leybke is arrested for revolutionary activities, the authorities do not limit their punishment to the young perpetrator alone. Tevye awakes the next morning to find his two dairy cows slaughtered. Wolf’s free-verse episode ends with Tevye on the

run once again, terrified by the warning. As Leybke is carted away in chains, Tevye—one of Yiddish literature’s most active talkers—finds himself silenced once and for all: ‘ “Father,” he cried out to me, “have courage!” But I had nothing else left to say.’ A similar tendency was at work when Leyzer Wolf introduced a new exchange of letters based on Sholem Aleichem’s epistolary classic about Menachem Mendl and Sheyne Sheyndl.*° In Wolf’s version, however, Menachem Mend eventually writes

home to his wife from a collective in Soviet-controlled Birobidzhan—a strange place indeed for this character who had, until then, most represented capitalist fantasy in Yiddish literature. Such reworkings of familiar voices and texts from the Yiddish literary tradition, updated to reference contemporary ideological rifts, political options, or simply new experiments in the construction of the poet’s literary persona, were central components of his aesthetic of sophisticated folkishness. In updating ‘Tevye and Menachem Mend for a new generation of readers, Wolf asserted the right of Yiddish authors to express themselves from within the contours of recognized literary tradition even as they transgressed it. Wolf’s willingness to engage with, challenge, and parody inherited texts and characters from Yiddish culture assured his young colleagues in Yung Vilne that they need not be embarrassed by their fate as Yiddish writers. He demonstrated that their use of familiar Yiddish literary texts, the town of Vilna, or the Jews’ immediate social and political concerns as material for their writing would not necessarily make it more 46 Wolf intended to publish his ‘Menakhem Mendl un Sheyne Sheyndl’ and ‘Menakhem Mend in birobidzhan’ in book form as Der nayer menakhem mendl (‘The New Menachem Mendl’). The book never appeared. Portions of the episodes were published in the Vi/ner tog, 14 Feb. 1936, and in Yungvald, 3 (Mar. 1939), 1-4.

The Emergence of Yung Vilne 189 parochial but, in fact, more recognizable to Yiddish readers everywhere.*’ Wolf was the standard-bearer in Yung Vilne for both poetic localism and universality. Abraham Novershtern has asserted that, in their hunger to avoid the ‘parochial’ label, Yung Vilne shunned literature that focused on internal Jewish debates.*® The

examples I have cited suggest a more complicated reality. Wolf was clearly torn between the socialist outlook of some of his colleagues, and a Jewish national politics. In 1930, for instance, he attempted to work through his own confusion in a long poetic political drama, ‘Yidnland’ (‘A State for the Jews’). Taking a leaf out of both

Herzl’s nationalist fantasies and Y. L. Perets’s late apocalyptic dramas, Wolf’s ‘Yidnland’ is more a performance of contradictory ideas than a political manifesto. It opens on Passover, a symbolic festival of deliverance, with a group of Jewish

visionaries gathered on a verdant island in the middle of the ocean to force the creation of a free Jewish land. The language of their proclamation of independence, secured by a volunteer army and unified sense of purpose, is designed to promote the gathering in of the exiles: A declaration to all the radio stations of the world, to the Jewish people the world over: Let it be known: an entirely new Jewish land was born today in the middle of the ocean with the help of a new Jewish Messiah! A Jewish land as big and as wide as it is plentiful, a land

blessed with the most beautiful miracles of nature! A Jewish land whose bosom is prepared to welcome all the world’s Jews... You thought that you would be forced for all eternity to remain entangled and suffocating in a spiral of Jewish blood. Jews! Listen to the call of the moment! Come from the farthest corners of the world . . . to the new, free land of the Jews.*9

Yet against such promise Wolf includes voices which spurn efforts at Jewish power and self-sufficiency. Elijah the Prophet echoes traditional Judaism’s susp1cion of forcing the hand of the Messiah by refusing to bless the new Jewish homeland, warning ‘nit in koyekh ligt di geule | nor in libe’ (‘salvation lies not in power |

but in love’). Most interesting is the appearance of a character referred to as the golus gayst (‘spirit of Jewish exile’). Playing on the concluding lines of Perets’s apocalyptic drama Baym nakht afn altn mark, in which a jester cryptically calls out, ‘Yidn, in shul arayn’ (‘Jews, back to the synagogue’), the warning of Wolf’s golus gayst seems a jest in itself: ‘Yidn, in golus arayn. Golus tatsil memaves!’ (‘Jews, back to exile. Exile will save you from death!”). 47 Other examples of this include his ‘Mendele, Peretz, un Sholem Aleikhem’ (‘Mendele, Perets, and Sholem Aleichem’, 1929), ‘Reb Mendele’ (1935), ‘Mendele montazh’ (‘Mendele Montage’, 1936), ‘Ayzik meir dik un di almone rom’ (‘Isaac Meir Dik and the Widow Rom’, 1937), ‘Montefiore in vilne’

(1938), ‘Der vilner goen un der besht’ (“The Vilna Gaon and the Ba’al Shem Tov’, 1938), ‘Vilne’ (1940), and ‘Lite’ ‘Lithuania’, 1940).

48 A. Novershtern, ‘Yung Vilne: The Political Dimension of Literature’, in Y. Gutman, E. Mendelsohn, J. Reinharz, and C. Shmeruk (eds.), The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars (Hanover, NH, 1989). 49 L,. Wolf, ‘Yidnland’, MS, Abraham Sutzkever Archive, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, no. 43, Leyzer Wolf file.

Igo Justin D. Cammy Ultimately, Wolf’s poetic drama proves at odds with any specific political end. Although the depiction of a foiled attempt to establish an independent Jewish state in an exotic land might strike some as outwardly anti-Zionist and equally suspicious

of territorialist attempts to relocate the Jews, Wolf’s parodic ending leaves this unclear. The warning of the golus gayst is funny in that it is a deadly serious parody of the Jewish collective uncertainty over national self-determination. Wolf raises the possibility of territorial and political self-sufficiency as a solution to the very real situation of Jewish poverty and the first signs of a brewing anti-Jewish storm in

Poland and Germany, only to have it scuttled by a voice asserting that Jewish strength lies in continued dispersion and powerlessness. The drama shows itself highly sceptical about the seriousness of Jewish national transplantation even as it ridicules those who favour the status quo. Far from disengaging from internal Jewish political debates, Wolf’s 1930 drama legitimized Yung Vilne’s artistic consideration of Jewish political questions from the group’s earliest years.°°

CONCLUSION In 1939 Leyzer Wolf founded Yung Vald (Young Forest), a literary group for the next generation of aspiring poets and writers in Vilna.°! With Yung Vilne’s earliest, defining voice now acting as a literary mentor to this newest collection of literary hopefuls, Yung Vilne signalled its shift from the youngest and last of the major Yiddish literary movements in inter-war Poland to one which had earned an international reputation for literary authority. In my description of the origins of Yung

Vilne, and of Wolf’s role in preparing the broadest of creative spaces for the new movement, I have attempted to show how both involved acts of wilful selfinvention. Just as Wolf—a reclusive young man by nature—found an assertive cultural voice through his poetics of parody, so too did Yung Vilne, a group artificially established (or at least midwifed) by the local establishment, emerge as a choir of °° ‘Throughout the 1930s Wolf continued to write poetry and prose that considered the Jewish polit| ical situation in eastern Europe. These include his indictments of European culture in his several poetic fantasies of Nazi leaders and their visits to Jewish centres in Poland such as ‘Hitler, gobels, un gering’ (Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering’, 1933), ‘Fashistn ‘ (‘Fascists’, 1934), ‘Goebbels in varshe’ (‘Goebbels in Warsaw’, 1934), ‘Briv fun fridrikh nitshe tsu adolf hitler’ (“Letter from Friedrich Nietzsche to Adolf Hitler’, 1935), ‘Goering in poyln’ (‘Goering in Poland’, 1935), and his posthumously published collection regarding the Nazi era, Di broyne bestye (“The Brown Beast’) (Moscow, 1943). In 1939 the Vilna journal Yung-vald (no. 4) published an announcement about a forthcoming novel by Leyzer Wolf, Mizrekh un man (‘East and West’). The promise was for a novel portraying the options for independent Jewish cultural life in three states: Soviet Birobidzhan, Palestine, and a territorialist free land. The novel was never published and the manuscript disappeared with the majority of Wolf’s personal literary

archive. It is unknown whether he took it with him when he fled to the Soviet Union in 1940. Wolf remained a refugee in the USSR and died of typhus or malnutrition sometime in 1943. >! The group published four issues of Yung-vald in Vilna between Jan. and Apr. 1939. Its members included the young poet Hirsh Glik, who would later go on to pen the most famous partisan hymn of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

The Emergence of Yung Vilne IQI complementary literary and artistic voices most evocative of the pressures and cultural ferment of its time. Whereas more avant-garde Yiddish literary movements in the inter-war period are remembered for the modernist reach of their work, Yung Vilne—under Wolf’s early direction—showed how the intersection of community

and individual creativity could precipitate a more organic relationship between writer and environment that would allow both the literary aesthete and the common reader to enjoy literature together.

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania: An Interview with Yud! Mark DOV LEVIN

INTRODUCTION ANTONY POLONSKY IN the period after the First World War Lithuania was the scene of the most far-

reaching attempt to put into practice the principle of non-territorial Jewish autonomy, as had been advocated by the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow and his Folkist (Populist) Party. This experiment was accompanied by high hopes in the

Jewish world. According to Leo Motzkin, who represented the World Zionist Organization at the second Jewish National Assembly in Lithuania held in Kaunas on 14 February 1922, ‘Fifteen million Jews are watching your experiment in the

struggle for national rights.’ In response, Max Soloveichik, minister for Jewish affairs in the Lithuanian government, affirmed that ‘Lithuania is the source from which will flow ideas that will provide the basis for new forms of Jewish life.”

Lithuanian Jewry derived its very distinctive character from the influence of the Haskalah and Zionism, its lack of acculturation, and its strong mitnagdic and musar traditions, and seemed the ideal soil on which to establish a system of Jewish autonomy. This seemed to be in the interests of both Jews and Lithuanians. The two groups had co-operated before the war in elections to the Duma, and the Lithuanians hoped that the Jews would support their claims to Vilna. ‘There seemed to be no fundamental economic conflict between the emerging Lithuanian intelligentsia and Jews, and the Lithuanian nationalists were more comfortable with specifically Jewish cultural manifestations than with Jewish acculturation to Russian, Polish, or German culture. Given the mixed character of the area, Jewish national autonomy would also make the state more attractive to Belarusians and Germans who might be incorporated into it. 1 “Proceedings of the Second Congress on the Jewish Communities and the Jewish National Assembly. Stenographic Reports’, Yidishe shtime (Kaunas, Feb. 1922), quoted in S. Gringauz, ‘Jewish National Autonomy in Lithuania (1918—1925)’, fewish Social Studies, 14/3 (July 1952), 225-46. See also S. Liekis, ‘Jewish Autonomy in Lithuania’, Brandeis University Ph.D. thesis, 1997.

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuama 193 The origins of the autonomous system lay in the period of emergence of Lithu-

ania. In September 1918, as German rule in the area was collapsing, a Zionist central committee was established in Vilna which supported the Lithuanian claims to the town. Shortly afterwards, the German authorities set up a Lithuanian parliament (taryba) and called on it to respect minority rights. Three Jews represented

the Jewish community in the new Lithuanian government: Simon Rosenbaum, vice-minister for foreign affairs; Nachman Rachmilevich, vice-minister for trade and industry; and Jacob Wygodzki, minister for Jewish affairs. This government was forced to move to Kaunas following the Polish capture of the city on 1 January 1919, to be followed five days later by the Bolsheviks, who were to be expelled again

by the Polish forces on 19 April. Max Soloveichik replaced Wygodzki in the Lithuanian government.

What the Jews understood by autonomy was clearly set out in point 5 of a memorandum submitted by the committee of Jewish delegations to the Paris peace conference, which demanded that the Jewish minority be recognized as an autonomous and independent organization with the right to direct its own religious, cultural, philanthropic, and social institutions. In relation to Lithuania, the Jews asked for full rights for Jews in the spheres of politics, economics, and language, for representation in parliament, administrative bodies and courts to be based on the Jewish proportion of the population, and for autonomy to be based on three sets of institutions: local kehilot, a National Jewish Council, and a Ministry for Jewish Affairs.? The Lithuanians responded positively. On 5 August 1919 Augustinas Voldemaras, the Lithuanian foreign minister, presented a memorandum to the committee of Jewish delegations to the Paris peace conference. It had four main points: it conceded proportional representation in parliament, the administration, and the judiciary; it established a Jewish ministry to deal with Jewish affairs; Jews were to be granted full rights as citizens as well as the right to use the Yiddish language in public life and in government institutions; and Jews were to be granted autonomy in all internal matters including religion, social services, education, and cultural affairs. The kehilot and the Jewish Council were to constitute the operating agencies of Jewish autonomy. They were to be government bodies, organized on a territorial basis, with the right to issue ordinances that would be binding both on Jews and on the agencies of the Lithuanian government. In October 1919 seventy-eight kei/ot were organized. Their first Jewish National Assembly took place in Kaunas on 4 January 1920, with the participation of 139 delegates. A Va’ad Ha’arets (National Council) made up of thirty-four members was elected. On this occasion, the prime minister, Ernestas Galvanauskas, and the foreign minister, Voldemaras, affirmed their support for autonomy. On to January 1920 the representatives of the Jewish minority joined the Lithuanian Council of State, and the president issued a declaration on national autonomy. On 4 March 1920 the Law on Kehilot was published. A kehilah was defined 2 Gringauz, ‘Jewish National Autonomy in Lithuania’, 234.

194 Dov Levin as a body recognized by public law with the right to impose taxes and to issue ordinances dealing with religious matters, education, and philanthropy. It was responsible for the registration of Jewish births, deaths, marriages, and divorces. Every citizen who was registered as a Jew in public documents (birth certificate, family listing, school registration) was to be considered a Jew. One could leave the Jewish community only through conversion or submission of proof that the documentation showing that one was a Jew was incorrect. | In the next months the basic structures of the system were established. Yet it was soon to exhibit problems. One was the fissiparous character of Jewish politics. At the second Jewish National Assembly the minister for Jewish affairs, Max Soloveichik, felt compelled to warn the delegates: ‘If we are unable to demonstrate a minimum of tolerance and trust, we will be unable to build up the system of national

autonomy. If that is the situation, let us give up the experiment immediately.” More importantly, the Lithuanian authorities were now markedly less enthusiastic.

In April 1922 Soloveichik felt compelled to resign as minister in protest at the failure of the proposed constitution to provide for the constitutional entrenchment of the Ministry for Jewish Affairs and the autonomous structure. He was replaced first by Julius Brutzkus and then by Bernard Friedman, who was distrusted by the supporters of autonomist politics. On 12 May 1922 the Lithuanian ambassador in Washington stated that Lithuania was only obligated to guarantee citizenship rights and the rights of national minorities to schools where they could be educated in their own language; it did not have to grant national autonomy. In fact, the new constitution did make some provision for national autonomy. According to paragraph 73, ‘Citizens of national minorities, who make up a substantial part of the population, have the right to carry on autonomously the affairs of their national culture, politics, education, social services, and mutual aid, and to elect representative institutions for the direction of these affairs in a manner provided for in special laws.’ Paragraph

74 read, “The minorities mentioned in paragraph 73 have the right to tax their members for cultural purposes and to receive both from the government and the municipal bodies their rightful share of the funds assigned for popular education.’ What really undermined the system was the way its maintenance became linked with the increasingly bitter Lithuanian political conflict. The Populists and Socialists, the strongest advocates of Jewish autonomy, were forced into opposition, and power was taken by the more conservative Catholic Christian Democrats. In March 1923 a vote of no confidence in the Christian Democratic government was supported by Jewish members of parliament, which caused some bitterness on the right of the parliament. Three months later, in June, the presidium of parliament stopped the use of Yiddish in parliamentary speeches. By the time the third Jewish National Assembly met in November 1923, there was growing opposition to the whole system in the Jewish community from the religious 3 Gringauz, ‘Jewish National Autonomy in Lithuania’, 237.

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania 195 right (the Akhdes) and the left. The new Conservative government was also determined to bring the system to an end, partly since the census of 1923 had revealed that the number of Jews in Lithuania was considerably less than had been estimated (150,000 instead of 250,000). Thus no budget was voted for the Ministry for Jewish Affairs, and the minister accordingly resigned on 2 February 1924. The new cabinet of 18 June 1924 did not include a minister for Jewish affairs. In September 1924 the Jewish National Council was dissolved, and new laws on kehi/ot were introduced, in accordance with which the registration of births, deaths, and marriages was handed over to the rabbinate and more than one kehilah was permitted in each community. In March 1926 the kehilot were stripped of their autonomous powers, and control of religious matters was handed over to the Orthodox. Any attempt to re-establish the system was forestalled by the growing political crisis. In May 1926 a new leftist government came to power and made important concessions to national minorities. This and general dissatisfaction with the functioning of the democratic system led in December 1926 to a coup led by a rightwing nationalist, Antanas Smetona. The political system was becoming increasingly

autocratic and there was no longer any place for Jewish or indeed any sort of autonomy, though the highly developed Jewish private school system and the Jewish co-operative banking system survived.

The reasons for the collapse of the autonomous experiment in Lithuania are clear. The two sides had unrealistic expectations of each other. The Lithuanians believed that the Jews would aid them in acquiring Vilna and Memel and 1m attracting Belarusians to a multinational Lithuania. They had much less need of the Jews in the fairly homogeneous Lithuania which actually emerged, while it soon became clear that Jews would not be a significant factor in acquiring Vilna. The Jews, for their part, took far too seriously assurances made by the leading Lithuanian poli-

ticians: their commitment to Jewish autonomy was always dependent on their broader goals. There were other reasons for the failure of the experiment. It fell prey to the Lithuanian party conflict, and the degree of consensus necessary for its success was absent in the Jewish community. It may be, too, that there is an inherent contradiction between the basic principles of a liberal state and the guaranteeing of group rights. Yudl Mark was a young Folkist politician who later became an important Yiddish folklorist and philologist. On 17 October 1972 the leading historian of Baltic

Jewry, Professor Dov Levin of the Hebrew University, conducted an extended interview with him on the problems inherent in the autonomous experiment in Lithuania.*

4 The tape (2010) can be found in the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

196 Dov Levin INTERVIEW I BEFRIENDED Yudl Mark twenty-two years ago (1972), when he spent an extended period in Jerusalem. We held long conversations about my research on Lithuanian

Jewry. My impression was that besides his exceptional competence in Yiddish philology, folklore, and pedagogy, he was an authentic source of information on the history of Lithuanian Jewry of recent generations. As a historian and sociologist I felt compelled to concentrate (if not to ‘immortalize’) at least some of his activities and memories which to date have not been published. Even more so, as the docu-

mentation of Lithuanian Jewry was brought to a halt together with the lives of hundreds of thousands of victims, the value of an informant such as Yud! Mark has risen immeasurably. With the knowledge that Mark had held the position of general secretary of Jewish autonomous institutions in Lithuania we began with this quite unusual subject. Y.M. I will begin by saying what I am going to talk about: how I came to Lithuania.

D.L. Straight after the First World War?

y.M. No. During the war years I was in Petrograd—as it was known at the time. I was under Kerenskii’s government. For a year—a little more than a year—I was under Bolshevik rule. At the end of 1918 our family had the opportunity to return—and that going back meant returning to Liepaja. At that time I did not want to return with the rest of my family, although there was enormous confusion at the university. The majority of professors had already fled from Petrograd. They simply could not survive the first year of starvation under the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, I wanted to stay in Petrograd in the hope that somehow it would be possible to find the few professors whom I still needed for my exams, in order to receive the papers showing that I had completed the full course at the university.

, Also my father could not return with the rest of the family. At that time almost all businesses in Petrograd were still in private hands. He was owed money mostly by those who owned tobacco shops, and he was also owed money for some amber he had sold, so he stayed, and my mother with the other smaller children—I was the eldest son—were supposed to return. | found myself in an impossible position. Under no circumstances could I stay, because I was the oldest in the family, and so against my wishes, I had to leave in December 1918.

When I arrived in Liepaja in December 1918, the situation was one of complete disorder. It was after the war; the Germans had only just left. So I threw myself into communal work: I formed a folkist party, and set up elections for the community.

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania 197 D.L. Does that mean the Folkist Party was divided?

y.M. Yes. An entire revolution was carried out in order to bring about universal secret, fair elections in the community. At that time the temporary government was not in Riga but in Liepaja, and I was a member of the temporary government of Latvia. I was involved the entire time there. D.L. There were three or four armies there at the time?

y.M. Yes. At that time there was fighting with all kinds of armies, and from one day to the next one didn’t know what the political situation would be. A major effort was undertaken to build new Jewish schools and the building of the Jewish school was started. In the middle of all this there was a big change in my private life: I got married. I was still a very young boy at the time and my wife was even younger. Immediately after getting married, I was mobilized into the Latvian army and they promised that I would be made an officer straight away. ‘They want-

ed to send me to the front immediately to fight with a division of German barons. My family and the family of my young wife prevailed upon me not to

eo under any circumstances, because people had not even been taught to shoot. One was given a gun—and off to war. In short, with a note saying that I was a member of their temporary assembly, my wife and I travelled across the border from Liepaja to my birthplace, Palanga. D.L. When did you become a member of the temporary National Assembly?

Y.M. Liepaja at the time was separated from Riga, so the Latvians set up a type of temporary Seym—they took representatives from the parties. ‘Together with a friend of mine I represented the Folkist Party. I had a document stating that I was a member and I travelled with that. D.L. Did you go to Lithuania, to Palanga?

: y.M. To Palanga, to my birthplace. I only stopped in Palanga overnight. The following morning I continued on to Kretinga. I saw that Kretinga was a dead shtet_—there was nothing there, so I continued on. I had been told that in Skuodas there was a middle school with four classes. I decided in that case to go to Skuodas. I probably arrived in Skuodas in December rg19, but there

was no snow at the time, it was such a mild winter. I arrived in Skuodas and found a middle school, and the head of the middle school was the Jewish doctor in Skuodas. My wife and I became teachers there. I became the mathematics teacher and she became the singing teacher—she was a violinist. Why did I choose mathematics? I chose mathematics because I had decided that if I was a mathematics teacher, no one would interfere with my going over

to and teaching in Yiddish, because the children all knew Yiddish. I did it and we conspired with the children that if we were asked what was the

198 Dov Levin language of instruction, we would say Russian, but learning—we are learning Yiddish. D.L. The middle school was in Russian?

Y.M. It was a Russian middle school and the doctor was given the right by the Lithuanian authorities at the time to be the head and director of that school. I taught in Yiddish there, and I learned how one teaches in Yiddish—such things. And gradually I began to persuade the parents that they should see that it was crazy to have a school in Russian when there was a Lithuanian nation being formed. Gradually, gradually, the majority of parents agreed that in the coming academic year we should go over to Yiddish. [ had a friend who came from another Lithuanian shiet/, a student. He was the Russian teacher. We were the younger ones, and the other teachers were there by chance. They were gathered from the shéet/ itself—intellectuals, semi-intellectuals it can be said, were the teachers at our place. In a word, I failed. There was a meeting of parents. The meeting of parents decided that we should go over to Yiddish, but the director said: ‘No! It’s my school. I have permission for Russian and I will not go over to something else. Russian is a language. What kind of language is Yiddish?’ In short, when the year ended, I announced: ‘If it stays in Russian then I am leaving.’ I started to think about where to go and what to do. I was proud and didn’t want to ask my mother or relatives for money to live on. So I had to go some-

where and become a teacher. I saw various announcements at the time in Yidishe shtime that Hebrew high schools were being established. The announcements were in Yiddish, but they always stated that a Hebrew school was being established and teachers were sought. I saw an announcement from

Ukmergé that they were setting up a high school, but it didn’t specify in which language. I decided: ‘I’m going there.’ D.L. Was that the first time that you went to Ukmergé? y.M. Yes. I knew that I had some relatives somewhere there. I didn’t know them— had never been in contact with them. I only knew that a brother of my grand-

father had once gone there, studied there, stayed there, raised a family there. So I went to Ukmergé. At that time I already had a child of a few months. So my wife and I and our child went. The journey took a whole day, from very early, and we arrived in Ukmergé the same day, late at night, and we came to a Jewish inn. Arriving at the inn, I asked first of all about my relatives. My relatives had a textile business. Briefly, two days later I made contact in Ukmergé with two Jews who were active in the high school: the local pharmacist, who was called Pick, and one of the local doctors. I had discussions with them and we decided: we will make it a Yiddish high school.

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania 199 D.L. Did they themselves want that?

y.M. They themselves wanted Yiddish, but they were not certain whether they would find someone who could take charge of it. We drew in more people. Then followed the big question: in which language? At this point a few of us were not a hundred per cent honest: we were diplomatic. “We will examine the children and we will see. If it emerges that they know Russian best of all, then it will be a Russian school; if it emerges that they know Hebrew, then we will do it in Hebrew.’ There were a lot that came from Russia.

D.L. The refugees... y.M. The refugees who had been in Riazan, in Tamboyv, in those regions. D.L. What was the dilemma: Hebrew or Yiddish, Russian or Yiddish?

y.M. Actually there were three distinct sides: there was a Hebrew side, a Russian side, and a Yiddish side. ‘The weakest was the Yiddish side. The majority of parents wanted Russian because they were familiar with high school being in Russian. Besides that, a large number of them actually came from the Russian provinces. There were several who wanted Yiddish. We set up an examination committee, we examined, and, understandably, it emerged that the language which they understood better than any other was Yiddish. So began the story of the Ukmergé high school, which I won’t go into now, as that is a chapter on its own. When we had begun to set up the school, the month of August had gone by, September came and so did the festivals, and we had to see where we

were. At that time solid traffic had been established between Ukmergé and Kaunas—bus traffic. All the coachmen became ‘busmen’. They organized groups, partnerships; they competed. The buses would drive for an hour and a half, two hours, and afterwards they went still faster. They could use the festivals, all the sabbaths. D.L. Did you travel on the sabbath at the time? Y.M. Yes.

D.L. Did that not bother you?

Y.M. I used to go outside the town and sit down and wait there for the bus, instead of sitting in the town... You know, the First World War had already brought many such changes in lifestyle. When I arrived in Kaunas, one of my first acquaintances was the lawyer Finklshteyn, Oyzer Finklshteyn. I arrived at a time—that was in 1920—when the parties were not clearly established. The General Zionist Party had been clearly formed, but even the Tse’irei Zion did

not yet have a distinct party form: there was a young group who were its followers, and at that time a role was played by prominent men in Kaunas.

200 Dov Levin D.L. Does that mean, more impartial?

Y.M. Yes, for example, this particular group of people—the large Soloveichik family, which was a wealthy family, and the large Wolf family. The Wolf family remained impartial. The Soloveichiks, so to speak, split: Max, the youngest, became a prominent Zionist; Matatyahu Soloveichik joined the Folkists; the eldest, who was a director of the Commerzbank, remained an impartial Jew.

Finklshteyn started to play an important role. Everyone thought of him as the most respected and the most talented Jewish lawyer in Kaunas. Several doctors started to play a definite part. Almost at the same time Lithuanian and Jewish parties started to be established. When IJ arrived in 1920, and in 1921 and even in 1922, there was incredible

harmony between the Jewish and Lithuanian activists. At the end of 1922, beginning of 1923, that started to change a little. Pll talk in more detail about that a bit later. The Lithuanian activists at the time really needed the Jews. They had received a nation and they did not know how to deal with it. Any person who had completed four classes at high school they regarded as something special. They had so many good positions and they did not have the

people to occupy these positions. , | D.L. Did you see that at the time?

Y.M. Gradually, yes. We talked among ourselves. We often discussed the question.

This was one of the central questions: the relationship with them, how should our relationship be with them, how should our involvement be with them, with which groups should there be links, etc.? For example, Simon Rosenbaum, who was not really a true Lithuanian, he came from Minsk, as

far as I can remember, he started to play an important role even before Soloveichik started to play an important part with them, because they needed people to send somewhere to negotiate with the Soviet powers, and with the new German powers, to establish relations and to create something that they didn’t know how to deal with: a foreign ministry. So it’s very interesting—I don’t know if it is documented anywhere—and

I will tell you about it, that the first important emissary who was sent to Moscow was the Jewish lawyer Rosenbaum, who came from Minsk, and the one with whom he had to negotiate was also a Jew, Joffe. Rosenbaum in any

case said—I didn’t hear this, I was told what Rosenbaum had said—that when they were alone, they would speak between themselves in Yiddish. D.L. Was this told to you by a reliable person?

y.M. Yes, yes. Il tell you another interesting story: when discussion took place about the border, Rosenbaum said: ‘Why do we need to discuss it? Where Jews speak Litvish [Yiddish with Lithuanian pronunciation| and they say “Dovid”

and “kum” should be Lithuania.’ ‘Dovid’ and ‘kum’ and not ‘Duvid’ and

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania 201 ‘kim’. In any case, that’s what the lawyer Rosenbaum is said to have conveyed.

They, the Lithuanians, put forward and supported Max Soloveichik. At first Max Soloveichik was more interested in scholarship: in ancient history, archaeology, and all kinds of things from ancient times, and for himself he dreamed of becoming a professor of ancient Jewish history somewhere. The Lithuanians took him over. He was tall, handsome, had a fine appearance, and spoke very nicely. He knew several languages exceptionally well: he knew Russian well, German well, understood French. The Foreign Ministry was virtually thrown upon him. He was never a foreign minister, but he was a special adviser for the Foreign Ministry. Later, when a representative was needed to send to the League of Nations, it was to be Max Soloveichik. We had two questions. First, the Lithuanians are forming parties, groups, etc. What should we, as a small group of Folkists, do? We decided then that we must link our political destiny with those who called themselves Folkists (Populists) in Lithuanian—Liaudininkai. The leader was a lawyer, SleZevicius. He was, as it happens, a good friend of Finklshteyn. We linked up with them

later. He created certain difficulties in later times, but we simply called ourselves Zydy Liaudininkai (Jewish Liaudininkai)—and that’s it, as long as we had a connection with them. Our links were with the Lithuanian Folkists, and we discussed with them and had dealings with them, etc. Understandably, in the early years all the discussions with them were in Russian. There was another very important question: concerning the whole issue of

a Jewish minister, should there or should there not be a minister for Jewish affairs? There were already differences of opinion between the small group of Folkists and the much larger Zionist group. The Zionist group almost all felt that it would be good to have a Jewish minister. Finklshteyn and others believed that certain difficulties could arise out of this: a parliamentary majority is established: one time you can have one kind of parliamentary majority, another time you have a different parliamentary majority. How will it be? Would a previous Jewish minister remain even if an entire cabinet fell or didn’t fall? — DL. Lf L understand tt correctly, the concept was in the first instance autonomy.

Y.M. There was a consensus concerning autonomy, but the constitution was not yet worked out and everyone had his own notions of autonomy. In the earlier theories of autonomy, particularly those which followed Dubnow’s direction, there was no Jewish minister and there was no need for a Jewish minister. In truth, it was said: why do we actually need a Jewish minister? Instead there are kehilot. ‘The kehilot establish a national council, directly or indirectly. Understandably there needs to be a chairman of a Jewish national council,

202 Dov Levin and that is the Jewish leader. A Jewish minister is more dependent on the goyim than on the Jews. There could be a very good premier for whom it would be good and appropriate that there should be a minister, but there could be who knows what kind of premier—how could one be a minister for him? But the goyim wanted a Jewish minister. D.L. The minister was a goyish idea, or did tt come from the Zionists?

y.M. I think it was a goyish idea. I am not a hundred per cent certain. A further question: who elects the Jewish minister? Good, let’s say, the National Jewish Council meets and chooses a minister, but what will happen later, how will it go from there? Goyim will not want to have a Jew sent in who may not fit in with the other ministers. In short, there was so much theorizing until it was announced that Soloveichik had accepted the post of Jewish minister. D.L. Previously it had been Dr Wygodzki.°

Y.M. Yes, that was in the Vilna period. But this Vilna period only lasted a short time. In Ukraine there were also one or two Jewish ministers who briefly held

the title. In Kaunas there were none, other than Soloveichik, and no sooner did he become the Jewish minister than more than anything he worked as a Lithuanian foreign minister. He was the one who used to travel to all the negotiations; he was the one that people came to. He used to go to the place where the ministry was. ‘The Jewish Ministry had little importance in day-today work. It is interesting that Rosenbaum was against the idea of a Jewish minister the entire time. He became the chairman of the National Jewish Council. Perhaps there were personal reasons. So he became the only Jewish representative chosen by Jews. One had to approach him on all issues. But, once there was a Jewish minister, then the position of the chairman of the National Jewish Council was placed under a kind of shadow. D.L. As a Zionist, what was Solovetchtk’s stance on autonomy? For the Folkists it was a big issue, but for the Zionists?

Y.M. For them also. ‘They were also supporters of autonomy.

D.L. But that involves a contradiction, since their ultimate goal was to resettle in Palestine. Their sojourn in the Diaspora was only an ‘overnight stay’, as they put tt.

Y.M. ‘Overnight stay’ here, ‘overnight stay’ there. One has to imagine that in 1921 and 1922 the possibilities of going to Israel were minimal, and then there was a Jewish life that was developing vigorously. In a matter of years everything that was destroyed in the time of the world war was being built up again. ° Jacob Wygodzki, a leader of Vilna Jewry, was the first minister for Jewish affairs in the post-war Lithuanian government.

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania 203 D.L. When did fewish influence in Lithuanian government politics start to go downhill?

Y.M. The great love affair between Jews and non-Jews in the sphere of general politics only lasted a short time—in fact, only until approximately 1923. It was

undermined from two sides. I felt at the time that Soloveichik was quite guilty in that undermining. He was an extremely energetic person and when he started travelling around the world, in 1921 and 1922, he started to dream of becoming the world leader of the Zionist movement. At the time international politics were of the utmost importance, with links with England, and he thought that he would become Weizman’s successor. On the one hand, Soloveichik started to look further, and for more. Through that alone his position weakened. On the other hand, the Lithuanians gradually started to realize that they had their own people who knew English, that they could find several people who knew French. They began to meet the illustrious in the world, and they saw that the great are not so great: it is possible to speak with them, to make oneself understood. So they began to feel, perhaps we don’t need Jewish assistance at all. There also occurred a major change in the political balance of forces in Lithuania itself. In the beginning the Liaudininkai and the Social Democrats comprised the majority. All the peasants were Populists and the party built on that, and in the beginning they had colossal majorities in the elected representative assemblies. A far-reaching agrarian reform was passed in Lithuania. All the estates were simply taken away from the Polish landowners. They were only left with a set amount, I think not more than 22 hectares—

I can’t remember exactly—and the rest was divided up and given to the peasants. There were no rural councils formed, and things like that—every peasant received his bit of land. ‘That was the great internal upheaval. D.L. Did it have a great impact?

y.M. Colossal. Everything changed. There were no longer dependent peasants in Lithuania. The year of the big changes was 1922. The peasant for the first time was working his own land, and in Lithuania there was a surplus of bread and more importantly of geese, which began to be exported to England and Germany. D.L. Did Jews benefit from the reform?

Y.M. Jews gained enormously. They gained because as the peasant grew richer, he started dressing better, and so the Jewish craftsmen had more work. It was quite a phenomenon. D.L. Was this under the Populist government?

y.M. Yes. The Social Democrats never really played much of a role, because no matter how many towns there were and workers in the towns, the Populists

204 Dov Levin got the votes, as everyone voted for them. They voted to get the land. After the peasant received the land, he was anxious that it shouldn’t be taken away

from him. So he voted for another party—for the party of the priests, the Christian Democrats. So the Populists, who had rescued the Lithuanian peasant, were buried. They lost the elections in 1923. And another minister replaced Soloveichik. Soloveichik was not dismissed, he resigned of his own accord—he knew when to leave. So another minister was chosen. The second

minister—a dear, wonderful person, a compatriot of mine—Dr Julius Brutzkus,° a fantastic person. Dr Brutzkus was the last minister where Jews were asked whom they wanted as minister. Later there were ministers and Jews were not asked whom they wanted. Other than the elections something else occurred. This I only formulated a year later: the younger brother came. The older brother had work: as soon as he learned something, he obtained work. But several years later the younger brother grew up, and for him there was no work.

D.L. Are you talking about Lithuamans?

y.M. Lithuanians. Competition started. Just as Jews, previously, were needed, now they started to see that Jews were in the way. Jews stood in the way of the younger brother gaining a position. D.L. Did Jews occupy government positions at the time?

Y.M. Yes. Jews didn’t land government positions every time, because this was bound up with learning Lithuanian and many other things, but if someone wanted to have a government position from the beginning, then he could have it. Everyone who completed Russian high school could get work. ‘There weren’t enough qualified people to meet the great need. Soon, however, the Lithuanians found people of their own who could be ministers and directors of banks. Official positions, both high and low, had previously been held by

Russians, and had, in some cases, been taken over by Germans during the occupation. It was some of these positions that Jews occupied, and those who were in these positions started to experience a real sense of insecurity. The new governing party, the Christian Democrats, started to say, ‘After all, itis a

Catholic country, and after all, the Jews are a minority. We don’t want to oppress Jews, God forbid. But since we have become an independent nation, then we should be in charge everywhere.’ I know that there were Jews, for

instance, in the Ministry of the Interior, employed in finance, in various ° Julius Brutzkus (1870-1951) was a Russian Jewish and Lithuanian Jewish politician. He was elected to the All-Russian Constitutional Assembly in 1917, and in 1922 became the minister for Jewish

affairs in the Lithuanian government. In 1922 he was elected to the Lithuanian parliament. After the abolition of Jewish autonomy he moved to Berlin. One of the founders of the Revisionist Party, he left Germany after the Nazi takeover and succeeded ultimately in settling in Palestine.

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania 205 places. So they gradually started, not to throw them out, but to ease them to one side, so they couldn’t go higher. D.L. Was this official, or was tt just in practice?

y.M. Nothing was official. Officially nothing, theoretically so to speak, changed. In reality, we started to feel continually that, let’s say if someone should have been promoted in their job, they were not promoted. For instance, in the Ministry of the Interior, right at the beginning, this happened to Yeshaye Rozowski. D.L. Yeshaye Rozowskt.

y.M. Yeshaye Rozowski, had he not been a Jew, would have become vice-minister, but he was appointed district head in Raseiniai. This is one example, and there were others in other ministries—similar things. Rozowski is more memor-

| able because he stayed in that post longer. He was the type of person who looked good in the eyes of the goyim. D.L. Was he once a police chief in Vilna?

y.M. Yes. He was the one who showed them what a police ministry ought to be, how it should be led, how things should be organized. But instead of being promoted, he was given a respected position, but sent away from Kaunas. In Raseiniai he became the ‘virsininkas—apskrities virsininkas’.

D.L. The district head?

Y.M. Yes. By the way, in passing I will tell you about the mistake of the Folkists in 1923. He was put forward as a deputy in the Seym and Jews did not vote for him. D.L. Why not?

Y.M. Because he was no good. He was the only district head in the police who didn’t take bribes. He was bad for Jews... they were angry with him. D.L. Was the Folkist Party already strong then?

y.M. At the beginning, in 1922, there was a small party. In 1922 quite a number of people came from Ukraine and also from Russia, thanks to Minister Soloveichik—those who wanted to flee from Ukraine, which was already bloodied with the civil wars. After the bloody 1919, and after what happened later with the civil war and everything, quite a lot of people came. For instance, Nokhem Shtif came, Zelig Kalmanovich came, Alexander Mukdoni came, and Dub-

now was brought. Dubnow was able to leave, and it was thought that he

| would stay in Kaunas. D.L. That was a temporary strengthening?

Y.M. Yes, it was a temporary strengthening.

206 Dov Levin D.L. And the other parties?

y.M. As far as I[remember, 1922 was a good year for the regeneration of the whole

Zionist movement everywhere in the world. Something else happened. In Lithuania the Bund had always been strong. There were entire shtet/s where all the ordinary folk were Bundists—for example, Vilkaviskis. D.L. The brushmakers.

y.M. Those who worked with pig bristles. There were still such shtet/s. Anyskai was

such a shtetl, Jonava was a shtet/l of blacksmiths and carpenters, the entire shtetl. In 1921 the entire Bund in Lithuania, with its leaders and with the ordinary people, went over to the Communist Party. They were swallowed up. In Poland they split, and the majority remained Bundists. Even in Russia others still held on—when Esther Frumkin and Weinstein and others went over to the communists, others remained, so to speak, non-affiliated.’ In Lithuania everyone joined the communists, and because of that, the treatment by

| the Lithuanians—by the Lithuanian political powers—of Jews changed

considerably. |

D.L. That means that previously there were very few fewish Bolsheviks.

Y.M. Very, very few. When the Bundists became communists, a strange situation arose. There were communists, and next to the communists in the political

spectrum were the Folkists. The entire police force began to regard the Folkist circles with great suspicion. D.L. Was the left of Po’ales Zion in such a position?

y.M. Po’alei Zion left—they are Zionists. From the perspective of the goy, they are Zionists, so that’s more or less kosher. ‘The Folkists began to be regarded with suspicion. The Populists had already gone over into the opposition. The blossoming of the Folkists lasted for a very short time in 1922. Zionism strength-

ened, Bundism disappeared. I myself was afraid to create Folkist groups, because we began to notice that this would be used by the communists. D.L. This was their tactic—using . ..

y.M. Using a legal mantle. Our work at the time was to make connections with manual labourer organizations, but not to create a Folkist group—simply to be more solid in the eyes of the local authorities, because from 1923 onwards democracy in Lithuania began to weaken. Smetona’s coup was in the offing.

| The Christian Democrats were in the majority—they and another party, ” Esther Frumkin (pseudonym of Malka Lipshitz) was a Bundist leader in Russia. Together with her brother-in-law Aaron Weinstein (1877—1938) she was a leader of the pro-communist majority at the 12th Conference of the Bund (Apr. 1920). Arrested in Jan. 1938, she was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp, where she perished. Aaron Weinstein was arrested 1n 1938; he committed suicide in prison.

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania 207 Ukininkai—the wealthier peasants. Most of the Yiddish schools suffered from all of this. I and another friend of mine went to the assistant minister of education 1n

the Christian Democrats—he was called Volodka—with a complaint: why aren’t the Yiddish schools getting the same rights as the Hebrew schools, | why isn’t it allowed to occupy a place in government schools, and other things—various options that we could get from them. | had learned enough Lithuanian to speak the mother tongue [tévy namy kalba]. The man had a black beard. He smiled and asked: ‘Why were only Yiddish teachers arrested?’ Why? Because all those who yesterday were Bundists or unaffiliated became communists. D.L. I have read several articles by Oyzer Finklshteyn in which, 1n the time of the Poles, he showed himself to be very patriotic. When he was writing in Yidishe shtime and other newspapers, he said that we must campaign against the Poles, and he

was a Folkist!

y.M. Yes, among us there were different opinions: whether this was good for Jews or whether it was good for the country at all, as Estonia and Latvia were being created with so many borders. But Oyzer Finklshteyn was a consistent democrat in general, and in favour of the independence of small nations. And he felt that, particularly for the Jewish minority, it was better and healthier to have smaller national entities than bigger ones. D.L. This was in the interests of Lithuanian patriotism.

y.M. In the interests of Lithuanian patriotism. We kept proclaiming that without

Vilna we would not calm down. p.L. I have another question, about Jewish soldiers: in the tume of the Lithuanian independence campaigns did you have a position about fewish participation in the Lithuanian military? Yy.M. We were very happy that there were soldiers, and we were very happy that Jews

stopped getting out of military service. We were also very happy that there were also Jewish officers—not many, but they were there. From the beginning there could have been more—it was simply not wanted. ‘There were no particular Jewish heroes, because in fact Lithuania didn’t go to war with anyone. D.L. The Bermondists, the Bolsheviks, the Poles—they did.®

Y.M. These were groups against whom one had to defend the country. 8 The Bermondists were a combined German-Russian force, formally called the West Russian army, which was created in the Baltic region in 1919. Its name came from its commander, Colonel Pavel

Bermondt-Avalov (1877-1941). The Bermondists invaded Lithuania in 1919 and occupied much of the north of the country. They were defeated by the Lithuanian army in a battle at Radviliskis on 21-3 Nov. 1919. This led to their evacuation from Lithuania in Dec. 1919.

208 Dov Levin D.L. IL think that about twenty Jews at that time fell in battle.

Y.M. Possibly. One even became a high-ranking officer. He was a one-time friend of mine from high school, Bramson—the one who later became the police chief in the Kaunas ghetto. D.L. In the ghetto he was a police chtef, but one day he became a foreman.

y.M. He resigned. It was a positive approach to all these things. In any case, as far as I know, we didn’t say much about that. We took it as a good thing, just as we took it as a good thing that Rozowski played a major role in the Ministry of the Interior. D.L. That’s a side issue. You accepted it, but the Lithuanians?

y.M. As long as they needed us, they kept us. D.L. [’m talking about the Folkists and not about the Jews in general. The Folkist Party emerges, according to what you say and according to what I know, as quite or very loyal.

y.M. Very loyal. D.L. On the other hand, the Lithuanian government started to look askance at you.

Y.M. They started looking askance in the small shtet/s because there might have been

people who were under police suspicion, and the fact that they proclaimed themselves to be Folkists was perhaps evidence that they were communists.

D.L. Yosef Gar writes in his book that he was sent away (because of living rights restrictions) from Utena, I think, to Naumiestis. At the time he was also a Folkist. Y.M. Yes.

D.L. Later it was suspected that he was a Trotskyist or something. This 1s one example of suspicion surrounding Yiddish teachers.

y.M. The police looked askance, with suspicion, at Yiddish teachers, and they really experienced actual incidents. Pll give you an example: theoretically they had to provide a teacher for every forty pupils. If there were, let’s say, thirty-five pupils, then a teacher was also provided. But what happened, let’s say, if there were forty-eight pupils? Then, if you like, the authorities could say they were providing one and a half teachers—paying the salary of one and a half teachers—or they could give no more than for forty. That meant that theoretically Jews retained the same rights—the minorities retained the same rights—but in truth, it was not the same thing. It depended on the administrative response to the actual situation.

I want to tell you that in 1922 we issued a paper called Nayes—a daily paper, and later it became a weekly. In Nayes the terms were coined which

Jewish Autonomy in Inter-War Lithuania 209 later extended to other countries—dozkeyt [hereness] and dortikeyt [thereness].

D.L. Jt all came from Nayes?

y.M. All from Lithuania. I want to tell you how it came about. Mukdoni was the editor of Nayes, Shtif was a co-worker, Kalmanovich was a co-worker, there were other co-workers, and they continually kept saying how good it was and how fair everything was in Ukraine, and that in Lithuania things were not as they ought to be. At that time there was a columnist at the Yidishe shtime called Leyzerovich. Leyzerovich wrote a feature article ‘We the Tarabeynishoks’ at

home in Tarabeynishok. It was a small shtet/ and he called the Folkists the *Tarabeynishoks’. So I wrote: ‘Not true, the Folkists are those that are linked with Lithuania, come from Lithuania; they live in harmony with their Lithuanian leaders. We are from here and the others are from there.’ DL. But they became very famous terms. y.M. Dotke [those from here], dortike [those from there]|—because the Bundists in

Poland absorbed them. :

Now I want to tell you about the great events of 1923. In all those years, in _ truth, there was never a narrow party majority, but we would always come to an agreement. There was always, in the end, a compromise. The last big com-

promise was made in 1923: that Rosenbaum would remain the chairman of the National Assembly. It was agreed that the assistant chairman would be someone from among the religious. I became the secretary of the National Assembly—a coalition, so to speak. Previously the secretary of the National Assembly had been Gorfunkel. Gorfunkel left and I became the secretary of

the National Assembly. |

When I became the secretary of the National Assembly, we set up—the only thing we really succeeded in setting up—a National Jewish Council. Other than Israel I think it is the only country where Jewish representatives were chosen according to general democratic principles by universal, secret, proportional elections. Elections were simultaneously held in the local communities and to the General National Assembly. D.L. How were you chosen?

y.M. As secretary—that was a compromise. That happened, as we say in America, in the smoke-filled rooms. D.L. Why specifically you? You were a young teacher.

Y.M. First, because then, in 1923, I was already known. I had already travelled around, I had participated in elections, I was considered to be a good speaker. I agreed. I left the high school. I felt very uncomfortable as secretary of the

210 Dov Levin National Assembly, because all my employees were older than me. It was a great strain for me and I had to adapt and learn a lot, and the main thing—I had to instil discipline, which had not existed earlier. Pll also tell you, on one of the first days I came early, understandably, and no one else had arrived. One arrives half an hour later, another arrives an hour later, the really important ones come, I don’t know when—whenever they want. What should I do with these people? Call that one into the office and reprimand him? I decided not to do that. So for several days, first thing in the

morning, I sat with the doorman, held a watch in my hand, and simply watched. I greeted everyone who came, and looked at the watch—nothing more. Several days passed by and everyone started arriving punctually. I had to invent all kinds of tricks and ideas, etc. At the time there were months of exceptionally good friendship between me and Rosenbaum, the chairman of the National Assembly. I used to go and see him every day and tell him everything. At meetings we almost always held the same views.

We held the elections: we had to organize them everywhere. That was complicated because the ultra-Orthodox, not the Mizrahi but the Agudah, did not participate in the elections to the National Assembly. They said that they could not participate in the elections to the National Assembly where internal details of Jewish matters were discussed, because they could not be in a situation of being in a minority. They said: ‘We will formulate budgets for the communities, then we will set aside a specific percentage for things we

must have, according to Jewish law.’ They did not want it. They knew that they would form a small minority and so they did not want to participate. They did participate in the community elections but not in the elections to the National Assembly. ‘The communists, on the other hand, didn’t participate in the community elections: they did participate in the elections to the National Assembly. Everyone who came to vote came to vote for two things at once. I did not want under any circumstances, for practical reasons and for reasons of convenience, that we should vote simultaneously for the community and for the National Assembly. I thought we would get more votes in the National Assembly than in the local communities, where people voted for an important Jew whom they knew. And he might be a Mizrahi. The Jewish voters, it appears, are quite politically sophisticated voters and in local elections they voted in many places for important people that they knew, and did not much consider the party issues in the communities. In the elections for the National Assembly people voted for a party rather than for an individual. When the National Assembly came into being, there were about seventy

or seventy-one people. The majority, understandably, were the general Zionists. The general Zionists, Tse’irei Zion, and the Mizrahi were in the majority. ‘They tried to make compromises, and certain compromises were

Fewish Autonomy in [nter-War Lithuania 211 made in resolutions that were never carried out. For instance, the Folkists came forward with another plan for a school system. At the time it was divided into three different Jewish schools: Kultur-lige [Yiddish], Tarbutt [Zionist],

and Yavneh [religious|—three different strands and all had to be treated equally, etc. Our policy was that it is one people, so there should be one school. The programme was that there should be a compromise school: learning in Yiddish, a lot of Hebrew, Tanakh should be taught—a compromise.

D.L. Were you not in the Kultur-lige?

y.M. We were thrown out of the Kultur-lige. As soon as the communists gained strength and they were the majority in the Kultur-lige, they expelled all those who didn’t belong to the Third International. D.L. Was that decided from within?

Y.M. Yes, we were simply thrown out—six or nine months after the Bundists became communists. We started to establish other schools for ourselves and the model was the Ukmergé high school, which never belonged to anybody. One point, to conclude—what happened at the National Assembly? At the National Assembly there were two lectures on education: one was given by Josef Berger, who was the director of Siauliai high school, and I gave a lecture

as well. After that a compromise was reached: a resolution that all Hebrew schools must teach Yiddish, and that in all Yiddish schools Hebrew must be

taught—and it remained on paper: not one Hebrew school introduced Yiddish if they had not taught it previously. In 1922 I produced a brochure called “Di aynhaytlekhe folks-shul’ (“The United Primary School’). In 1922 no one other than myself dared speak of compromise. They said: ‘What is school? It is such a sacred thing and it touches on a world-view. How can one

compromise when every compromise is false and every compromise is hypocrisy, etc.?’ Translated from Yiddish by Helen Beer

The Transfer of Vilna District into Lithuania, 1939 SARUNAS LIEKIS ©

ON to October 1939 Lithuania and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of mutual assistance. This treaty included the transfer of Vilna and its surrounding area, the Vilna district, to the Lithuanian republic. After this transfer, on 28 October 1939, the Lithuanian republic annulled the previously operating Polish laws and introduced its own legal system. Antanas Merkys was appointed commissioner of Vilna and granted extensive legislative powers to control the newly acquired city and

district. The deputy prime minister, Kazys Bizauskas, later replaced Merkys. Following the entry of Lithuanian troops into Vilna, Pranas Kaunas was appointed military commandant of the city. The new Ministry of Education announced that under Lithuanian law the kehilah of the Jewish community, which had exercised authority during Polish rule, would have to be re-elected in May 1940.' As a consequence, the kehilah’s structure and its operating rules would be changed. The leaders of the Jewish community petitioned the Lithuanian minister of internal affairs, Kazys Skuéas, to restore the kehilah’s status as a legal entity and to allow it to continue its activities as under the laws of the former Polish state. Jacob Wygodzki, long-time chairman of the kehilah, sent the petition in January 1940, with the added signatures of the chief rabbi of Vilna, Isaac Rubinstein, and eight other rabbis.” Wygodzki, writing in a brief and unsophisticated manner, asked the Lithuanian authorities to preserve the old kehilah and allow it to continue its activities under the laws that had existed when Vilna had joined Lithuania.? In addition, the Central Union of the Vilna Jewish Merchants

sent a cable to the minister of the interior on 2 February 1940.* The timing of the petitions coincided with the changes in Lithuanian policy towards the Vilna 1D. Stankiinas, Pro Memoria, 10 Feb. 1940, Lithuanian Central State Archive, Vilnius (LCSA), collection 377, inventory 10, file 286, fo. 20.

2 Memorandum by Dr Jacob Wygodzki, Jan. 1940, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 286, fos. 10-11; Memorandum by Isaac Rubinstein, 19 Jan. 1940, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 286, fo. 3. 3 Memorandum by Dr Jacob Wygodzki, 1940, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 286, fo. 12.

4 D. Stankiinas, The Head of the Press and Publicity Department in MI, The Statement, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 286, fo. 1.

The Transfer of Vilna into Lithuania 213 district. After a short initial period of purely administrative and police-enforced measures taken by the authorities to ensure the functioning of social and economic life in the city, the Lithuanians moved to implement the so-called Vilnius political programme, which sought to ‘Lithuanize’ the city by dismissing the Polish élite

from key positions and encouraging the upward mobility of pro-Lithuanian elements. Because ethnic Lithuanians constituted only a tiny group in Vilna, the authorities had to rely on support from other ethnic minorities.° Besides catering to minorities at a general level,® Lithuanian politics included playing off different factions and interests within each community against each other. States usually support minorities in order to enhance state security,’ and the Jews thus seemed useful to Lithuanian policy-makers in pursuing their goal of incorporating the Vilna region. After the partition of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth by the Habsburg

| empire, Prussia, and Russia, each of these three governments introduced its own laws and regulations regarding the Jewish population and the kefi/ot. In Poland these disparate rules of law remained in force until 21 June 1927, when they were finally unified.® The resulting single system established by the new law strongly favoured the religious character of the communities. ‘The law made provision for a so-called Zwiazek Religijny (Religious Union), which was to be headed by a Rada Religijna (Religious Council) in which each local Jewish community organized in a gmina (community) was to be represented. However, this aspect of the law remained on paper, and the Zwiazek Religijny was never established. Each kehilah took responsibility for: organizing and supporting its own rabbinate; founding and supporting its own synagogues, mikvaot, and cemeteries; supervising religious education; supplying kosher meat to the population; and managing community property. Each kehilah collected taxes from the Jewish population to support these activities.” Formally, the kehilot in Poland were divided into two groups: small and large. The small kehilah’s executive board consisted of a rabbi and eight elected members.

Every male over 25 years of age had voting rights to elect board members. The > R. Zepkaité, Vilniaus istorijos atkarpa 1939-1940 (Vilnius, 1990), 127-8. Lithuanian commissioner Kazys Bizauskas maintained that the primary purpose at the time was to increase the patriotism of the non-Lithuanian-speaking inhabitants of Vilna. For that purpose he founded Lithuanian organizations

for non-Lithuanian speakers; organized and co-ordinated the flow of Lithuanian information and propaganda; and encouraged the struggle against opponents of the incorporation of Vilna district using sociopolitical means (ibid.). © Apgvalga, 2/1 (Jan. 1940), 1. In his interview with Yidishe shtime the commandant of Vilna, Pranas Kaunas, said, ‘Vilna Jewish society has demonstrated absolute loyalty and tact towards the Lithuanian state.” The Lithuanian Jewish press printed more detailed articles every day. ’ H. Frisch, “The Druze Minority in the Israeli Military: Traditionalizing an Ethnic Policing Role’, Armed Forces and Society, 20/1 (Fall 1993), 64. 8 Dziennik urzedowy Rzeczypospolites polskie; (“Digest of the Laws of the Polish Republic’), 1927, no. , 52/28, item 500. The law affected all of Poland except Silesia. 9 W. M. Glicksman, A Kehillah in Poland during the Interwar Years (Philadelphia, 1969), 3—5.

214 Sarunas Liekis elections were universal, equal, secret, direct, and based on proportional representation. Large kehilot, which had greater administrative responsibilities, were established in localities with more than 5,000 Jewish inhabitants. 1° Until 1928 the Jews of Vilna administered their religious affairs according to Russian laws. There were some attempts to reorganize the administration of communal affairs along the lines of the law introduced in that year. During the First

World War two rabbis from Germany, Pinhas Kohn and Emanuel Carlebach, wrote a ‘Law of the Vilna Jewish Community’.*t On 25 December 1918 the Vilna Jews elected their first secular kehilah, which proved short-lived (1918—20).'” In 1928, after the introduction of the 1927 Law on Jewish Communities, elections to the large ke/ilah’s twenty-five-member council and twelve-member board were held. Jacob Wygodzki became chairman of the kehz/ah and Leizer Kruk was elected chairman of the board. For many years the rabbi of Vilna, Isaac Rubinstein, served as rabbi of the kehilah. The religious people in the community expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome of the elections. Religious Jews constituted a minority in all community bodies. Immediately after the elections disputes arose between religious and secular groups over the board’s handling of property belonging to the Great Synagogue, the largest synagogue in the town. The kehilah’s newly elected council and board wanted to take immediate control of all property previously in the possession of the Great Synagogue’s board. The dispute soon went to court,

where it became a protracted case. In 1931 riots started over the issue, and the

. authorities forced all sides to come to an agreement that the kehilah and the Great Synagogue would share ownership of the property and their respective boards would manage it together. The Polish minister of education also issued instructions to the Vilna kehilah to impose a compulsory tax upon the Jewish community.!? In spite of this, the political confrontation between these two camps in Vilna did not cease. Indeed, confrontation remained the main feature of the community’s life in Vilna, and seemed an apt reflection of the general situation in Poland, where almost all Jewish communities experienced some internal strife. Jewish political life was marked by the basic division between secular and religious forces. Religious Jewish organizations in eastern Europe denounced the concept of Jewish national autonomy in the Diaspora. Instead, they wanted religious autonomy. Both camps, religious and secular, interpreted the Law on Jewish Com-

munities to their own advantage. In fact, however, the secular Jews, whom the religious Jews usually identified as leftist, dominated the communities for the following reasons. First, kehilot (with the single exception mentioned above) were defined as ‘religious’. Kehilah officials, however, were elected by all Jews, both 10 Dziennik urzedowy Rzeczypospolite; polskie, no. 52/28, item 500. 11 T. Rubinstein, ‘Apie aktualias Vilniaus problemas/ Apzvalga’, Apzvalga, 1/1 (Jan. 1940). 12 S. Kassow, ‘Jewish Communal Politics in Transition: The Vilna Kehile, 1919—1920’, in YIVO Annual, xx (New York, 1991). 13° Deziennik urzedowy Rzeczypospolite) polskie], no. 89/31, item 698.

The Transfer of Vilna into Lithuama 215 religious and non-religious. The non-religious element, which was mainly leftist, participated more actively in politics, so that the religious Jews tended to lose out in elections. Generally the leftists did not care much about religious practice unless it provided income for the community. Thus, Jewish communities experienced internal strife and intercommunal political battles. Secondly, wealthy Jews paid

most of the high kehilah taxes. They were often opposed to the more extreme religious groupings and could count on the support of those who were dependent on charitable relief from the kehzlot.

These conflicts and squabbles continued until the Second World War. In 1935 the authorities disbanded the governing bodies of the community, and in 1936

a new council and board were elected for the period 1936—40.'* The council and board had twenty-five members, seventeen of whom, according to the Vilna religious Jews, were secular Jews and only eight of whom were religious or sympa-

thetic to the religious group.’° The kehilah managed the cemetery, the mikveh, some thirty houses, several plots of land, two libraries, and a hospital. ‘They also gave subsidies to rabbinical seminaries and supported the Talmud Torahs. In 1939 expenditure on religious tasks and programmes reached 160,000 zlotys, and the annual budget of the kehilah reached 737,893 zlotys.'® The kehilah’s council and

board had twenty-five employees, and 25 per cent of the budget went towards their _ salaries.1"

The legal situation of the Vilna Jewish community changed radically after the transfer of the Vilna district to Lithuania on 28 October 1939, because the legal status of the Jewish community in Lithuania differed from that in Poland. In 1925, after a short period of secular Jewish autonomy in Lithuania (1918-25), the government had changed the Jewish communal structure to eliminate this secular autonomy.'® The 1925 law permitted Jewish national communities defined by the Jews and called kehilot (although exempted from responsibility for religious matters), but it allowed such kehzlot to be established only in Jewish places of residence. The leaders of the old kehilot gathered in December 1925 at the conference of Jewish 14 ‘The council consisted of twenty-five people who elected a twelve-person board. The rabbi of the city, Isaac Rubinstein, was chosen as the thirteenth member of the board. The chairperson and vicechairperson of the board had to be approved by the local administration. The board of the Vilna kehilah elected in 1936 had the following members: Jacob Wygodzki, chair, and Shepsel Milkonovicki, vice-

chair (both representatives of the Zionists); Gorsh Elijasberg (Zionist Revisionist representative); Shloima Broido (Mizrahi representative); Efraim Pruzham and Ovsiei Viduchanskii (both representatives of merchants); Leizer Kruk (representative of artisans); Rubin Kahan (Agudah representative); Shloimo Bostomsky (Democratic Progressivists representative); Abram Faynsilber, Joseph Teitel, and Jankel Zhelezniakov (all Bund representatives). In 1939 Jankel Zhelezniakov and Abram Faynsilber were exiled by the Soviets to Siberia, as was the chairman of the Vilna Jewish council, J. Chernikhov, and vice-chairman, J. Aranovich. 5 Zydy tikybiniy reikaly tvarkymas Lietuvoje ir Vilniaus kraSte’, memorandum, LCSA, collection

377, inventory 10, file 286, fo. 41. | 16 A.I. LivSicas, Raportas, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 287, fo. 46.

‘7 Thid., fo. 42. 18 Vyriausybes Zinios, 192/ 1304.

216 Sarunas Liekis communities to discuss the situation, and they decided not to elect kehilot according to the new law, but to abstain from voting. Thus, the elections for the new kehilot held by the government on 1 January 1926 were boycotted and therefore failed to elect representatives of the communities. On 8 March 1926 the minister of internal

affairs reacted to the stand taken by the Jewish communities by stipulating that wherever new kehilot had not been established by 1 February 1926, the old kehilot were to elect commissions for the purposes of liquidating them and disposing of their property.'? New kehilot would not be elected, and all property that was unrelated to Jewish religious practice would be transferred to the Ezra Organization for Charity, Mutual Assistance, and Culture, while property used for religious purposes would be transferred to Adat Israel. ‘Thus the kehi/ot were to be liquidated, but the new Law on Jewish Communities of 1925 remained valid. The religious functions of the kehilot were partially taken over by the boards of the synagogues.

On 19 November 1928 the Ministry of Education and its religious department issued decision number 18220, validating the existing practice under which the boards of the synagogues and prayer houses administered all Jewish religious property.”° Later, in 1930, the Central Rabbinical Executive Committee was founded to oversee Jewish religious affairs throughout Lithuania.?! According to the census of 1931, more than 450,000 people lived in the Vilna district. Poles constituted 39.37 per cent, Jews 34.16 per cent, and Lithuanians 19.23 per cent of the population. ‘The remainder included Belarusians, Russians, Tatars, and others. These data do not accurately reflect the situation in the region at the end of 1939, because on 2 December 1939 the Lithuanian authorities registered an additional 18,311 refugees from Poland.** Of the refugees 7,728 were Poles, 6,860 were Jews, and 3,723 were Lithuanians.” Because of winter shortages, the number of people registering as refugees and thus eligible for state assistance increased to 25,139.74 In Vilna the Lithuanian authorities had to deal with a very active Jewish communal and cultural life. According to the Lithuanian Ministry of Internal Affairs, 176 of the 441 organizations existing in the Vilna district on 10 October 1939 were Jewish organizations.*° Thus, Jewish organizations made up about 39.9 per cent of all of the organizations in Vilna. ‘The corresponding proportion in Lithuania proper was somewhat different. On 1 January 1939 there were 220 Jewish organizations out of a total of 789. Thus, the Jewish organizations accounted for 27.9 per cent of all organizations.7° Given that Jews comprised approximately 7.5 per cent of the population in the country as a whole, this was rather a high proportion. 19 Vyriausybés Zinios, 218/1425. 20 ‘The Chancellery of the Commissioner for the Vilna Area, LCSA, collection 401, inventory 4, file

16a, fo. 656. 21 Vyriausybés Zinios, 3228/2248. 22 Zepkaité, Vilniaus istorijos atkarpa 1939-1940, 49. 23 Tbid. 50. 24 Tbid. 110. 2° ‘Vilniaus srityje veikusiy draugijy statistika pagal tautybe ir pobidi’, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 416, fo. 103. 26 Lietuvos organizacijos 1939 m. sausio m. 1 d., LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 416, fo. 1.

The Transfer of Vilna into Lithuania 217 Various interest groups clashed over the issue of the Vilna kehilah. The question of its continued existence became more acute because of the planned elections to its council and board in 1940. Legally, there was great confusion. Until 1939 the Vilna kehilah was one of many kehilot functioning under a Polish law from 1928 uniting all kehilot into a single Zwiazek Religijny Publiczno-Prawny (Public Legal Religious Union). According to the law, all kehilot were subordinate to the Rada Religijna (Religious Council). If the Vilna kehilah were legalized, it would be impossible to establish a religious council because everywhere else in Lithuania kehilot were non-

existent. The law therefore had to undergo substantial change. The Lithuanian authorities might have tried revitalizing the former ‘little’ kehilot in the Vilna district and creating a small-scale religious council for the Vilna district alone, but such a course was not feasible, as it would have entailed two sets of laws for the Jewish community in the unified Lithuanian state. Interestingly enough, the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Internal Affairs acted not on the basis of legal arguments, but in accordance with what they deemed to be ‘state interests’. Domas Stankunas, department head for press and organization supervision at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, defended this concept of state interests and presented a memorandum on the subject to the minister of internal affairs. He maintained that: 1. The aim of the Lithuanian state was to integrate the Vilna district into Lithuania and abolish all differences between the Vilna district and the rest of Lithuania that were present during the twenty years of the Polish occupation.

2. Re-creating Jewish autonomy would encourage other ethnic and religious groups to seek the same kind of autonomy. The religious part of the Vilna Jewish community would have to be satisfied with the councils of synagogues and the rabbinical executive committees. 3. Jewish affairs had not been satisfactorily settled in Poland, and the application of Polish laws regarding Jews would not help to settle matters.

4. With the transfer of Vilna to Lithuania, the percentage of Jews among the population in Lithuania increased from 7 per cent to 9 or even 10 per cent. The

Jewish minority was gaining strength culturally and politically, and thus it might change the political programme and actions of the Lithuanian state. As we might have guessed, his opinion on Jewish autonomy was ultimately negative: “The kehilah should not be allowed to work in the Vilna district or in other

territories.”*’ The minister of internal affairs accepted his recommendations. Interestingly, however, one person in the ministry did defend the idea of Jewish autonomy. A censor of the Jewish press in the Ministry of Internal Affairs by the name of A. I. Livsicas, himself a Jew, gave his opinion in a report addressed to the supervisor Stankunas. Livsicas presented a short summary of the activities of the Vilna kehilah and justified the claims of the kehilah leaders. The kehilah, he 27 Stankunas, The Statement.

218 Sarunas Liekis stated, focused on religious, social, cultural, and political life, and Livsicas considered it politically unwise for the authorities to abolish it. The withdrawal of the legal basis for the kehilah’s existence would cause resentment and distrust towards the authorities. Instead, it should be allowed to function as before, but under appropriate supervision and strong surveillance.2® Neither his recommendations nor the memoranda from the defenders of the kehilah met with a positive response. (Livsicas’s report had incorporated the arguments put forth in the memoranda submitted by the defenders of the kehilah.) The Vilna rabbi, Isaac Rubinstein, composed the most elaborate and coherent memorandum, giving the following moral and idealistic arguments for preserving the kehz/ah in its old form:

1. The Vilna kehilah was one of the oldest and most respected Jewish institutions in the world. 2. Closing the kehilah’s institutions would strike an undeserved blow at the Jewish society of Vilna. 3. The Vilna kehilah was an important donor to the poor of the city. 4. Terminating the kehilah would degrade and insult Dr Jacob Wygodzki, its longstanding chairman.

in the United States.”°

5. Closing the kehilah would make an unfavourable impression abroad, especially

The Lithuanian Ministry of Internal Affairs understood the existing problems between religious and secular elements in the community quite well. Different branches of the government, such as the news department in the Ministry of Defence, some other offices in the military, the Department of Political Police, the state security police, which had been integrated into the structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Board A of the Criminal Police Department had for years

| spied on various ethnic, political, and religious groups. From 1934 onward the state security police maintained a ‘third unit’ in its Espionage Department to keep track of organizations whose members included political emigrés from other countries. This unit also conducted surveillance of ethnic and religious minorities, including Jews.°° It gathered accurate information and made practical recommendations to the government. On the basis of this information the ministry concluded that the abolition of Jewish autonomy, which had been guaranteed under Polish laws, would not raise discontent in Vilna, and that the question of the legalization of the Vilna

kehilah concerned mostly the kehilah leaders, who benefited most directly from its existence. Religious Jews were more interested in organizing purely religious organizations than in preserving the previous kehilot, which were dominated by the 28 AI. LivSicas, Raportas, 5 Mar. 1940, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 286, fo. 49. 29 J. Rubinstein, Memorandum, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file, 286, fos. 21-2. 30 A. Anusouskas, Lietuvos slaptosios tarnybos 1918—1940 (Vilnius, 1993), 170.

The Transfer of Vilna into Lithuania 219 secular leaders. From the outset the religious communal leaders and the religious

organizations in Vilna focused on making contacts with their counterparts in Lithuania. At that stage even the kehilah’s leaders did not know the official opinion of its own council and board, who did not discuss these issues, and furthermore

, they did not meet after June 1939. The Lithuanian government prevented the kehilah from supervising or participating in educational and charity activities. The Jewish schools started receiving support from the government, and Jewish orphanages were supervised by the local authorities. In February 1940 the officials responsible for the supervision of public organizations in Lithuania issued categorical recommendations: ‘It is the right time now to make unified legal principles for the Jews in the Vilna district and for the Jews in Lithuania. It would be better for us to do this as quickly as possible.’*! Official discussion, however, did not reflect the internal communal strife in the kehilah. Various factions in the kehilah exploited the state’s position to advance their own interests, and this in turn brought the whole issue to a head. On 10 December 1939 the rabbinate of Vilna elected a committee to manage religious property in accordance with the official Lithuanian ‘Instructions for the Board of the Synagogues and Houses of Prayer’.*” For unknown reasons, the commissioner’s office did not receive the letter containing the election information together with the request for voter registration until 1 February 1940. Registration for the new board was set for 2 February. On 5 February the commissioner, Kazys Bizauskas, warned the Vilna district’s police chiefs that they would have to assist the board to safeguard the public during the transfer of Jewish religious property from the kehilah to the board by 10 February. The police immediately informed the property managers about the forthcoming changes in ownership.*? On 7 February the rabbis obtained verbal permission from the authorities to proceed with a takeover of the property and of all

religious functions.** On the same day the rabbis made an attempt to seize the cemetery, the Strashun Library, and the Great Synagogue. The events which followed were described in the morning edition of the Kaunas Yiddish newspaper Dos vort of 8 February.®° The move was called an atentat (encroachment), organized by Agudah (a political party of religiously Orthodox Jews) against the kehilah. The chairman of the Vilna Mizrahi (the party of religious Zionists), Josif Shkolnicki, the governor of the Great Synagogue, Michael Strashun, and a young man referred to in the newspaper as Altman”° together attempted to gain possession of 31 ‘Zydy tikybiniy reikaly tvarkymas Lietuvoje ir Vilniaus kraSte’, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 286, fos. 43-4.

°2 LCSA, collection 401, inventory 4, file 16a, fo. 1. The committee had elected the following presidium: Josel Shuv, chairman; Vulf Krinski, member; Michael Strashun, treasurer; Hirsh Eljashberg, member; Daniel Rozenhauz, member; More Davidzon, secretary; Abram Vigdorchik, member. Candidates included: Movsha Volozhinski, Josif Shkolnicki, and Shalit Tevelis. 33 Letter no. 2118, LCSA, collection 401, inventory 4, file 16a, fo. 656.

34 Stankiinas, Pro Memoria. 35 Dos vort, 33 (8 Feb. 1940). 3° Sheftel Altman, the lawyer for the committee from Kaunas.

220 Sarunas Liekts the property. They obtained only the signatures of two cemetery watchmen for the surrender of the cemetery. This caused uproar in the community. The kehilah’s chairman, Jacob Wygodzki, hastily telephoned the Lithuanian commissioner in Vilna, Kazys Bizauskas, and appealed for help in ending the conflict. In this conversation Bizauskas retracted the permission he had given earlier to the newly formed synagogue committee to assume control of the property. He said that he had been 1ll informed on the issue before giving his permission and declared that his previous instructions relating to the transfer of the property were now void." The officials of the kehilah proceeded to counter-attack. They hid the keys to the synagogue and closed the Strashun Library. The same day active members of the Vilna kehilah serving on the Jewish committee for refugees excluded Josif Shkolnicki from the committee. Michael Strashun immediately lost his post as governor of the Great Synagogue. Curiously, the commissioner for Vilna, Kazys Bizauskas, asked the Ministry of Internal Affairs to prevent the publication of any information on these events. The commissioner then announced that for the time being, and until the issuance of new instructions, he would suspend the transfer of the property.°°

The censor of the Jewish press in Vilna, Livsicas, immediately contacted his colleague D. Margolis, supervisor of the Jewish press in Kaunas, and asked him to prevent the Kaunas Jewish press from publishing any information about the scan-

dal in Vilna. Despite the ban, the information leaked and the article mentioned above was published. The Vilna Jewish newspapers Vilner kuryer and Vilner togblat

immediately reacted and accused the Lithuanian authorities of applying double standards for the Kaunas and the Vilna Jewish newspapers. The ministry, acting with the consent of the commissioner’s office, agreed to make a formal statement on

the subject during a regular Jewish radio programme, and to publish a limited account of the conflict in the Vilna press.” In order to preserve peace in the city the authorities decided not to harass the Jews of Vilna over this issue. The Lithuanian government was having enough trouble in Vilna with the militant Polish undereround opposition organizations and with widespread Polish popular discontent. Later the commissioner’s office proceeded to enforce the rule that the synagogues’ boards were to be the only Jewish representative bodies. By 26 April 1940 fifty synagogues and prayer houses in Vilna and in the Vilna district had received instructions and certificates to register for elections to the boards of synagogues and prayer houses.*° Between February and April the commissioner’s office collected signed oaths of allegiance to the Lithuanian state and written promises to follow Lithuanian laws from 640 synagogue board members from the entire Vilna district.** In order to avoid any unwelcome developments, Jacob Wygodzki was summoned to 37 Dos vort, 33 (8 Feb. 1940). 38 LCSA, collection 401, inventory 4, file 16a, fo. 650. 39 A. LivSicas, Raportas, 8 Feb. 1940, LCSA, collection 377, inventory 10, file 286, fo. 29. 40 LCSA, collection 401, inventory 4, file 16a, fos. 660-2.

41 LCSA, collection 401, inventory 4, file 16a, fo. 4. ,

The Transfer of Vilna into Lithuania | 221 the fourth district police office on 3 April to hear the decision by Commissioner Kazys Bizauskas (number 2118, dated 5 February) detailing the transfer of the property to the newly established synagogue boards.*” Finally, on 11 April, the Ministry

of Education announced the official date for elections to the boards of the synagogues and prayer houses: they would take place on 3 June. It further warned that all synagogues not holding board elections on that date might be closed. The results of the elections were to be sent to Commissioner Bizauskas.*° Thus, the Vilna kehilah was not re-elected, although this would have been possible under Lithuanian law. But nobody took the initiative, presumably for reasons similar to those operating in Lithuania in 1926. If the elections had been held under the regulations of 1925—6, the Vilna kehizlah would have been deprived of autonomy

| under the Law on Jewish Autonomy. In addition, religious Jews were satisfied with a purely religious expression of organized Jewish life. Jewish leftists, such as Bund members and others, who had actively participated in the kehi/ah’s activities, were decimated by the Soviets before the entry of Lithuanian troops into the city. Those who had left or fled Poland to Vilna as refugees attempted to keep a low profile

because of the negative attitude and repressive means used by the Lithuanian authorities towards the left and towards all politically active refugee groups.

| The whole issue soon became moot, however. On 25 May 1940 the Lithuanian , government appointed Jacob Wygodzki to the twelve-member Vilna city council, and thus gave him some compensation for his failure to implement his plans for the kehilah.“* The office of the commissioner for the Vilna district was abolished on 8 June,*? and after that the synagogue boards had no one to whom to send their election results. One week later Lithuania lost its independence in accordance with the Soviet ultimatum. The process of Sovietization then began. Lithuania’s new

rulers abolished all non-communist public organizations, and the issue of the kehilah accordingly disappeared. Nevertheless, the boards of the synagogues and prayer houses continued to exist for more than a year after the Soviet occupation, until the beginning of the Soviet—German war on 22 June 1941. This whole story once more confirms that the abolition of Jewish autonomy and of traditional Jewish communal structures in Lithuania in 1926 occurred as a result of state policy and not by accident. The abrogation of Jewish autonomy stemmed neither from the will of any one political party nor from the intentions of a few individuals at a particular moment; rather, it reflected the modernizing tendency of the state to abolish any particularism in society, thus increasing social mobility and facilitating the formation of a modern nation. The policies regarding the Jewish community in Vilna were an unconscious attempt to define Jewish identity in religious rather than national terms and to encourage in the Jews a civic identification #2 LCSA, collection 401, inventory 4, file 16a, fo. 648. 43 Letter no. 9571, LCSA, collection 401, inventory 4, file 16a, fo. 664. 44 Vyriausybés Zinios, 708/ 5506.

* Tbid. 708/5507.

222 Sarunas Liekis with the Lithuanians. This tendency contradicted the dominant, typically east European, concept of nationality in Lithuania, which recognized the existence of many nationalities in the state, and among them the Jewish nationality.*° 46 The Lithuanian constitution recognized the existence of ethnic minorities and guaranteed their rights. Officially recognized nationalities, or ethnic groups with political rights as such, included the Jews as well as the Germans, Russians, and others. The census of 1923 identified Jews as comprising a nationality but not a religion.

Jan Kazimierz University 1936-1939:

~ A Memoir

BRONISLAWA WITZ-MARGULIES MokRE than sixty years have passed—almost all of my conscious life—since I first crossed the threshold of the Jan Kazimierz University (now L’viv University) as a student. The time has been both long and short. After I had finished at the Gymnasium and was taking university entrance exams, I dreamed only of learning. |

thought about lectures and classes. I was impressed with the ancient building’s beautiful lecture halls and galleries full of books. For me, the world of knowledge was the most beautiful world. But the year was 1936... Thousands of people were rallying in L’viv, Stanislav, Drohobych, Lutsk, and other cities. Both Ukrainian flags and red workers’ banners were raised in the villages, and when an unemployed Cossack was killed, his funeral turned into a huge demonstration. The People’s House was bursting with discussion. At a huge convention the progressive Polish intelligentsia expressed its support for many of the left’s demands. The university community, a microcosm of society at large, was split by ethnic, social, and political conflict. Student unions, for example, were divided along the lines of nationality. The authorities were reluctant to create unified, multi-ethnic organizations, so in each department there were separate Polish, Ukrainian, and

Jewish clubs and student professional unions. As far as I remember, only one accredited organization, the rather small Zjednoczenie (Unity) group, led by the philosophy student Izak Eisenberg, included students of all three nationalities. Most of the students came from wealthy families; you had to have resources not just for living expenses but for tuition as well. Scholarships were rare, even though they were granted only as loans to be paid back after completion of the course. Those whose parents could provide them with unlimited resources sometimes became

‘eternal students’ who only pretended to study, failed exams, and went on ‘study- | ing’. Attendance at the lectures was open, which meant that, with the exception of the fixed minimum of classes required by their departments, students were free to go to the library, attend other classes (language classes that they might consider useful, for example), or not to participate at all. Some rich students divided their ‘free’ time between parties and political activities, but there were also some students at the university with limited resources who combined their studies with paid

224 Bronstawa Witz-Margulies work. They usually got into university only through heroic effort, after several years of working (mostly as tutors, because other work was hard to find), saving every penny, and starving themselves for the sake of their future studies. If they kept their jobs, they often failed the very demanding exams because they had not had enough time to prepare. In most cases, they were unable to finish their studies on schedule.

As for politics, it seemed that just about every party and political current in Poland had its supporters and representatives among the students. Both the right wing and the left wing were there. The fiercest battle was over the nationality question, although each nationality had its right-wing and left-wing students. There were relatively few Ukrainians at the university because young people in the countryside—both Ukrainian and Polish—had little possibility of finishing secondary school. The Jewish students came from the towns. Thanks to the tremendous efforts of their parents, some of them finished their courses at private Gymnasiums , (Jews were almost never accepted at public ones), and the most talented of them went on to university. There were quite a few professors and scholars of Jewish origin. The emancipation of Jews in Europe had been going on for some half a century, and young Jews were hungry for modern knowledge. But the political struggle was an obstacle here.

The Ukrainians experienced ethnic discrimination at the university, but antisemitism became an especially favoured watchword of the young people from the Obo6z Narodowo-Radykalny (National Radical Camp), the Mtodziez Wszechpolska

(All-Polish Youth), and the Endecja (National Democrats). In those years the fascist wind was already blowing from the West, though for the time being just as an ideology. No doubt under its influence, the racist mood increased sharply in the land that had once welcomed the Jews and had been their homeland for many centuries—sometimes an unkind one, but always dear. I am a Jew, and I felt this with pain. At the university, members of fraternities in their velvet caps demanded a proportional quota or zero admission for Jewish students, and they declared ‘Jewless days’, when their pickets prevented students of my nationality from entering the university building. I remember that on one such day we marched down 3 May Street and in front of the university shouted: ‘We want to study!’ Near the university a brave girl named Paulina Festig ran out from our ranks, jumped into the crowd of men picketing, tore down and crumpled their poster with the slogan ‘A Day Without Jews’, and returned to us before those boys knew what was happening. There were assaults in the town and even a murder at the university. We marched at the funeral of a student named Peczenik. The ‘ghetto benches’ were put into the lecture halls. Only Poles could sit on the right side; the thugs ordered Jews to sit on

the left. The Ukrainians didn’t want to get involved, so they usually sat on both sides at the back. We did not accept the ghetto benches. We gave in to force—they

Jan Kazimerz University 1936-1939 225 were capable of pushing a girl downstairs—and would go to the left, but no one would sit down. We listened to the lectures standing. The illegal Komsomol (Union of Communist Youth) was influential among leftist students of all nationalities, even though you could go to gaol or to the camp in Bereza Kartuska for belonging to it. The Soviet Communist Party dissolved it in 1938, together with the Communist Parties of Poland, western Ukraine, and western Belarus, on the pretext that they had all been infiltrated by numerous informers. But the komsomoltsy continued their activities, keeping them secret from both the authorities and far-off Moscow. They lectured on Marxism in the legal organizations and talked about the Soviet Union, although, as it turned out, they knew very little about it themselves. They were looking at the world through a prism of progressive theories, through rose-tinted spectacles. The leftists of each nationality opposed chauvinism ‘at home’; for example, the Ukrainians opposed the Ukrainska Orhanizatsiia Natsionalistychna (Ukrainian National Organization) and the Jews opposed the right-wing Zionists. Against this sad background of political feuds in the school, all of the professors who taught me were magnificent. Above all, these were highly cultured people. Most of them condemned the rioting, the ghetto benches, and so on. In any case, even though they held varying political views, they were all decent people. When part of the class, including girls, listened to lectures standing up, they also ostentatiously remained standing and led their classes that way. Some even began to treat the students who were being discriminated against with particular warmth. For all that, I was inexpressibly grateful to them. The professors tried to divert the young people’s attention away from politics, to turn the university into what it was meant to be and what it had long been: a sanctuary of learning. History itself has taught that political upheavals cannot stop the progress of scholarly knowledge, even if they can interrupt it for a time. At Jan Kazimierz University there were many prominent scholars who set up their own scientific schools. ‘Their names, their works, and their creative powers are preserved in the annals of learning despite the mass destruction of the intelligentsia of L’viv at the hands of the Nazis during the war. Some of them left the country and survived.

Some of their students also survived, and among them there are many renowned scholars in Poland and abroad. When I recall the university, it is above all the scholarship that I remember. I enrolled in the humanities department, but I didn’t want to limit myself to one area of study because I was interested in too many things. So I chose two specialities: classics and philosophy. To be accepted into the classics department I had to

take an exam in ancient Greek. I had studied Greek as an extramural student because it was offered only in men’s Gymnasiums (women’s Gymnasiums offered only Latin) and in some cloister schools for nuns. I had studied it for six months

before my Gymnasium final exam, and then I| studied over the vacation—and passed. ‘The classical philology department was famous for the volume of materials

226 Bronstawa Witz-Margulies covered and for its stringent requirements. Few students finished in less than seven to eight years. It was not an attractive prospect, but at that time I was quite selfconfident and hoped optimistically that somehow everything would be fine. So there I was at the centre of academic life, studying in two humanities departments and a member of student professional unions. Moreover, the kindly professor Mieczystaw Kreutz, chair of the psychology department, soon gave mea job asa

secretary two hours a day and arranged a stipend for me, which freed me from tutoring. It was bliss sitting in the spacious study halls, reading works on classical archaeology or the history of philosophy. (Later, in 1939-40, I transferred to the history department.) It is interesting that what sticks in my memory from those early years at the university is not so much the scholarly truths and acquired knowledge, but images of the professors and lecturers and some characteristic details and events. Professors Ryszard Ganszyniec and Jerzy Kowalski ‘ruled’ in the classical philology department. The office of Professor Ganszyniec—an authority on cultural and religious studies—had a sanctity about it. Students, especially younger ones, entered only when summoned by the assistant. How many times was I there over the course of three years? Perhaps two or three times. I remember the soft carpet, the shelves filled with books against all the walls and up to the ceiling, the huge desk, and the professor behind it: grey, kind, and at the same time demanding. The consultation on my student essay, “Totem and Taboo in Ancient Greece’, took place there, and six months later there was another conversation about the finished work. I became genuinely interested in the subject which the professor had assigned to me, though from my current perspective I was too enthusiastic about Sigmund Freud’s works on the topic. My interest in the history of religion prob-

, ably dated from that time. The professor accepted my work regardless of whether he agreed with the conclusions and reasoning of a second-year-student—this much was obvious. What mattered to him was the quality of the work, whether the student could think in a scholarly manner, find and use the sources, write a thesis. Nobody taught these things. We were learning them from books, by studying independently. By that time Professor Stanistaw Witkowski had already left Jan Kazimierz University. He had been the chair of the classical philology department from 1902 to 1935, and his tradition was still alive there. He was a world-renowned Hellenist, an unsurpassed student of Greek language and literature and ancient texts, the initiator of a number of fields in classical studies, and the creator and editor of

Studia Leopolttana. Earlier (1902-9) he had been the chief editor of the international journal EOS. He contributed to many scholarly journals; his essays never ceased to appear. He died in 1950 in Warsaw. His students also worked in classical philology at the university: docents J. Smereka and M. Auerbach (later a professor until 1941), M. Golias (the well-known author of secondary-level textbooks), and others. After the war the prominent professors Iurii F. Musak and I. Kobiv worked

Jan Kazimerz University 1936-1939 227 there, as did I. Husar, and others. Later, between 1953 and 1964, the renowned scholar Professor Solomon Jakovlevich Lurie raised the standard of the classics to a high level. Iam privileged to have been taught by him in Leningrad in 1945-8, and also by anumber of his eminent students. Ryszard Ganszyniec studied with the best German professors. Before L’viv he had worked in Warsaw and Poznan. He was a younger colleague of Witkowski, and at the department in L’viv he tirelessly continued and broadened all fields of Witkowski’s research, especially his publishing activities. For many years (1924-34) he was the editor-in-chief of the journal EOS, which he raised to the highest academic standard. He also created and edited Przeglgd klasyczny (‘Classical Review’) and Kwartalnik klasyczny (‘Classical Quarterly’) as well as the journals for high-school students Filomata and Palaestra (in Latin). Ganszyniec named his separate section in the department the Katedra Kultury Antycznej (Chair of Ancient Culture). While at its helm, he published a series of works on the history of religion. And, like Witkowski, he researched and popularized the legacy of Polish medieval and modern humanists who wrote in Latin. For me, his works on the history of ancient Greek philosophy were particularly important; in them my philological and philosophical interests were combined. After the war Ganszyniec was a professor at Wroctaw University from 1946 to 1948, and then at Kraké6w University until his death in 1958. Many scholars came from his school, including, among others, his assistant Bronistaw Bilinski, who after the war became | a well-known Polish scholar and editor of one of the pillars of Polish classical philology, the series Archiwum Filologiczne (‘Philological Archives’). We were enraptured by Professor Jerzy Kowalski’s lectures on Roman literature. Kowalski was one of the most visible figures in the history of classical philology at L’viv University in the inter-war period. His erudition seemed limitless. An alumnus of Krakow University, he was a student of the prominent Polish classicists Kazimierz Morawski, L. Szternbach, and Tadeusz Sinko. Like Ganszyniec, Kowalski was very broad in his scholarship. He was a student of ancient literature, culture, and scholarship as well as of Latin historical grammar and the rhetoric of ancient Greece. He was the author of seminal works on rhetoric and rhetors, and on ancient geography. He wrote a whole series of introductions to new editions of the classical authors on whom he lectured at special courses at the university. When Kowalski was telling us about Roman poets and writers, they appeared before our eyes, and we started to understand the content and style of their works as well as their role in the development of literature. In his lectures on the poetry of Ovid, Propertius, and Catullus, Kowalski quoted their poems from memory with perfect diction, trying to enhance the characteristics and the colour of ancient conceptions, images, and presentations, and their beauty and poetic power. For one thing, he did not shy away from the juicy representations of erotic openness characteristic of ancient peoples. If I’m not mistaken, he quoted from Ovid’s Ars amatoria

(“The Art of Love’). I remember that the nuns who made up almost the entire

228 Brontstawa Witz-Margulies female part of the audience blushed terribly, but courageously carried on with their note-taking. The professor possessed not only scholarly talents, but also literary ones. Together with his wife, Anna Kowalska, he wrote stories and novels about the life of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Professor Kowalski was a demanding teacher, and he didn’t allow students to procrastinate. In our first year he was already giving us tests that required us to read and translate difficult authors. I remember that once, when we were reading Cicero, one of my colleagues, a nun, was having trouble coping with the translation and I dared to prompt her. The professor noticed it immediately. He gave me a look likea bolt of lightning, but all he did was ask me what year I was in. ‘First’, I stuttered, terrified—and I never prompted anyone ever again.

After the war Jerzy Kowalski was a professor at Lublin and Wroclaw Universities, but he died prematurely in 1949. Among his prominent students who worked or are still working in the field is the Ukrainian scholar I mentioned before,

I. U. Kobiv, who continues the work of his teachers and does research on their activities;' and there are several other professors in Poland.* Memories are rarely precise, so here I have used some data from his works.°

In the archaeology department Professor Bulanda introduced students to the world of ancient discoveries—at least in theoretical terms. His assistant was Kazimierz Majewski, later an equally well-known Polish archaeologist. In archaeology classes each student had to prepare a presentation. I remember the many hours

I spent over the literature on excavations in Priena, a Greek city in Asia Minor. Professor Bulanda came to the archaeology lab and, although I had mastered only the rudiments of archaeological notation, observed my efforts with warm encouragement. Before my eyes the everyday life of ancient Greece emerged from behind the ruins of gorgeous temples and porticos. It was a world of the distant and faded past, but at the same time of eternal life—the world ofa nation that gave so much to modern civilization. Students in classical philology had to attend language classes in Latin and Greek. The classes were run by M. Auerbach and M. Golias, excellent instructors whom I’ve already mentioned. There were also classes in modern languages, which were very important not only for the students of antiquity. In general, anyone could learn the language he needed, or that he simply wanted to learn. And learn they did: there was never a shortage of students in language classes.

I took a class on the history of the ancient world, and Professor Konstanty Chylinski supervised my exam. He was a Russian émigré and the author of several ! I. U. Kobiv, ‘Stanislav Vitkovskyi: Vydatnyi doslidchyk antychnosti’, in Pytannia klasychnot filolohii, iii (Kiev, 1963); id., ‘R. Hanshynets: Nevtomymyi doslidchyk 1 orhanizator u haluzi antychnot filolohii’, ibid.; id., ‘Iezhy Kovalskyi: Vyznachnyi znavets antychnosti’, in [storia 1 kultura antychnosti (3-i Naukovi chytannia pamiati profesora S. Ja. Lurie) (L’viv, 1990).

2 Among other professors in the department of classical philology was, for example, the highly respected Professor Manteuffel. I cannot write about them since I don’t remember them. Because I

studied in two departments, I had to make choices, and did not take their courses. 3 Seen. 1.

Jan Kazimierz University 1936-1939 229 works on the epigraphs and the history and historiography of ancient Greece. He was already an elderly man, and very kind. He did not mercilessly fail students as other professors often did; people usually passed. If a stuttering student babbled some nonsense, the professor put his hand to his heart and said, ‘My boy, spare my bad heart, please, because it might not hold out!’ Perhaps that 1s why it was so pleasant for me to see his face expressing satisfaction at my answers during the exam, and then to receive my A grade. Perhaps because of their speciality, the classicists managed to keep their distance from political passions. Nevertheless, we knew that Professors Kowalski and Ganszyniec, for example, had opinions close to the left. Professor Ganszyniec publicly condemned national discrimination and the anti-democratic reactionaries many times. These were true humanists.

A more modern atmosphere prevailed in my second department, philosophy. By then the highly respected Professor Kazimierz Twardowski had already left. He was the creator of a philosophical school, and his pedagogical work at the university

had a great impact on the development of Polish philosophy. But the eminent scholars Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Roman Ingarden, and Mieczystaw Kreutz were still there. Professor Ajdukiewicz continued in T'wardowski’s school, the L’viv—Warsaw school of neo-positivism, which emphasized the significance of the use of words in scholarly thinking and investigated the relationship between theoretical and empirical bases of scholarship and the essence and function of the quantification and

formalization of learning. ,

I remember how the professor tried to explain some philosophical concepts to the new students in the first classes of the first year. With a mysterious expression on his face, he took a piece of chalk and hid it behind his back: supposedly the chalk was no more! I don’t remember what he was trying to explain with this example— the difference between theoretical and empirical knowledge, limitations of the latter, or something else. But, although I had taken an introduction to philosophy

class at my Gymnasium, it was this simple image, supported by the scholar’s authority, that stuck in my memory. I became neither a neo-positivist, nor a professional philosopher. After the reorganization in September 1939, when the university became the University of Ivan Franko, there was no longer a philosophy department. But memories of the seminar served me well when I needed to understand subjective idealism according to Marxist philosophy, and sensualism and empiricism in the history of philosophy, and even much later when I wrote my dissertation on Protagoras. Asa logician Professor Ajdukiewicz was unsurpassed. He lectured on logic from the rudiments we had all learned in school to logistic and mathematical logic. I did

not get to that level, and later I greatly regretted it. After the war Professor Ajdukiewicz headed the logic section at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology

230 Bronistawa Witz-Margulies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he wrote many new works on general and

mathematical logic and created a semantic theory of language. But back then in L’viv he was still a very attractive young man, kind to his students, with democratic convictions, who never built a wall between himself and his listeners. He was one of the best-liked and most respected of the humanities professors. Professor Ajdukiewicz is particularly memorable to me because he lectured and

conducted examinations on the history of philosophy. I took the exam after long hours spent in the philosophy study room, mostly over Professor Tatarkiewicz’s handbook. From that time on I was powerfully drawn to the history of philosophy—especially, of course, the philosophy of antiquity, which was to be my field of specialization. Our professors knew how to awaken scholarly interest in us. Professor Roman Ingarden was already well known as a philosopher as well as

a physicist. He was born in Krakow and spent his later years there as well. He lectured at Jan Kazimierz University from 1933 to 1941, and from 1945 to 1970 he was at the Jagiellonian University, by then as a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Philosophically, he was a phenomenologist, a follower of Husserl (that is, of Husserl in his earlier period); he developed his own variant of phenomenology. Aesthetics was his favourite field among the philosophical sciences and he wrote a

large number of works in this area, as well as on the theory of literature and of course on the theory of cognition. The forefather of nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenology was, without a doubt, the seventeenth-century classic rationalist Descartes, with his principles of evidence as the central criterion of credibility and the primacy of reason. We read Descartes in Ingarden’s seminars—I don’t remember whether it was in my first or second year—in the Latin original, of course. We took turns translating the

| texts, and from time to time the professor stopped the translation to expound on the content. The professor solemnly repeated the philosopher’s credo, the famous ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) and then he asked each of us to explain how we understood this. The seminars became more and more difficult, requiring deeper reflection and more extensive preparation. Professor Mieczystaw Kreutz, the head of the psychology department where I was a secretary and for whom I wrote an experimental work, was an excellent pedagogue. Curiously, he managed not to allow the ghetto benches in his lectures. | remember that I sat on the right side, and nobody was standing. In his seminars he turned the confrontation over nationality into a competition in learning, as if he wanted to say, ‘Well, let’s see who’s better at learning.’ And in fact, in psychology some of the politicized young people diligently pored over their books, trying to demonstrate their great scholarly talents. The psychology department maintained strict order. Students who enrolled in the lectures and seminars had to attend regularly. Ifin other classes one needed only to present one’s indeks (record book)—and sometimes also that of someone who was absent—to get the professor’s signature, here the attendance was recorded. I was

Jan Kazimierz University 1936-1939 231 assigned to write down pluses and minuses, and the professor, although he trusted me, checked up on me now and then. He signed a student’s record book only after he or she had completed the full cycle of lectures, and then only signed for those who had attended at least three-quarters of the seminars and lectures. There were no books for Professor Kreutz’s exams. He examined from lectures, and one could know more, but not less, than what he had covered. He lectured without notes, but everybody in the class took notes on what he said. His assistants then collected the notes, and, together with the professor, edited the best of them. In this way the course packs (skrypty) were generated; the appropriate number was mimeographed and students prepared from them. In his lectures Professor Kreutz explained in detail the structure and physiology of the brain and related all psychological processes to them (although he did not exclude the possibility of other causes and factors). His views were close to the theory of Pavlov, but the professor stressed that he arrived at his theory quite independently of Pavlov, and there were also differences. The department had an interest in experimental psychology, and we conducted experiments not only among ourselves, but also outside the university, mainly in schools. The newest experiments were tried out; for example, I investigated the phenomenon of suggestion using a device invented, if ’m not mistaken, by the professor himself. ‘The device recorded involuntary movements of the hand, and I collected a great deal of experimental material. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to analyse it in time and it was lost. Although he himself used tests and conducted experiments, the professor was nevertheless a sharp critic of behaviourism, the movement in American psychology that reduced human and animal actions, and even words and feelings connected with them, to mechanical reactions to stimuli from the environment. The behaviourists claimed that psychology can investigate only those psychological phenomena which can be observed, and not consciousness itself. But Professor Kreutz considered consciousness the main subject of psychology, and that was why he tried to find the seeds of truth in the method which was rejected by the behaviourists: self-

observation, or introspection. His method was based on the free and natural description by the person examined of his or her emotions. We used the method of introspection all the time at the department—the faculty and the students—and we were well practised in it. Even much later I maintained the habit of analysing my - thoughts and feelings until they were erased from memory. In experimenting with different methods, Professor Kreutz was trying to find his own approach to psychological research. The entire department was supposed to keep up with the newest scholarly literature, particularly foreign literature. At each seminar one student had to summarize a scholarly article he or she had read in a foreign language, and then we would discuss the views presented. The professor saw to it that opportunities for getting acquainted with the literature constantly increased. He required knowledge of at

232 Bronistawa Witz-Margulies least two European languages. Those who had studied German in school had to take English or French, and vice versa. | knew German and French, and I had to learn English (which later turned out to be useful not just in psychology, but in all of my scholarly work). I belonged to the leftist group at the university, and, like many others, on 1 May, Labour Day, I did not go to lectures or to my secretarial job. ‘The next day the professor asked for an explanation of my absence. ‘It’s because of my convictions,’ I answered. With anxiety in his voice, the professor asked whether I was a member of

the Communist Party. I wasn’t, and that was enough for him. His kind attitude towards me did not change. Professor Kreutz worked in L’viv until June 1941, and psychology was taught in all departments. I do not know the fate of Professor Kreutz and his assistants Adam Bardecki and Mr Tomaszewski. But as far as I know, they left L’viv before the mass destruction of L’viv intellectuals at the hands of the Nazis. At one point they were working in Wroclaw, and Mr ‘Tomaszewski later became a leading scholar. The professors and instructors at the university did not limit their activities to the confines of the campus walls. They participated in a broad effort to popularize learning. The largest university auditorium—not the old one, but a new one added later—was the so-called Collegium Maximum. It was a huge amphitheatre, and only very powerful microphones could deliver the speaker’s voice to all listeners. In addition to regular lectures, there was a /ectorium there every week. Scholars gave popular lectures on topics from their fields, and when it was a lecture by one of the leading lights of academia, the hall was always packed.

Who filled the auditorium? Students craving knowledge came from other schools, and people came from the town, but most of all students came from other departments and specialities. They wanted to broaden their intellectual horizons, while students from the lecturer’s own department came to learn how to lecture ina way that would make the subject accessible to everyone. I believed that in order to be a philosopher I needed to have a basic knowledge in all fields of study, so I regularly attended the /ectoria. ‘The lectures on astronomy were so interesting! The lectures on biology inspired me so much that for some time I attended regular classes and seminars on that subject. All professors, docents, and instructors considered it their duty to present their views from time to time to the broader audience in the Collegium Maximum. However, schools were the main arena for professors’ extra-university activity, especially high schools. Almost all high-school teachers from L’viv and the surrounding region, as well as many in other regions, were graduates of our university. They were perhaps its most important products. The professors did many things directly for the schools, such as preparing various publications and textbooks. I’ve already mentioned the journal Filomata and the Golias textbooks, for example. Lecturers at the university took care not to lose contact with their former students who taught in schools and on whom depended the level of education of the citizenry

Jan Kazimeerz University 1936-1939 233 and the level of knowledge of future students and scholars. I know about the quality of Jan Kazimierz University graduates from the example of my own teachers in the Gymnasium. I was a student at the Juliusz Stowacki private girls’ Gymnasium in L’viv. Our schoolmistress and Latin teacher was Teresa Cyganowa, one of Professor Kowalski’s best students. I know she was in touch with him and sought his advice on many occasions. In her classes nobody could remain passive; she worked constantly with the whole class. When one of the students recited a lesson or translated a text, the teacher would ask the other students questions as well. She would pose a difficult question to the whole class, prompting competition among us: ‘Who knows? Who can guess?’ She did not limit herself to teaching the language, but also explained the author’s epoch, entertainingly describing to us the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans. I know that I personally read extra pages of the Latin authors to win her praise, and this had important results. My knowledge of Latin, which I owe to Mrs Cyganowa, proved so lasting that it did much more than just help me to get into the classics department at the university and study there for three years. Although I did not become a philologist—I’m a historian and in part a philosopher (the history of

ancient philosophy)—I never forgot Latin. Even at my advanced age I can work with literature in Latin from the times of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the museums of Grodno. And when Grodno University opened a department of classical languages and did not have enough Latin teachers at first, I was able to teach Latin to a few groups. Mrs Cyganowa was an excellent schoolmistress as well. Would this have been possible without the influence of Jan Kazimierz University, which taught pedagogy

so well? In her teaching Mrs Cyganowa taught us how to think, and taught us to evaluate human actions from a moral perspective. She taught not only on the basis of the facts of everyday life or school life, but often by using historical examples. For instance, we had to express our opinions on Alcibiades, who escaped to enemy Sparta after being unjustly sentenced by the court of Athens. He betrayed his home city and helped the enemy in its war against Athens. Our opinions were clear. On another occasion we had to interpret Protagoras’ saying that ‘Man is the measure of

all things.’ (Wasn’t this the seed from which, much later, my dissertation on Protagoras grew?) Mrs Cyganowa, a mother of two, also talked with us girls about matters of the home, and often taught us things that our mothers forgot to teach us—like how to mend stockings. I will never forget my beloved teacher.* Another excellent pedagogue was our Polish and literature teacher, Miss Anna Szujska, also a graduate of Jan Kazimierz University. A tall, slender blonde, she was our model of how to dress and behave. In her classes she succeeded in making the treasures and beauty of Polish literature dear to our hearts. We recited the poetry of the great romantic bards with genuine zeal. * Not long ago I heard that in L’viv during the Holocaust Mrs Cyganowa, Mr Szutera, the mathematics teacher, and several other of my former teachers hid and thus saved Jews.

234 Bronstawa Witz-Margulies In assignments on topics of our own choosing, our teacher encouraged imagination, rich language, and imagery from nature. At evening gatherings or nameday

celebrations at the Gymnasium we staged scenes or wrote little plays and skits ourselves, all of which stimulated our interest in theatre. I remember that in our excellent L’viv theatre I sat in the gallery at almost every opera and every new play, and the same was true of many of my friends. At school we printed a bulletin-board newspaper and also a printed one called “The Ephemeral’. Miss Szujska had no prejudices against the Soviet Union. During extracurricu-

lar classes we discussed not only works of contemporary Western literature, but also translations from Soviet literature. For example, we read an interesting book for young adults called The Republic of Shkid by Belykh and Panteleev. The irony was that either at the end of 1939 or at the beginning of 1940 she was deported to Kazakhstan, where our beautiful and highly educated teacher was forced into difficult and extremely unpleasant labour making fuel from manure (kziak). Like most of our literature teachers, she had been a student of Professor Juliusz Kleiner; and of the people who intervened for her, Kleiner was the most energetic. His efforts got results: Miss Szujska returned to L’viv. With the name of Juliusz Kleiner, I return to the subject of the university. I was not a student in the Polish literature department, but was there anyone who did not know about Professor Kleiner? A prominent historian of literature, he was the author of monographs on Krasinski, Stowacki, and Mickiewicz. Kleiner was particularly drawn to Stowacki, and he edited his complete works. He also wrote several

studies in literary theory and later wrote Zarys dziejéw hteratury polskie; (‘An Outline of the History of Polish Literature’). At Jan Kazimierz University every| body knew him and attended his popular lectures. Some of the details of Professor Kleiner’s life I learned from Helena Weinbaum, my closest friend from school, who escaped the Holocaust and remained in L’viv until the end of her life. She was Kleiner’s student and graduated from the Polish literature department in 1940. Here I quote her recollections about the professor: Juliusz Kleiner was of average height and posture. He had a round face, often visited by a kind smile. He lectured from memory in a calm voice, but not a monotonous one, without gesturing. | always listened attentively and with genuine interest, because his lectures were really very thoughtful. He knew his students (most of us in Polish studies were girls) and he knew our strengths and weaknesses. He was helpful but at the same time demanding (of everyone equally). ‘The students eagerly attended his lectures, and they liked and respected him. He knew how to maintain his composure even in a difficult situation. In 1937 or 1938 some admirers of the ‘Aryan race’ entered the room where he was about to start his lecture, and from the mouth of one of them came the words ‘Jews and Jewesses please leave the audi-

torium’. Kleiner said to them, ‘You are not my students, please leave!’ He said this very calmly but at the same time very firmly. In the meantime one of the most talented of his students, Maria Szminda-Letki, approached the uninvited ‘guests’ with the same firm demand, and she was supported by the voices of other students in Polish studies. The unwelcome

Jan Kazimierz University 1936-1939 235 guests were forced to leave. Unruffled, the professor delivered the lecture. The next day, the whole university learned about Maria’s brave and noble action from a laudatory letter from the dean’s office that was posted in the hallways of the university.

In connection with this incident, Helena Weinbaum remembers this also: At the time when ‘Aryanism’ and ‘pure blood’ were in fashion among Polish students (because the sons of the so-called ‘élite’ predominated among them), another professor at L’viv University, Stanistaw Zakrzewski, a specialist in Polish history, decided to take a stand openly against this trend. At one of his lectures he said that the postulate of racial purity 1s actually harmful, because reality demonstrates that it 1s precisely the mixing of persons of different nationalities in marriage that has positive effects on the quality of the offspring. As an example he mentioned Pushkin, who even had a black ancestor!

From her father Helena knew some facts about Kleiner that most other people didn’t know. He was a Jew, but only by birth. When he was 12, in 1898, his parents decided to have him baptized so that it would be easier for him to realize his unusual talents. The future scholar took his baptism very seriously and became a devout and deeply believing Catholic. He gave full expression to this feeling in his monograph on Mickiewicz. Juliusz Kleiner probably left L’viv for Lublin immediately after Hitler’s attack

on the USSR. There he survived the Nazi occupation protected by Catholic priests, and later he worked at the Catholic University of Lublin. Finally, he moved to the Jagiellonian University, where he was a professor and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences until his death in 1957. His son Witold works there now. Is this the end of my memories from Jan Kazimierz University? Not exactly. I was there from the time I was 18 to when I was 21. Of course my life, like the lives of other students, wasn’t filled with studying or politics only. We were young: we laughed, told jokes, danced, went out together, went to the movies and the theatre; there was love and friendship, joy and all the concerns of everyday life. I shall say a little about our student nights. In the evenings students usually gathered in their clubs and organizations, which were, as I mentioned before, divided along lines of nationality. I belonged to the Society of Jewish Philosophers, which was the union of Jewish students in the humanities and had its office near the university. In those three small rooms the directors held their meetings, students came with various

problems, and people could get to know each other. Students gave lectures and presentations on topics from their fields of study, and I remember that the topic of my own popular psychology lecture was ‘Kretschmer’s Psychological Theory’. And of course there were some presentations with political overtones. The Jewish Students’ Association split off from the Society of Jewish Philoso-

phers, and the women’s organization remained part of the association. In my second year at school I was elected president of the association. Our activities were modest; mainly we distributed aid among poor female students. We got very little

236 Bronistawa Witz-Margultes funding from the philosophers, and I don’t know where the rest came from. In any case, not from abroad. Maybe the wealthier parents contributed some money. ‘The

rest we earned ourselves by selling tickets in town to dances organized in halls rented by the Society of Jewish Philosophers.

These were happy nights, and I liked to dance. In addition to these separate dances, there also must have been university balls, because I remember one of them (although I don’t remember what year it was). The entire first and second floors of the university were filled with light. Music was playing and the scent of perfume was in the air. From the auditorium, bursting with people, couples made their way to the hallway and danced above the decorated staircase there. Smiling girls danced as if they were floating on air. I was there with my fiancé, in my best dress and with my hair done up by a hairdresser. I felt so happy; it was as if there could be nothing terrible or cruel in the world. And it seemed that everybody dancing around us was as happy as we were. But war was already striding along the roads of Europe. What a short time our hap-

piness was to last! , This is the last image that remains of my pre-war memories up to September 1939. I won’t write about what I remember of the history of the university after that, because it became an entirely different school. But the scholarly traditions of Jan Kazimierz University carry on and develop without regard to state borders, and they continue to be worthy of recollection.

| Translated from Polish by Gwido Zlatkes

My First Encounters with Jews and Ukrainians JACEK KURON ‘I did not know how to accept the Jews as being something worse.’ JACEK KURON

- Lwow wasacity of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, a city of acute antagonisms. I grew up in the cult of the ‘Orleta’ who fought to win the city for Poland in 1918 and used to sing ‘Bronia Lwowa polskie dzieci, znoszac razy, Smier¢ 1 bol’ (‘Polish children defend Lwow bearing blows, death, and pain’), but I was fascinated by what was different about the others. Whenever I walked past the Ukrainian school, something drew me towards it. I remember very well what led me to believe in what was then called internationalism but today might better be described as a kind of universalism.

The father of two of my colleagues, an awful Endek, once said to me: ‘Your father’s associate is a Ukrainian.” This was a reference to a young man called Czajka.

My father worked with him in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa). He was an unusually pleasant person and used to tell me stories by Jack London. I liked his versions much better than the originals. So I went to my father and asked, ‘Is Czajka Ukrainian?’ And my father replied, ‘No, but I am.’ To begin with, I thought he was joking, but he repeated it completely seriously. Although I was flabbergasted, I believed him. I was tortured all day. In the evening, when I had just about come to terms with it, I asked him about it. And then he said

to me, ‘No, ’m not a Ukrainian, but I told you I was so you’d understand that people are born Ukrainians, Poles, Gypsies, Jews quite by chance. I could have been a Ukrainian.’ I was astonished by the obviousness of what he said; it was a lesson I never forgot.

The Jewish problem was brought home to me with incredible force when the Germans arrived in Lwow. I suddenly discovered that Jews were also my colleagues

and friends, as well as friends of my parents. Many assimilated members of the Jewish intelligentsia and Poles of Jewish origin lived in our building. Their children were my friends. I used to go to one of them, Marek Grab, to watch films on a small This extract is taken from Jacek Kuron, Wiara 1 wina: do i od komunizmu (London: Aneks, 1989), I4-25.

238 —— Facek Kuron children’s projector. I also remember well the shop in our building. It belonged to Mr Liwszyc, and I used to go there for ice cream or soda water. He would always check to see if horns had started to grow on my head and tell me I was a little devil. I also remember the many people I came in contact with during the war. Although I lived on the ‘Aryan’ side, I met people from the other side of the wall, the ‘nonAryan’ part. Outside Lwow there was a death camp, and outside Janow there was a labour camp. Jews were held there, but every day we also saw columns of Jews marching four abreast through the city. Their heads were shaven, and, with their striped prison overalls and clogs, they were shadows of human beings. They used to sing:

Albosmy to jacy tacy (We’re not just anyone Z janowskiego lagru pracy From the Janow labour camp Kto nas nie zna moze poznac Whoever doesn’t know us can recognize us.

Chuj ci do dupy, kurwa mac. Up yours, son of a bitch. Gdy wyciagna cie z kolumny ~-- Yow’re not even given a coffin Nie dostaniesz nawet trumny ~When they pull you out of a column

, I na piaski pdjdziesz spac And bare sand is your resting place

Chuj ci do dupy, kurwa mac. Up yours... ,

Akcja w maju, akcja w lutym An Aktion in May, an Aktion in February Zone z dzieckiem masz za drutem Your wife and child behind the wire

Serce chce sie z bolu rwaé Your heart is torn by the pain. , Chuj ci do dupy, kurwa mac. Up yours . . .) They also sang another song, which may have been amusing to some. I did not find it so: ‘Marshal Smigty Rydz didn’t teach us anything, then golden Hitler came and taught us how to work.’

Every morning I went to the other side of the city to get milk for my baby brother Felek. It was freezing, and snow lay on the ground. I was running along my street, Zulinski Street, when I bumped into someone from the Janow camp. People from the camps were clearing the snow from the streets and piling it up in heaps. At first I was frightened; the town lived in fear of typhus, which was rampant in Janow. In Lwow there was a Jewish doctor, Weigl, who produced a vaccine against typhus. For a time his life was spared. One of the ways many of my parents’ friends earned money was by feeding lice for his vaccine. A small cage with lice inside was attached to their thighs, and the lice sucked their blood. The danger of typhus, the lice that carried the disease, and the Jandw camp, where the lice were rampant, all had a terrible effect on me. But I have to admit that my fear was also connected with a street poster of a Jew, or rather a louse with a face which had very Semitic features and under which was written: ‘Jew = louse = typhus’. So when I ran into the prisoner from the Janéw camp I was frightened. At the same time I felt a terrible burning shame. I walked down the entire street (probably about 100 metres), where

First Encounters with Jews and Ukrainians 239 many Jews from Janow were working. To punish myself for my fear, I rubbed against each one of them. Suddenly I realized that they were exhausted and under-

nourished, and my pushing them made their work more difficult. My penance wasn’t worth a straw. I remember three Jewish children, starving and emaciated, singing in the courtyard. We called them into our flat and gave them some soup in the kitchen. It was not the soup we ate, but the soup from the pot that was given to the Jewish workers in the factory where my father was manager. I knew that when the children finished

then too. |

eating, they would be thrown out of our kitchen, and death awaited them on the street. I was ashamed of what I ate, my clothes, and the fact that I was safe. Marek Grab, the boy with the projector, spent the entire day in our flat before he was to be transported. He was terribly frightened and pale. I felt his fear, and I was ashamed At school we once learned some carols before Christmas. During break the boys started to change the words of one of the carols, singing: “Chwata na wysokosci, czterech Zydoéw gryzie kosci’ (‘Praise on high, four Jews are gnawing bones’). Again I felt that burning shame for them, for myself, and for the fact that I did not have the courage to stand up to them. This was because of my position at school. My parents thought I was frightfully intelligent and put me straight into the third form. It was very difficult for me, as I did not know many of the things the others did and was always the worst in the class. I didn’t have any friends, because I| started to go to

that school just after the Germans moved us out of the Zaklad Ubezpieczen Spotecznych (Social Security Agency, ZUS) building and we were living on Zulinski Street. It is the worst thing to be a new boy amongst other children, and I did not have time to get used to it before we moved. I was always a stranger, an outsider. These continual moves turned me into a little sociologist and ethnographer. I discovered very early on in life that there was such a thing as a group, group bonds, eroup leadership, habits, that the same things can have different names. It was enough to use the wrong word for others to laugh and sneer at you. It was important not to make a mistake. First you must watch how the group functioned. But I never had any friends my own age, normal friends and chums, and I was very lonely. In December 1942 my brother Felek was born. Immediately afterwards Wacek, my cousin whose father had died in Katyn and whose mother had been deported to Siberia, came to live with us. Then I grew up all at once. Perhaps it was because of

my independence that my sensitivity developed. The sensitivity had been hidden so I could be a brave man like my father. My sensitivity to the Jews, however, had far deeper roots: it was based on my belief in the brotherhood of man, which my grandfather, father, and mother had instilled in me. I remember the following scene: we were playing in the courtyard when there was a sudden loud noise. There was a shot at the gate. ‘Then there was silence. We froze, and the janitor’s wife shouted across the courtyard, ‘What’s happened?’ The

240 Jacek Kuron janitor replied, ‘Nothing, a Ukrainian’s killed a kike.’ We ran out to the street and saw blood and the small twisted body of a Jewish child. ‘Nothing, a Ukrainian’s killed a kike.’ It was not the first corpse I had ever seen, but it was the first child, the first one close to my own age. I felt very close to the body lying on the street and I identified with him strongly. At the beginning of the German occupation my father ran a lamp factory at 11 Zulinski Street which was under German control. He also worked in the Lw6w Biuro Informacyi i Propagandy (Information and Propaganda Office of the Home Army) and the Home Army counter-intelligence at the same time. In addition, he was active in helping the Jews, although he never said anything about this to us. Even after the war he kept everything secret. He said, ‘I read the history of the AllRussian (Bolshevik) Communist Party. I knew what was coming. I didn’t say anything.” My father had been a socialist before the war, but in the 1930s he veered towards communism. He was a member of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) district committee in Lwow, where the adherents of a united front with the communists were in the majority. I think that for him this alliance was not just a tactical move; his radicalization was the result of the crisis, the growth in fascism, and the helplessness of the Social Democrats in the face of the ever-growing totalitarianism of the Piisudski government. He was thrown out of the PPS precisely because of that common front. The Soviet army’s entry into Lwow was a powerful blow to my father. He was an avid patriot and did not believe in any co-operation with the Russians. In spite of the pressure exerted on him, he did not want to work as a journalist for the Communist Party newspaper Czerwony sztandar. He became a typesetter, and in the end managed to leave that job and start work as a turner in a fittings factory. He was an engineer, having graduated from the Technical University before the war, but he said that to work in this capacity under the Soviets would amount to betrayal of his country. Soviet rule in Lwow had a terrible effect on him. All the deportations to Siberia— we saw entire families being taken away. At night NK VD members used to go to people’s homes and force everyone to leave, allowing them to take only what they

could carry. That is what happened to my mother’s sister. Information came through to my father from the Lacki and Brygidki prisons about the NK VD and the interrogations. ‘The alliance between Stalin and Hitler, which was given great prominence in the press at the time, and the incorporation of western Ukraine into the Soviet Union (a further partition of Poland), made my father overtly antiSoviet. Yet he became so in a strange way, as if he still had not lost his illusions: each step was a new blow to his faith. These are elections? This is socialism? That’s how you get people to vote? ‘There was a feeling that things ought to be different because, after all, this was supposed to be socialism.

He talked about how the elections to the factory council had been held in his fittings factory. The Russian Party secretary, who was a full-time salaried adminis-

First Encounters with fews and Ukrainians 241 trator, put forward a list agreed by all the factory organizations and asked if there were any other proposals. One of the workers got up and put forward somebody’s name, and the secretary asked him, ‘Comrade, is this your own candidate or are you proposing him together with other people?’ ‘Yes, with others.’ The worker thought it would be better to say he had done it with others. ‘And what organization do you represent?’, the secretary shouted. “Because I know all the organizations in this factory, and they have put a joint list forward. And if you’re speaking on behalf of some agreement, that means there is a secret organization. Vania, call the NK VD.’ Then the worker said, ‘No, on my own behalf.’ ‘Ah, that’s different,’ the secretary said. ‘We don’t want to get our revenge on you, we want to help you, educate you, but if you’re an enemy of socialism, we’ll destroy you. Vania, never mind about that call.’

My father said it was like a thunderbolt for our people, who had come up through

the trade unions under the Sanacja in a bourgeois Poland. But I knew that it was above all a thunderbolt for him. He behaved like someone who had been rejected in love, and he never stopped suffering from this disappointed passion. When Broniewski, the leading Polish communist poet, was arrested, my father collected signatures of support and wanted to send the list to the government. He was persuaded not to do so and withdrew with great regret and pain. Despite everything, he continued to believe. His faith was strengthened when the Red Army started to win victories that he believed would give Poland a chance. Outings with my mother to the swimming pool in Zamarstynow made the great-

est impression on me. We used to travel by tram through the ghetto to get there. Jews from the whole voivodeship had been brought into the ghetto, where they were crowded together in a few streets and houses. Many people lived on the streets, dying of hunger. For me on my way to the pool, however, it seemed that the worst thing was that they did not have any water. At the end of the tramline there was a market, and mother bought cherries—large, juicy cherries. Starving Jewish children watched through the gaps in the fence. My mother coped with all of this with her remarkable serenity. She did not like

worrying about things, and therefore did not interfere in other people’s lives. Hence her unusual tolerance. She simply accepted the fact that on the floor below us, two floors down, and in the cellar of our building Jews who had escaped from the ghetto were hiding. If one of them were discovered, we could all have lost our lives, all of us—Felek, whom she loved very much, me, her husband, herself. She knew that. She survived the bombing later on with the same calm. She used to say, ‘I’m not going down into the shelter; if a bomb falls it’Il hit everyone anyhow.’ And she would calmly go on rocking Felek. She used to travel with me through the ghetto with her lazy serenity, seeing nothing and worrying about nothing. We walked to the pool. I would not eat the cherries or go into the water, as I could not put out of my mind the image of the starving people on the other side of the fence and of those people lying in the street

242 Jacek Kuron dying of thirst—or so it seemed to me. The water was greenish, wonderful, inviting. Later I went for a swim and ate the cherries, which had earlier stuck in my throat. Much of what I have said about my parents to this point may not appear flattering. But I will continue to speak ill, because I want to describe them as I saw them then, and to express my fascination with and my rebellion against them. When the liquidation of the ghetto had already begun and only the people who worked in the workshops for the army were left, my father, as the manager of the

lamp factory, was given some yellow cloth squares with the letter ‘W’ sewn on them. These would exempt the wearer from being rounded up. He had fewer of these ‘W’s than there were workers in the factory. I remember clearly how he explained to the person who was distributing the squares that they were to be handed out to intellectuals, activists, writers—to those who above all had to be saved. He spoke calmly and freely, although it may only have seemed so to me. I do not believe it was a choice he made calmly, but that is how it seemed to me at the time, and I found it very painful. He did not give a ‘W’ to Emil, the brother-in-law of the shopkeeper Liwszyc. Emil was semi-literate, funny, and had a heavy Jewish accent. He came to us after escaping from the transport. We were sitting in the kitchen, and he was eating soup. He told my mother about his escape with great satisfaction: ‘Well, having escaped, who was I supposed to go to if not the engineer?’ But I knew it was my father who had sent him in that transport. There was another case in which I felt extremely alienated from my father. One

evening old Mr Grab, Marek’s father, turned up at our flat. He was pale and unshaven. He sat down and talked about all sorts of unimportant things and wanted

to stay for the night. Just before the curfew began my father began to raise his voice—he always dealt with difficulties that way—saying, ‘Please leave, ve got a wife and children.’ J was ashamed to be one of those children of my father’s, that it was for me that this man was being sent out to his death. I later discovered that there was an important reason for what he did. The factory was a Home Army base, and there were transports of Jews that went through it. At the time, however, I swore to myself that I would never for any reason, even for a greater ‘good’, throw anyone out of the house. All of these fragmented stories reveal an important cause of Polish antisemitism. We were in close contact with people who were hunted. We lived in the valley of death, the place where the transports left for the death camps. We saw Ukrainian or Polish policemen shooting at Jewish women and children escaping from the convoys. We saw the SS killing Jewish children on the streets. Every Pole was faced with the most profound moral dilemma: how could one live normally alongside all that was happening? Some people chose to fight the occupying power and help the Jews. The rest could continue to live normally without losing their minds only if they accepted that the Jew was different and worse than themselves, a kind of subhuman. In this way the Nazi propaganda fulfilled a certain need. I think that the extermination of

First Encounters with Jews and Ukrainians 243 the Jews drove people either to battle or to a lunatic asylum; the rest had to accept that those who were dying were a lower breed. And that is what happened with the overwhelming majority of the Polish public. Such rationalization was even more necessary for those who took over former Jewish property, or for artisans and traders who took over their customers. Three million murdered Jews—that is, after all, three million apartments, which in most cases were taken over by Poles. There was other property as well: gold, furniture, workshops, furs, and even old coats, shoes, clothes, etc. The Germans only took the better things, and in any case, they did not know how to find everything. While there is no doubt that the extermination of the Jews greatly improved the standing

of the poor Poles, real fortunes from the extermination were made only by a small, ; marginal group. I did not know how to accept the Jews as being something worse, so I had to suffer all of that pain, shame, and anger. I had to live with an endless desire to fight. I never stopped trying to set up some kind of underground organization. I used to tell my friends about my father’s conspiratorial activities, and I brought leaflets from home to encourage them to work with me. Once I wanted to take a revolver, but luckily I did not succeed. One day Mrs K came to see us in Zulinski Street. Before the war she used to live on the first floor of the same ZUS building as we did. She was blonde, with large milk-white breasts. This was my first erotic fantasy. She used to stand on the balcony eating apples. So she came that day, although she had not had any social contact with us before, and asked about various neighbours. My father answered that

he hadn’t seen or met anyone. My father later pointed out that Mrs K was only interested in our Jewish neighbours. She asked about Markus, one of our Jewish friends. ‘I haven’t seen him,’ my father replied, stony-faced. I was very surprised at that and said, ‘But we went to Krakow with him.’ ‘By train?’ My father looked at me

with great surprise, and because his question was so convincing I wanted to help him, so I added, ‘No, not by train, by lorry.’ It had been a transport of Jews to Romania, and my mother and I rode with them as far as Zaryte to visit my aunt for the holidays. We travelled with building material. Every few kilometres we were stopped by patrols because Frank, the governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland, was on his way to Lwow at the time. As soon as Mrs K shut the door behind her and

we could no longer hear the sound of her footsteps, my father leapt up and gave me a good thrashing. He roared, ‘She is a Gestapo informer, and you have just murdered me, your mother, everyone. No one’s going to stop you from killing yourself, that’s your right.’ Then my father pushed me out onto the stairs. I ran away fully convinced I was never going back, but I hoped he would call me. Then he called. I turned around, and he kicked my cap after me. Some time later he told me

very calmly, “Chey shot that Mrs K. Perhaps she was innocent, but you opened your mouth so wide, she had to die.’ I felt I had killed Mrs K. The evening my father threw me out of the house the story of Zoska began. For

244 Jacek Kuron me it was the most important event of the occupation. It determined my attitude towards the Jews and all the life-or-death choices I later made. Early on the day of Mrs K’s visit a girl had turned up at our flat on Zulinski Street. She was about 16 and was looking for work as a servant. My mother had liked her very much, but later, when my father came home, he realized that she was a Jew from the ghetto and

he told her to go. She seemed very tense, tired, and frightened. When my father threw me out, after Mrs K’s subsequent visit, I decided I was not going back home, but would sleep on wooden planks in a nearby square. There was a full moon that night—it was summer. I swept together some shavings and lay down; it was not at all cold, and I was not even unhappy. Then I heard some irregular breathing next to me. Through the gaps between the planks I could see the flushed face of a girl: it was ZoSka. She was unconscious. I went back home again through the courtyard. The gate was shut because of the curfew, so I got in through the fence. I woke my father up and told him that the girl he had thrown out was lying unconscious under the planks. He asked me where she was, and we went together to see her. After he had a look, he told me to go home. Some time later he told us that we had a cousin called Zoska Czarniecka. He said she was in the isolation hospital with typhus and we had to visit her. We took her some rhubarb compote in a bottle. She leaned out of the window and waved to us. She had a white scarf on her head, as people with typhus had their heads shaved. It was the Jewish girl, for whom he had procured ‘Aryan’ papers. At that time there

was a danger that someone might inform on us, so we moved from Zulinski to Kochanowski Street, to the flat of a Hungarian general’s wife. Later on a transfer point for Jews was set up at 5 Asnyk Street. ZoSka lived there, and I was with her for the whole of the autumn and half the winter. I do not even know what her real name was.

She was my great childhood love. She was very well read in Polish literature and told me the plots of many books. Although she was very intelligent, she was childish when it came to the strange real world we had to live in. In this world we were really the same age. I was the only person close to her, as she was to me. The flat on Asnyk Street was enormous and middle-class, with a front and a back door. We warmed

ourselves by the woodstove. I did the shopping, and we cooked together, mainly potatoes. After we ate, I did my homework. We used to tell each other about many things. I would think up stories to make it more fun, and we laughed. We slept in an enormous bed near the stove. We would have pillow-fights and then cover ourselves with the duvet, snuggling up to each other because it was very cold. That was all before the ghetto was liquidated. Every so often Jews would stay in the flat before

being sent to the next place. They would arrive pale and unshaven. Once I was rushing around the flat and left the door ajar. In the adjoining room the window over the street was blacked out. One of the Jews said to me, ‘Don’t rush around like that.’ ‘It’s only a little crack,’ I said. “That ray of light leads straight into the barrel of a gun, he warned.

First Encounters with Jews and Ukrainians 245 Many times I turned over in my head what happened later, both during and after ~ the war. I thought about it so much that it is terribly difficult for me to say today what I thought then and what I thought later. I felt that Zoska wanted something

from me, that she was threatened by something. I did not know how to help her or even what I thought. Zoska was afraid of the rats that used to run around the courtyard well on Asnyk Street. I was surprised by this. A janitor who had a paralysed wife and a son also lived in the courtyard. I had the impression he blackmailed Zoska and forced her to have sexual relations with him. Perhaps I just imagined it. When we were still living in Zulinski Street a Gypsy or Romanian brought a crate of potassium cyanide to the factory. I picked a box up, and my father seized me by the wrist, took me to some water, washed my hands, and said, ‘You could have touched it, licked your hand, and died.’ The same kind of tin boxes were brought to Asnyk Street and left in the cupboard under the stairs. My father said to me, ‘Be careful, you now know what it is. Watch out that Zoska doesn’t touch it.” Zoska was fascinated by the cyanide. She used to ask how much one needed to take to die and how to swallow it. One day we fell asleep snuggled against one another, and when I woke up I felt she was cold, dead. I knew straight away she had poisoned herself. I lifted my head and saw the egg-shaped capsule of the cyanide lying on the chair by the bed. I got up. I knew I had to tell my father she was dead. I washed and dressed, went back, and kissed Zoska. She had such a twisted face that I started to sob. I knew I could not go through the town sobbing, as someone would ask why I was crying. What could I say? I went back to the bathroom, washed, kissed her, and started to sob all over again. Once again I washed, kissed her, and went to the stairs, and again I started to cry. Several times I did this before finally crossing the city to

get to my father. And that is the story of Zoska. , Afterwards there was her funeral. My mother, father, and I walked behind her wooden coffin. She was buried in the Lyczakowski cemetery, where my greatgrandfather, an insurgent who fought in the anti-Russian uprising of 1863, is buried. A cross with the name Zofia Czarniecka was placed on her grave. No trace of her was left, no real name, no real surname. I felt I was the only one in the world who could have helped her, and I had not known how.

From Lwow we went to Zaryte in Podhale, and I spent several months there. When my mother, Felek, Wacek, and I were left there on our own, I tried selling combs and sewing-thread from house to house. Not only did I think I was grown up, but more importantly, my parents did too. On my trips around the mountains or from Zaryte to Rabka with thread or for supplies, I used to walk kilometres on my own, at dawn, at dusk, and at night. I used to daydream then, and there was always someone with me in my daydreams. Sometimes it was my closest friend, and sometimes it was a girl. My vivid dreams of love and friendship grew from these, com-

bining friendship and love in brotherhood, in battle, and in service. That is probably why the driving force of my life has fundamentally been the creation of

246 Jacek Kuron friendship, love, comradeship in the service of a great cause. This is the most important thing for me. In the spring of 1945 we arrived in Krakow, where we lived for a year. It was there that the following story took place. One day my mother asked my grandfather to take Felek for a walk. My grandfather took his hand and tried to pull him; Felek, crying, pulled his hand away. There was a market next to the house, which was very crowded because it was just before Easter. I was playing in the courtyard. Suddenly a crowd surged into the courtyard. Along with it were grandfather and Felek, who

was screaming terribly. (It ought to be added that Felek was blond and fairskinned.) Grandfather was old and decrepit. Someone started to shout, ‘Where’s the mother? We'll see if it’s her child.’ Felek did not stop crying, although mother picked him up while the crowd looked on, ready at any moment to snatch him away from her. If she really was the mother, he wouldn’t cry, they shouted. These people took grandfather to be a Jew who was dragging the child away to ritual slaughter for matzah. Later in May of that year there were pogroms in Krakow and a few other towns. A year later there was a pogrom in Kielce. It is difficult to say what was behind the Krakow pogrom, but the Kielce one was undoubtedly provoked by the Urzad Bezpieczenstwa (Security Service, UB). But no one provoked the market crowd in the courtyard of my parents’ house. The UB got there right away anyhow. My mother often got her identity papers mixed up, as she had various fake ones from the occupation as well as her Russian passports and birth certificates—-so it really was difficult to prove that Felek was her child. Suddenly she got very upset and started to shout at the men from the UB that they were giving in to the mob. They said they had hurried to get there, that they were there to protect us. The crowd stood around for a while, waiting, but in the end people started to go on their way.

The wartime sources of hatred towards the Jews compounded existing antisemitic feelings. ‘There was a folk antisemitism based on a feeling of separateness, and there was antisemitism whipped up by the Endecja, supported by a considerable section of the clergy and Oboz Narodowo-Radykalny (National Radical Camp) propaganda. Immediately after the war a new type of antisemitism developed. In the spring of 1945 transports of repatriates arrived in Krakow. Residents of Lwow went to the stations to find friends and acquaintances, and took them and their friends back home. At the time our flat looked something like a cross between a station and a hotel or shelter. Crowds of people slept on mattresses on the floor, bundles everywhere—for us kids it was paradise. Hela and Erna, two Jewish girls, also moved in. In those days my parents had

quite a large flat, but it was understood that each refugee only came for a short while. Hela and Erna did not want to leave, however. Naturally there was a row and conflicts. One day two of their friends arrived, Jews who were officials of the UB. They intervened very forcefully: “The girls are to live here, and if anyone so much as raises a finger towards them... .’. They went on about antisemitism, fascism, etc.

First Encounters with Jews and Ukrainians 247 One of them really had hatred in his eyes. My father, who had joined the new PPS and was a member of the city government, telephoned the UB. Another official turned up, also a Jew. He tried to persuade the other two, argued with them, and finally everyone left. Although this is only a small episode, it points up what was behind the next wave of Polish antisemitism. After the events of March 1968 I shared a gaol cell with Marek Szapiro, a very Jewish Jew who had survived the ghetto and spent the rest of the occupation somewhere in Wawer hidden under a floor. Szapiro was imprisoned in 1968 because he wrote in a private letter that there was antisemitism in Poland. He was arrested for spreading information contrary to the interests of the Polish state. It was Marek Szapiro who told me that in the ghetto Janusz Korczak, the renowned creator of Polish and Jewish orphanages, had said to Marek’s father, ‘If Poland 1s taken by the Soviet army after the war, the Jews will be finished. ‘The Polish public will refuse to

co-operate with the Soviets, but look at the ghetto—those are people alien to Poland and they’!l work with the Soviets.’ This did not come to pass, because the Jews were killed. But Korczak was right; the few who came back from Russia took up posts in the government. After all, that had been the tsar’s policy, and Stalin inherited it from him. How did I seem to the ghetto child when I went with my mother to the swimming pool in Zamarstynow? I think he sincerely hated me. He had reason to: he was a hunted animal, and for him I was the one who accepted his dying of hunger and thirst. Could anyone escaping from the ghetto tell the difference between the blackmailers (szmalcownicy) and all the other Poles? Were they not all the same? I know it wasn’t he who went to work for the UB. His brothers, his relatives who had escaped

the Germans by fleeing to Russia, returned to where the ashes were still warm. _ Those who had survived the extermination told them of their experiences and passed on their hatred. Later I got to know some boys of Jewish origin who passionately hated fascism, by which they understood antisemitism. Consequently, they hated all nationalist

Poles, even those who did not belong to Endecja but were part of the Polish Catholic majority. It was easy to see this group and their hatred in the new power structure, in the security apparatus, and to say: ‘The Jews, the Jews are taking their revenge, once again they’ve started a battle with Poland.’ In the eyes of the crowd that surged into our courtyard with grandfather and Felek the Jews represented a threat to the existence they had won. The people feared that the Jews would return and take back their homes. In Kielce this fear undoubtedly played an important role, as masses of Jews had once lived in the town and the smaller villages in its vicinity, and their homes had been taken over during the war by the poor. The antisemitism I encountered at school and in the courtyard was crucial in my attitude towards the new authorities, people’s Poland, the world. The war made me hypersensitive to the Jewish question. I only had to hear the word ‘Jew’, and I saw

Zoska and old Grab thrown out of our flat. I saw the children who had hardly

248 Jacek Kuron finished eating their soup when they had to go out on the street again. The underground propaganda against the new order and the arguments used every day were to a very great degree antisemitic. This placed me on the side of the new order and made it just in my eyes. Translated from Polish by Anna Zaranko

Lithuania Honours a Holocaust Rescuer JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN IN the summer of 1940, in the Lithuanian capital city of Kaunas, a Dutch business-

man, not himself a Jew, did truly amazing things to help thousands of stranded Jews. What did Jan Zwartendyk (1896-1976) do, and why did Lithuania only recognize him for his courage fifty-nine years after the event? By late 1939, under the terms of the Hitler—Stalin pact, Germany had completed its occupation of western Poland, and the Soviet Union had taken over the eastern part of the country. By May 1940 at least 10,000 Jews had fled from those occupied

zones into neutral Lithuania. On 15 June 1940 the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania and five weeks later accepted its ‘request’ to be annexed to the USSR, a procedure which was completed by 5 August. The Polish Jews who had fled to Lithuania precisely to escape Soviet rule felt especially vulnerable and desperate during the annexation process. By July virtually all consulates in Kaunas were in the process of closing. Panic set in among the Jewish refugees. At this point Jan Zwartendijk, voluntarily and at great personal risk, took on a role which quickly evolved into the rescue of Jews.

Since May 1939 Jan had represented the Dutch electronics manufacturer Philips in Lithuania.’ In May 1940 the Germans overran Holland, and a Dutch | government-in-exile, technically a resistance organization, was established in London. L. P. J. De Decker, the Dutch ambassador to the Baltic states who was based in Riga, suspected the Dutch consul in Kaunas of Nazi sympathies. In June 1940 he asked Zwartendijk to take over in Kaunas as consul representing the Dutch government-in-exile. In spite of the fact that Zwartendiyk had no diplomatic The Sino-Judaic Institute underwrote the basic research for this chapter, which was completed while the author was Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. 1 An almost complete official record of Philips’s presence in Lithuania in 1939-40 has been preserved in Lithuania’s Central State Archives in Vilnius. These are mainly Finance Ministry documents pertaining to Philips-Lithuania. They bear original tax stamps and photographs of Zwartendijk and his wife. I am grateful to archives director Ricardas Cepas and deputy director Grazina Sluckaité for making these documents available to me. The Kaunas Regional Archives (Juozas Rimkus, director) also contain some commercial and Finance Ministry documents for 1923—41 and old telephone books for 1939-40.

250 Jonathan Goldstein

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The Old Town Synagogue, Lodz 289 the eaves relieved the expanse of unplastered walls (see Figure 2). It seems that the state of the building remained unchanged in the ten years following this critical comment from 1885: ‘In the twenty years that have passed since the synagogue was erected, no one has managed to obtain plaster for it.”? More interesting was the faccade, with its pedimented projection flanked by wide piers. The main entrance on the ground floor, a triple-layered rectangular portal, was topped by a horseshoe arch. Leading up to the entrance was a series of wide steps. However, it seems that the facade lacked the ‘ornamental tablets showing the Ten Commandments’ mentioned in the preliminary budget. The interior space was more elaborately decorated. Of course, the central element was the aron hakodesh (ark of the Torah) attached to the eastern wall of the building, with a platform with a pulpit (probably a dzmah) in the centre in front of it, flanked by flights of stairs. The front of the aron hakodesh was very ornately decorated. The central case was adorned with a pair of columns below a horseshoe arch. Above these was mounted a tablet with the ‘Ten Commandments. The side sections were

divided by horseshoe-arched plinths, which were themselves divided by small columns. The ceiling and balustrades were covered with arabesque paintings. The base line of the galleries was continued on the eastern wall by the cornices over the rows of plaster arcades. he space between the columns was also filled with horseshoe arches, probably made of timber and covered with paint. Stained glass in the oculi of the horseshoe arches over the windows and the main entrance portal, and in

the rose window in the eastern wall, brought more colour into the interior (see Figure 3). Mertsching’s architecture shows clear links with the Moorish style that was very popular in synagogues of the nineteenth century. The main decorative element was

the horseshoe arches—a motif taken mainly from the Arab monuments of Spain and referred to in the preliminary plans as ‘the Byzantine style’. Colourful interior

decoration is also a characteristic of the oriental style. ,

The 1895 blueprint for changes to the Old Town Synagogue allows us to assess the extent of later renovation. The alterations were the response of the Lédz Jewish community’s synagogue supervisory board to the construction of a more monu-

mental temple by the Progressive Jews of 4.0dz in 1881-7. Centrally located at Spacerowa Street (now Aleja Kosciuszk1), the Progressive synagogue was built in | the Romanesque revival style with oriental interior features. Its construction had been funded by a group of affluent Jewish industrialists, headed by Izrael K. Poznanski, who were distancing themselves from the Orthodox community centred around the Old Town Synagogue. The board decided to renovate the 30-year-old synagogue to make it as imposing as the Progressive synagogue. The first plans for the renovation of the old synagogue appeared at the beginning of the 1890s, and limited the budget to 10,000 roubles. Over the next few years plans surfaced for © ‘Kronikat6dzka’, Dzienntk t6dzki, 200 (1885). See also Stefanski, ‘Budownictwo synagogalne’, 12.

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The Polish—Israeh Textbooks Committee 309 made of German and Israeli textbooks, and recommendations of the joint German— Israeli committee were published in German and Hebrew.®

The need to undertake a similar revision of mutual stereotypes in Polish and Israeli textbooks has long been recognized and was undertaken in 1992-5. In 1991 a cultural agreement was signed between Poland and Israel, one of whose resolutions was to establish national committees in each country to work in co-operation to examine history and geography textbooks and their treatment of the two nations. They were charged with drawing up recommendations for authors of textbooks in each country, with the aim of rectifying mistakes that could lead to the formation or aggravation of prejudices and distortions of the truth. The motives for this initiative varied. The political forces that began the negotiations were motivated by the pragmatic consideration that such a process would bring respectability in the eyes of some parts of the American and Jewish communities. Without a doubt, however, the influence of a group of Polish intellectuals who felt regret for the fate of the Jews in Poland and who understood the importance of the Jews’ economic and cultural contributions to the history of Poland was of paramount importance. There was no lack of people who were ashamed of the inadequate aid offered their neighbours

during their time of distress. This led to intellectual interest in any subject connected to Judaism and its culture. The hundreds of books and articles published in recent years reflect this, as does the establishment of research centres and institutes concerned with Jewish history and culture. The sceptic may claim that interest in this subject is simply a means of obtaining grant money, participating in conferences, and forging connections with the West-

ern world. This explanation, however, is not valid when applied to the many researchers who have devoted their time to the subject of Jewish history. The cultural agreement and the activity of the committees were preceded by work towards mutual understanding initiated by these researchers and educators. An article by Anna Radziwitt (later deputy minister of education in Poland) published in Po/in in 1989 stressed the need to teach Jewish history in Polish schools and outlined the possibilities that lay in the teaching of Polish literature, which contains many references to Jewish life in Poland.’ Mention must also be made of the pamphlets for teachers on minorities in Poland by Jerzy ‘Tomaszewski and Andrzej Chojnowski and, in the field of literature, the collection by Irena Maciejewska on Jewish suffering.® These and other publications encouraged the appearance of, and were a rich resource for, new textbooks and the work of the committees. At the beginning of the discussions it quickly became clear to the two committees 6 §S. Eden, ‘Habedikah hahadadit shel sifrei halimud lehistoriyah beyisra’el uvegermaniyah’, in his Perakim betikhnun limudim (Jerusalem, 1991). " A. Radziwill, “The Teaching of the History of the Jews in Secondary Schools in the Polish People’s Republic, 1949-1988’, Polin, 4 (1989), 402-24.

8 J. Tomaszewski, Maniejszosct narodowe w Polsce w XX wieku (Warsaw, 1991); 1. Maciejewska, Meczenstwo 1 zaglada Zydow w zapisach literatury polskie) (Warsaw, 1988).

310 Shevach Eden that there was no need to be concerned with geography textbooks, since instruction in this discipline does not deal with most countries in detail but rather discusses a particular country only to demonstrate a specific geographical problem or charac-

teristic. Poland and Israel were not studied as part of this method. On the other hand, it was suggested at their first meeting that the committees concern themselves with the teaching of literature, in so far as it has to do with the various aspects of the relationship between Poles and Jews. The literary expressions of the contact

between Poles and Jews exposed both the positive and the negative sides of this relationship. Literature allows the study of the problems of Polish—Jewish relations, and can also be used to demonstrate how prejudices are formed. The committees’ work was based on examination of elementary and secondary textbooks. The difficulties were immediately apparent. ‘The members of the Israeli committee were fluent in both languages (Hebrew and Polish), whereas the Poles

were forced to depend on translations. During the period of communist rule in Poland, Jews were not mentioned in textbooks, except for a brief mention of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and a reference to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis. History textbooks published following the end of communist rule deal with Jewish history in a completely different fashion, although there is no consistent method of approach. Let us now consider a few specific instances to illustrate the problems that arose for the members of the two committees. For the members of the Israeli committee (as indeed for Poles of good conscience) one matter of primary concern was the

indifference of the majority of Poles to the fate of the Jews during the Second World War. This question intrigued the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who dedicated an entire book to the relationship between Poles and Jews (the Hebrew translation of which appeared only recently).? He collected every reference to aid and

rescue by Poles and pointed out that he himself was twice saved from death by Poles, who endangered their own lives to save his. Ringelblum mentions the great danger that was faced by those who chose to help Jews, and assigns the main burden

of blame to the antisemitism that was rampant in Poland between the two world wars and which was prevalent in the Church and the governing forces. His questions reverberate: ‘Was it not possible to reduce significantly the poison of denunciations and co-operation [with the Nazis]? ... Why did the antisemitic incitement of the Polish newspapers not cease for a single moment?!” His conclusion was judicious but harsh: The Polish people and the Government of the Republic of Poland were not in a position to deflect the Nazi steam-roller from its anti-Jewish course. But it is reasonable to ask whether the attitude of the Polish people measured up to the scale of the catastrophe that befell their country’s citizens. Was it inevitable that the last impression of the Jews, as they rode in the death trains speeding from different parts of the country to Treblinka or other places of — 9 E. Ringelblum, Stosunki polsko-zydowskie w czasie wojny Swiatowej (Warsaw, 1988). 19 FE. Ringelblum, Katavim aharonim: Yahasei polanim-yehudim, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1992-4), ii. 180.

| The Polish—Israeh Textbooks Committee 311 slaughter, should have been the indifference or even joy on the faces of their neighbours? Last summer, when carts packed with captive Jewish men, women and children moved through the streets of the capital, was it really necessary for laughter from wild mobs to resound from the other side of the ghetto walls, was it really necessary for such blank indifference to prevail in the face of the greatest tragedy of all time???

Jan Btonski movingly discussed the question of Polish indifference in his article ‘Biedni Polacy patrza na getto’, which appeared in 1987.'* In Btonski’s opinion his people were guilty not of participation in crime but rather of neither preventing it nor helping the victims. When one reads what was written about Jews in Poland before the war it is a matter for relief that the Poles did not in fact participate in murder. Btonski quotes the poetry of Mitosz in which he describes the Poles riding

on the carousel in Krasinski Square while to their left the Warsaw ghetto was engulfed in flames. Btonski demands the purification of Polish soil, tainted by the mass murder of the Jews and Polish indifference to this crime. “The field of Cain should be purified by the memory of Abel.’ His approach and the discussions which it gave rise to suggested to the members of the committee that even on this difficult subject it was possible to achieve a degree of consensus. The questions raised by the reception that awaited those returning to Poland from camps and from Russia, as well as the pogrom in Kielce, were also of concern to the Israeli committee. So too was the attitude of the Catholic Church in Poland. The Christian churches have played a sad role in the spread of hatred of the Jews. In spite of some promising moves, a full searching of its conscience has not yet been undertaken by the Catholic Church in Poland. As members of the Israeli committee pointed out, many of the new textbooks in Poland prefer not to deal with these difficult questions. The student who depends on textbooks for his information about Jews will not know how Jews arrived in Poland; what the social, economic, or cultural experiences were for a large minority that lived in Poland for hundreds of years; what role they played in the Polish economy and the building of cities; and, beginning in the nineteenth century, how they contributed to Polish culture and science. The questions continue even though the Jews are no longer in Poland. The phenomenon of antisemitism without Jews, stirred up to encourage partisanship in local politics, demonstrates the continuing existence of stereotypes. The most common accusation is that the Jews co-operated with the Soviets and were happy when the Red Army entered eastern Poland in 1939. There is little explanation of what the alternative was to Soviet rule, and no understanding of the persecution of the Jews in the Soviet Union and the foundations of antisemitism in the political trials in the USSR and its satellites. 41 FE. Ringelblum, Polish—Jewish Relations during the Second World War, ed. with footnotes J. Kermish and S. Krakowski (Evanston, IIll., 1992), 7-8. 12 Tygodnik powszechny, 11 Jan. 1987; repr. in J. Blonski, Biedni Polacy patrzqg na getto (Krakow, 1994).

312 Shevach Eden The members of the Polish committee had questions of their own. They were concerned by the way Hebrew-language textbooks spread anti-Polish stereotypes.

They asked a number of pertinent questions: Why is the responsibility for the establishment of the extermination camps in Poland placed on the Poles? The Poles were certainly not asked if they agreed to be occupied by the Germans, who treated the Poles cruelly, and systematically eliminated the Polish intelligentsia and leadership. This question has great importance for the many visits made by young Israelis to the extermination camps in Poland. Visitors to Majdanek see the closeness of the

Polish town to the camp and ask why the Poles were impervious to the tragedy unfolding in front of their eyes. In informal conversations between members of the committees, these visits of

Israeli youth to the camps and other places of importance to Jewish history in Poland were discussed, and it was concluded that lack of contact with young Poles and the lack of knowledge about the reality of Polish existence hindered a decline in stereotypes. For their part, the members of the Polish committee argued that one must understand the logistical considerations of the Germans when carrying out the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish problem, the fact that Auschwitz was well placed for rail connections to the whole of Europe, as well as the fact that the majority of

European Jews lived in Poland. — The Poles were also concerned with the lack of attention paid to the general economic history of Poland. In their opinion, many economic problems were common to the Jews and other segments of the population. The catastrophic economic situa-

tion was not inherent in economic policy, but rather was caused by economic changes that stemmed from the crumbling of political structures that had existed before the First World War, and from problems that arose following the establishment of new countries. In agricultural Poland the situation of farmers was no better than that of poor Jews. An analysis of the economic problems of the Jews demands an examination of all economic problems arising out of the process of modernization. According to Polish historians, the policies of discrimination were only a secondary factor in the economic situation of the Jews. Social radicalism in the inter-war years was directed against the capitalist system. In the eyes of the peasants the Jewish traders were a symbol of exploitation. ‘The Jew was not a producer; he bought cheap and sold dear. The members of the Polish committee emphasized the need to differentiate between the peasants’ protest movement and Nazi antisemitism. The revolutionary changes that began in Europe during and after the First World War caused a rise in nationalist feeling. New sovereign countries were established and national minorities hoped for recognition of their own national rights. ‘These hopes included the desire to establish their own countries or at least to have their rights as minorities acknowledged. This led to a conflict of interests between the new countries and their minorities. Complicated situations evolved that affected the Jews, among others. Minorities in Poland comprised a third of the population,

The Polish—Israeh Textbooks Committee 313 and a large proportion of them were irredentist. ‘The Germans wished to re-establish the pre-1914 frontiers; many Ukrainians and Belarusians wanted to secede from Poland. Public opinion in Poland favoured the emigration of the Jews from Poland, and the Polish committee emphasized that the demand for their emigration could be seen as in line with the Zionists’ demands for emigration to Palestine, especially the slogan of ‘evacuation’ of the New Zionist Organization. The Polish committee expressed surprise at the fact that most Hebrew textbooks argued that all the problems of the Jewish community were a result of the good or bad will of the government or politicians. In their opinion not enough attention was

paid to the connection between the growth of antisemitism in Poland and the erowth of antisemitism in Europe in general and Germany in particular. The two committees drafted an outline for a joint programme dealing with the treatment of Polish—Jewish relationships in textbooks in the two education systems. Obviously, the recommendations needed to be consistent with the general curriculum and its needs. The detailed outlines were published in the body of recommendations, and suggestions and their explanations were based on a few main principles. In the teaching of history these were:

1. The connections between past generations and the complexity of past relationships must pave the way for understanding and for discussion of the future.

2. The building of a better future necessitates a courageous analysis of the past and all that it includes. This will aid in the rejection of stereotypical viewpoints and approaches held by the two peoples. In the teaching of literature:

1. Itis important to emphasize events and literary works in which mutual respect is expressed, and also to emphasize images of those who defended the persecuted in critical situations. 2. The teaching of literature can help us understand the processes that led to the creation of stereotypes and thus can help dispel them.

Discussion of specific subjects needs to emphasize the complex character of historical developments. Committee members agreed that there were still certain events and phenomena that had multiple, sometimes contradictory, interpretations. For example, as regards the government monopoly on the production of alcohol, cigarettes, matches, and sugar, according to Hebrew textbooks this was an attempt to force the Jews out of these industries and to place them in the hands of Poles; Polish textbooks explain that there was a lack of private capital and that therefore government capital was needed to maintain production and employment. In addition to these principles the committees drafted an outline of suggested topics for instruction in both Poland and Israel. The last paragraph is dedicated to the establishment of the state of Israel and the relations between Israel and Poland.

314 Shevach Eden It was recommended that these subjects be taught in both countries. The second half included subjects pertaining to Polish history to be taught in Israel. The members of the two committees were of the opinion that the formulation of principles and specific subjects for discussion could contribute to an improvement in the relations between the younger generations of the two countries. For example: the raising of the subject of the pogrom in Kielce enabled one to examine both the general problem of antisemitism and the very specific conditions which gave rise to this tragic event. ‘The discussions of the committees were held in an atmosphere of good will. It cannot be assumed that the committee members represent all the historians and educators from the two countries; rather, they represent those interested in increasing understanding and good will in future generations. However, even among these scholars there are specific areas of disagreement. We can assume that the new textbooks will reflect the established principles. These agreements are only the beginning of discussions for the historians, authors, and teachers who will carry out these suggestions. Much work remains to be done. We hope that a good

beginning has been made. ,

Translated from Hebrew by Erica Nadelhaft

‘The Image of the Holocaust in Polish Historical Consciousness FELIKS TYCH A WELL-KNOWN journalist from Gazeta wyborcza, Tadeusz Sobolewski, observed

recently that the Holocaust—which today functions widely as a ‘tragic myth’ in European and American culture, making up for many years of neglect in those continents—has a hard time entering into the popular consciousness in Poland. ‘I am afraid’, Sobolewski writes, ‘that we Poles have a mental block with regard to the Holocaust; we drive it out of our consciousness . .. we cannot take in its reality.” Up to this point it is possible to agree with him. But when he attributes the cause of this mental block to the fact that Poles got used to viewing the Holocaust as ‘the greatest crime in human history’,! then doubts arise. There are two reasons for this.

First, almost all the opinion polls conducted in Poland that have a direct or indirect relation to the Holocaust, as well as popular opinions expressed on the topic, appear to indicate a lack of awareness among the majority of contemporary Polish society concerning what really happened on these lands between 1939 and 1945. Among a significant percentage of Poles there is the conviction that Jews are still widely present in the country, although the real number does not exceed 8,000 to

10,000. However, surveys conducted in 1992 by the sociology department at the University of Warsaw recorded the following opinions held by respondents: 23 per cent of Poles generally held that the number of Jews in Poland was great or very great, and one in three was convinced that the Jewish minority in Poland ranged from several tens of thousands (15.5 per cent) to several million (3.5 per cent).? In other words, even if respondents had scraps of knowledge about the Holocaust, they believed it to have been only partly carried through by the Nazis and had no idea of the full extent of the crime. My own observation, resulting not from the survey but from daily personal experience, is that those who do not succumb to myths about a pervasive Jewish presence, but see their environment realistically, treat the Jewish absence in Poland as obvious and natural, and do not particularly think about how this state of affairs came about. This is clearly not a comprehensive

summary of the situation, but it does cover a significant range of opinions on the subject. 1 'T. Sobolewski, ‘Ksiega audiowizualna’, Gazeta wyborcza, 250 (24-5 Oct. 1998), 18. 2H. Chalupezak and T. Browarek, Mniejszosci narodowe w Polsce (Lublin, 1998), 197.

316 Fehks Tych Secondly (and interrelatedly), there is no evidence of a general conviction that the Holocaust was ‘the greatest crime in human history’ among the majority of Polish citizens. It is a conviction that is primarily (although not exclusively) held by the intellectual and moral élites and currently also by a certain portion of young people. None the less, it is far from general. This is primarily, although not solely (since an important role is played by family and group transmission of historical consciousness), a product of how the issue was treated during the first forty-five years after the war by the most influential purveyors of knowledge in society: radio and television, historical journalism, schools, tourist guides, encyclopedias, regional exhibitions, films, trade books, and memoirs.? A deep impression was made on Polish consciousness by a notion that was widely disseminated for forty-five years in official post-war propaganda: that after the Second World War Poland ‘finally’ became a nationally uniform country. Charac-

teristically this idea was put forward without the reasons for this new, ethnically uniform situation in Poland ever being considered. The mechanisms of this change were never a subject of discussion either in school textbooks or in other media that influenced historical consciousness at that time, including the educational system. It was never said what price had been paid, both in historical and in simply human terms, for this ethnic uniformity. Primarily, I have in mind three unrelated facts: the Holocaust, the expulsion of the Germans, and the Ukrainian drama. These matters remained taboo for nearly half a century. There was a peculiar, never negotiated, but effective consensus in this field between the extreme left and nationalistic right, although at its source, at least in part, were different motivations. Breaking out of this consensus was not approved of either by the ruling faction or by the successors to the pre-war ‘nationalists’. I shall mention an example familiar

to some. In the eighth volume of Wielka encyklopedia powszechna PWN (‘The Great Universal Encyclopedia of PWN’), published in 1966, under the entry ‘Nazi

concentration camps’ it was accurately stated that the death camps (Belzec, Chetmno nad Nerem, Majdanek, Birkenau, Sobibér, Treblinka), in which over 2 million people were murdered, were established almost exclusively for the Jews, and that go per cent of the victims were Jews while 1 per cent were Gypsies and 3 According toa paper by Andrzej Zbikowski based on a sociological survey conducted in May 1992

on a representative sample of 1,000 randomly selected Poles, the sources from which respondents gained information about the Jews were as follows (in order of frequency): TV, film, radio 58.5%; talks

with family members (e.g. parents, grandparents, etc.) 48.3%; books, papers, periodicals 47.6%; conversations with acquaintances 29.9%; personal contacts with Jews 22.5%; school 13.9%; religion classes, church 10.8%; no knowledge about Jews 3.0%; other sources 0.5% (A. Zbikowski, ‘Zrédla wiedzy Polakéw o Zydach: Socjalizacja postaw’, in I. Krzeminski (ed.), Czy Polacy sq antysemitami? Wynikt badania sondazowego (Warsaw, 1996), 65). Considering the minute presence of Jews in Poland (approx. 0.48 per 1,000), the statistic on personal contacts with Jews seems to me rather improbable and

raises questions about the reliability of the remaining figures. It is almost unbelievable that of 1,000 randomly selected respondents up to 225 could have gained their knowledge in this way.

The Holocaust in Polish Consciousness 317 others.* A scandal broke out, and that attempt to tell the truth became the startingpoint of a campaign against the encyclopedists which led to the dismissal of the

editorial committee of the encyclopedia. The campaign was initiated by the same dominant political forces that instigated the antisemitic campaign of March 1968.

Following Soviet patterns, a new version of the entry was prepared, which subscribers were supposed to insert 1n place of the original, which was to be torn out. In the new version historical reality was completely distorted and the passage read: ‘Death camps served the purpose of the biological destruction of the Polish nation .. . they were a/so an instrument of the planned extermination of the Jewish population.” This incident clearly demonstrates not only how the Jewish presence in the national history was consciously eliminated from the version taught in Poland, but likewise Jewish death, the Jewish Holocaust. Paradoxically, in certain closed enclaves of historical studies it was possible to write the truth about the fate of the Jews, i.e. in Jewish publications such as those

| of the Jewish Historical Institute. It was impossible to avoid this since Jews knew what had happened to their people. This knowledge was tolerated so long as it was limited to the Jewish community, but because of the influence of the official version of history—censorship and self-censorship as well as the consensus between the extreme left and the nationalistic right—it was simply not disseminated into the broad picture of Polish history. Although in the last five years of the twentieth century there was a real breakthrough in this field, this distorted view of Polish history has still not been relegated

completely to the past. For example, in Przewodnik po Polsce (‘Guidebook to

Poland’), the most comprehensive guidebook in Polish bookshops, published in a large edition in 1997 by Wydawnictwo Sport 1 Turystyka and Muza, among the many historical facts nothing even indirectly hints that in pre-war Poland 27.2 per cent of the urban population was Jewish and that Jews contributed substantially to the character of towns and cities until 1939. In the entry for Biatystok, while it is stated that the Nazis ‘murdered approximately 50 per cent of the city’s population’, it is not mentioned that that 50 per cent of the inhabitants were predominantly Jewish. In the same guidebook, among the information about Auschwitz it is stated that the gas Cyklon B was used ‘for the mass murder of prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, and the infirm’. However, not a single word mentions at whom this gas was primarily directed and which people constituted 90 per cent of its victims. Thus Jews continue to be erased from Polish history, although certainly not as thoroughly as before. When it is written that 50 per cent of a ‘city’s population’ was murdered, but not that it was primarily Jews who were concerned, then it is not a lie, but neither 1s it the truth. * Wielka encyklopedia powszechna PWN, viii (Warsaw, 1966), 89. > My italics. On this, see J. R. Krzyzanowski, ‘Jak robilismy Encyklopedie’, Zeszyty historyczne, 124 (1998), 192-5.

318 Feliks Tych The journalist Jerzy Stawomir Mac accurately observes in his analysis of this and similar guidebooks that ‘it is possible to read in them about the decimation of towns by plague in the Middle Ages or the invasions of the ‘Tatars and Swedes, but not that before the very eyes of a generation still living a large percentage of their inhabitants were killed’.° Since it is not without reason that outside Poland Auschwitz is commonly held to symbolize the Holocaust, it is important to our understanding of this issue to know the results of public opinion polls on Auschwitz—both those of several years ago, and comparatively recent ones. In January 1995 Centrum Badania Opinii Spotecznej (CBOS) conducted a survey on a representative sample of 1,000 randomly selected adults on the subject ‘Auschwitz in the collective memory of Poles’. To the question ‘For whom is the memory of Auschwitz important today?’, 43 per cent of respondents answered ‘for everyone’, 20 per cent answered ‘for Poles’, and only 8 per cent ‘for Jews’. To the question ‘What associations does the name Auschwitz have for you’’, 47 per cent answered that for them it is the site of the martyrdom of the Polish people, 8 per cent that it 1s a site of the extermination of Jews, 20 per cent that it is a place of Jewish and Polish martyrdom, 61 per cent that it 1s a

site of the martyrdom of many peoples, and 11 per cent that it is a site of genocide, | where humanity was exterminated.’ Whichever way we look at these responses, they all indicate that to understand Auschwitz in the context of the Holocaust, and consequently to understand the Holocaust itself, is not something that has yet been achieved by the majority in Poland. In a survey conducted in September 1998 by Osrodek Badania Opinii Publiczneyj (Centre for Surveying Public Opinion, OBOP) entitled ‘Concerning Auschwitz’, only 5 per cent of respondents answered that Auschwitz was mainly the site of the extermination of the Jews. A further 48 per cent were of the opinion that the camp was ‘the site of the martyrdom of many peoples’.® This is obviously true, but when

it is not mentioned that one group constituted 90 per cent of the victims, then it simply means that the Holocaust of the Jews does not occupy a special place in the general perception of the effects of the occupation.

It is worth noticing that, according to the survey conducted three and a half years earlier, a slightly broader awareness of the importance of Auschwitz in the extermination of the Jews was indicated. Namely, to the question ‘What primary association does the name Auschwitz have for you?’, in January 1995 8 per cent (3 per cent more than in 1998) replied that Auschwitz was above all the site of the extermination of the Jews, while in February 1995, after a great deal of information appeared in the media in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of 6 J. S. Mac, ‘Amnezja narodowa: W Polsce unicestwia sie pamie¢ o spolecznosciach zydowskich’, Wprost, 17 May 1998, 34-5. ” CBOS, Oswiecim w zbiorowe pamieci Polakéw: Komunikat z badan (Warsaw, Jan. 1995), 3.

8 OBOP, Wok! Oswiecimia (Warsaw, Sept. 1998), 4. In regard to this survey, see the commentary ‘Zmowa milczenia’, Slowo zydowskie, 21/177 (16 Oct. 1998), 4.

The Holocaust in Polish Consciousness 319 Auschwitz, more than twice as many respondents (18 per cent) gave the same response.” As can be seen, a large percentage of the responses minimizing the Jewish aspect

of Auschwitz simply stemmed from ignorance. This example shows that, when historical information is widely available, positive results can be obtained immediately. But where it is not available gaps in knowledge arise, and historical consciousness can even regress. Let us also look at less conventional sources to learn about the state of historical consciousness on the issue of the Holocaust. On 28 November 1998 the television channel Nasza TV (Our TV) broadcast, undoubtedly with noble intentions, a live

discussion on the Holocaust and attitudes towards Jews. (It is typical that this important subject is broached at a time when most potential viewers are unlikely to be watching: this programme was transmitted at 10.55 p.m.) At the end of the programme a remarkable, shocking American documentary about the Holocaust was shown. The discussion was to some extent a survey, since viewers were invited to call in to the television station during the broadcast and give their opinions about Jews and the Holocaust. The results of the ‘spontaneous’ survey were appalling. All the responses were antisemitic, and one caller claimed in so many words that ‘Jews erected the walls of the Warsaw ghetto with their own hands, and now they blame

the Poles for not rescuing them.’ Beyond this and some other opinions that he expressed, the caller had no knowledge whatsoever of what went on during the occupation, nor of what was then possible or impossible. Most probably he did not know that the camps for Poles were also constructed with their own hands, and that in both cases this was done under the threat of arms. On 12 October 1998 during the popular television quiz show Va banque, conducted by Kazimierz Kaczor on the second public television channel, to the question ‘Where were the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto ultimately taken?’, not one of the participants (who were otherwise highly knowledgeable, even in matters of the non-Jewish camps) named the camp at Treblinka. Let us recall that this was a place where 300,000 Polish citizens who were residents of Warsaw died, plus at least the same number of Polish Jews from other places. It is hard to conceive that the average educated Pole would not be able to come up with the name of a place

in which 300,000 inhabitants of the capital and 600,000 Poles generally were murdered. This is a very bitter realization but an unavoidable one. There is, however, one optimistic note: a few years ago such a question simply would not have been asked on a popular television programme; neither would there have been a television programme on the Holocaust such as the one mentioned above. Something has changed, and for the better. It is impossible not to observe here a certain connection between the stunning gaps in historical knowledge of these quiz participants and such an incidental fact ° CBOS, Aneks do komunikatu ‘Oswiecim w zbiorowes pamieci Polakéw’ (Warsaw, Mar. 1995), 5.

320 Feltks Tych that on the site of the so-called Umschlagplatz, the place from where those same 300,000 Warsaw Jews were loaded onto cattle wagons and transported to the gas chambers of Treblinka, until the 1980s there was a petrol station, and for nearly forty years none of the country’s cultural or political lobbies either attempted or were able to change this. Only under pressure from some Polish intellectuals and

American public opinion was this petrol station, which had been a blight on Poland’s reputation, removed and the present modest but quite appropriate monu- ment put in its place. An analogous situation can be found to this very day in Chelmno nad Nerem, on the site of the first Nazi ‘death factory’ for the Jews. In the grounds of the so-called palace, the place to which the victims were transported and from where they were loaded onto gas chambers on trucks—that is, almost on the very spot where 360,000 Jews were martyred—there was situated until 1999 the district storage site for artificial fertilizers and coal. In this particular case, thanks to the efforts of the Council for the Commemoration of Resistance and Martyrdom, there is a chance that things will change and that there will be a small museum and site of commemoration in the grounds. Is it possible to claim that the long duration of these states of affairs 1s indicative of a common attitude towards the Holocaust? I think so, provided, of course, that we do not equate ‘common’ with ‘universal’. In January 1998 Gazeta lubuska, a newspaper published in Zielona Gora, conducted a sociological experiment. A reporter was sent to a small village called Zydowo to write an article on the villagers’ attitude towards Jews. The idea came from the simple association of the village’s name (‘Zyd’ means ‘Jew’ in Polish) with the subject. Virtually every inhabitant admitted that he or she had never met a Jew. None the less, nearly everyone thought in terms of a Jewish stereotype, and this was very negative. When respondents were asked about their attitude towards the Holocaust, aside from one 19-year-old and one older man, no one condemned the Nazi genocide. One inhabitant went so far as to state: ‘Hitler did well to murder the Jews because they would have finished off Poland and attacked the whole world.’!° It could be asked whether Zydowo, with its overwhelming acceptance of the Holocaust based on its extremely negative stereotype of the Jew, holds an exceptional place on the map of Polish historical consciousness. Certainly its inhabitants do not represent the most enlightened portion of Polish society. It is difficult, however, to consign them unequivocally to the fringes of society. Jerzy LeszkowiczBaczynski, a sociologist who wrote a commentary on the survey at the request of the newspaper, was not of the opinion that the responses of rural Zydowo’s residents were 1n any way exceptional. He also pointed out that the people described in the article were unable to say what constituted their superiority over the Jews. The definite feeling of their own worth is based on creating a negative stereotype of the ‘other’. The abstract Jew is thus the carrier of all the negative characteristics, without 9 *Tylko Hitler pozna?, Gazeta lubuska, 2 (3-4 Jan. 1998).

The Holocaust in Polish Consciousness 321 anything positive being attributed to him. It is worth pointing out that none of the people in the article even attempted to compare their attitudes with their own experience..."

So much for Dr Leszkowicz-Baczynski’s comments. I believe he is on the right track: several decades of the absence of Jews from the major historical media and distortion of the facts about the existence of the Jews have led to the majority of Poles being deprived of the possibility of understanding the Holocaust as an actual phenomenon and evaluating it as a moral catastrophe for civilization. After all, even the Jewish cemeteries have mostly been levelled, especially since 1968. It is thus true to say that for decades Polish society has not been provided with the opportunity to develop a rational stance concerning the Holocaust. In 1995 a sociological investigation was carried out among fifty-eight secondary school students in Wroctaw. Their attitudes towards Jews turned out to be quite different from those of the rural inhabitants of Zydowo. According to the survey’s author, the image of the Jew was for respondents an important element in maintain-

ing their own ego, their sense of being Polish, their superiority. However, the students saw more similarities than differences in the typical representation of each people, with a ratio of 60 (characteristics common to both Poles and Jews) to 40 (negative characteristics in Jews that do not occur in Poles). Does this gap in atti-

tudes between the rural inhabitants of Zydowo and the students from Wroclaw have its source in their social environment or in the differences between generations? Both factors probably played a role, but it seems to me that the age factor played the greater part. In this case, too, the author of the study wonders how the negative stereotype of the Jew in Polish society can be explained, describing it as ‘fairly mysterious,

considering the almost total absence of the ethnic group in Poland today’. He explains it much as the sociologist Leszkowicz-Baczynski from Zielona Gora does; that is, for many individuals it is ‘a crucial element, allowing them to uphold their social self in opposition to their image of the Jew’. This exercise, it can be deduced,

is facilitated by the minimal presence of Jews in Poland today, resulting in the impossibility of confronting the stereotype with reality.‘? It seems logical that the negative attitude towards the Jews dulls moral evaluation of the Holocaust, or is, in extreme cases, conducive to condoning the Nazi genocide, as can be seen from the survey conducted in Zydowo. At present, however, it is not so much ignorance that threatens Polish social consciousness in this matter, but the propaganda of the Polish nationalistic far right, who, tolerated by the justice system, publish leaflets in large print-runs denying the

Holocaust and claiming that the reduced number of Jews in Poland after the 1 J. Leszkowicz-Baczynski, of the sociology department of the Teachers’ College, Zielona Gora, Gazeta lubuska, 2 (3-4 Jan. 1998). 12 -T). Dolinski, ‘Polacy, Zydzi i Cyganie w percepcji licealist6w’, Psychologia wychowawcza, 4 (1995), 310-16, esp. 313-15.

322 Feltks Tych Second World War is the result of their currently residing at leisure in the United

States.‘° Such propaganda should not be ignored. In Germany it is a criminal offence. In Poland it can be legally distributed, and thousands of leaflets of this type circulate throughout the country, to the surprise of the Western press. ‘4 Let us return to public opinion surveys. I must admit that for the purposes of my

research I have had difficulty in using the results of a well-known investigation published in 1996 by a group of historians and sociologists under the direction of Ireneusz Krzeminski. Their book, entitled Czy Polacy sq antysemitami? (‘Are Poles

Antisemites?’), is an analysis of a survey conducted in 1992 on a representative sample of 1,000 Poles concerning various matters including the Holocaust. One

article by Ewa Kozminska-Frejlak and Ireneusz Krzeminski is entitled “The

Attitude of Polish Society to the Holocaust’.'° ,

My problems with this article result from several factors. The authors make the

introductory claim that ‘the primary aim in constructing the questions for the survey on the topic of the war events was, in the first place, to reconstruct the main

outlines of the image of the Holocaust and the attitude of Poles towards it’.*® However, none of the questions or responses actually address directly the issue of attitudes towards the Holocaust itself. Virtually all of the questions are formulated to support a particular hypothesis: the messianic self-stereotype of Poles. Moreover, they revolve around the axis: who suffered more from the German occupa-

tion—Poles or Jews? Almost half of those surveyed (46 per cent) selected the response that ‘the Jewish people suffered more than the Poles’, while 32 per cent felt that both peoples suffered equally. On the matter of whether the Poles did enough to help the dying Jews, 78 per cent of respondents felt that Poles ‘did as much as they could’ to save the Jews, while ro per cent felt that the Poles might have reasons for stirrings of conscience.?" Undoubtedly the results of the survey deserve attention. The question remains, however, why they differ so much from the results obtained by CBOS and OBOP. I do not have an answer to that. The results also seem to go against experiences such

as those reported in Gazeta lubuska’s article on the community in Zydowo. The latter article cannot be taken too seriously, but neither can it be ignored. Jt is always a delicate matter to investigate historical consciousness: there are no accurate and incontrovertible cognitive tools. On top of this, the problem of investigating public opinion on morally complex matters certainly reduces the chances of arriving at true answers. That is why we must also look at alternative sources. It seems to me that one way of studying the state of popular awareness concerning the Holocaust can and should be by analysing school textbooks. These are an important source as they not only allow us to investigate the state of awareness of the authors

13° Mity Holocaustu, 2nd edn. (Warsaw, 1998). , 14 Among the latest articles see ‘Marschieren fiir ein judenfreies Grosspolen’, Die Tageszeitung, 13

16 Tbid. 97. 17 Tbid. 98.

Nov. 1998. 19 In Krzeminski (ed.), Czy Polacy sq antysemitami?, 96-145.

The Holocaust in Polish Consciousness 323 themselves, but they also show what historical image largely shapes the historical awareness of Polish school-age youth. Currently most of Polish society has gained its basic historical knowledge from textbooks written before 1989. In these textbooks Jewish topics in Polish history are simply almost absent and the Holocaust is camouflaged by the magical formula ‘6 million Polish citizens’ murdered by the Nazi occupier. On the topic of the genocide of 3 million Polish Jews they give virtually no information. In the 1990s the Holocaust slowly gained a presence in Polish textbooks. In comparison with the previous period the changes were revolutionary. However, the projected picture still fails to give the essence of the phenomenon. Since I[ have written on this subject in a popular weekly, and a longer article has been printed in the Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, I will not go into detail here about

the image of the Holocaust in Polish school textbooks.’ However, I must touch upon the matter briefly, since it is crucial to our discussion. The Holocaust was of course a catastrophe which happened to the Jews, but at another level, at the level of our civilization, and morally, it was a catastrophe which happened to humanity as a whole. Very few textbooks present the matter to the student in such a way. Another question arises in the Polish context, since for logistical reasons it was Poland that the Nazis chose as the site of the Jewish genocide, and Polish Jews were the majority of the victims of the Holocaust. How did the first-hand witnesses, 1.e. Polish society, react in the face of this crime? Did they do everything possible to rescue the greatest number of victims? Did the majority of Polish society feel that this crime was something that concerned them directly, wounding their society, but against which they were simply helpless? Did they condemn it unequivocally? ‘To what degree was Polish society divided in its attitude towards the genocide carried out before its very eyes? To what extent was it guilty of the sin of omission, to what extent the sin of indifference, and to what extent the sin of approval of the Holocaust? These are all questions that have a decisive influence on the functioning of the Holocaust in Polish historical awareness and the degree of moral sensitivity to the complex issues connected with it. Unfortunately, it is to these very questions that most textbooks avoid giving any answers. It is true that Polish historical writing has not responded to the issue by publishing any monographs. '? However, it cannot be stated that the authors of textbooks do not have access to information that would allow at least a rudimentary response to the questions. Hundreds of archival sources have been published that are available in libraries; others can be accessed in archives. But there are other matters that require these authors not to reach for any sources, but simply to overcome certain stereotypes. 18 ‘Cien zwirowiska: Co polskie podreczniki mowia o HolokausScie’, Polityka, 47 (21 Sept. 1998), 85-6; BZIH, 3—4/ 183-4 (1997), special issue, 36-9. 19 Partial responses to some of these questions can be found in Krzeminski (ed.), Czy Polacy sq antysemitami?

324 Feliks Tych It is enough to remember the ostracism Jan Bionski was subjected to by his peers

when in 1987 he published his bold article ‘Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’ in Tygodnik powszechny, writing the truth that had been obvious to Jews for years, since they had experienced it personally, while for most of Polish society it was new, and for many shocking and difficult to accept. Even now, well over a decade after Btonski’s article was published, when they deal with the Holocaust and the Jews under German occupation, most school textbooks do not indicate the crucial, existential difference between the situation of the Jews and that of the Poles in the years 1941-5, and it is in this very point that it is possible to illustrate the essence of the Holocaust. In none of the textbooks do we find the essential piece of information that, after witnessing the Holocaust, quite dramatic shifts took place in the attitude of Polish

society towards Jews. Very few authors mention the demoralization of a part of Polish society during the war, although this is documented in hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish sources from the period. Not even the statements of the Vatican concerning the Holocaust and the Jews published during the pontificate of a Polish Pope have made an impression on society at large (they have only affected an élite), and this is quite simply because of a lack of awareness that these statements need to be disseminated, if not because of a peculiar boycott of them.

It is tempting to mention that the only two events which occurred to heighten social awareness of the Holocaust for Poles were two films: Fiddler on the Roof and

Schindler’s List. The first does not deal directly with the Holocaust, but it has brought home the disappearance of the Jewish population. ‘The second, obviously, directly concerns the subject.

| What are the conclusions to be drawn from these reflections? The primary inference, also mentioned by Tadeusz Sobolewski, is that the majority of Polish society up to this very day has some peculiar mental block concerning the Holocaust. On the whole, it seems to me, it mainly results from historical ignorance caused by the shortcomings, or rather conscious distortions, of the communist public education system of the first forty-five years after the war. But it is also the product of what the family and social milieu have said on the matter, and is influenced by the endemic

antisemitism of pre-war Poland, both of a religious nature and resulting from economic competition between Poles and Jews. This residual pre-war antisemitism was strengthened through the war years by witnessing the unashamed Nazi crimes against the Jewish population. ‘UVhere was also the attendant factor of the occupying forces corrupting a significant portion of

Polish society, among other things by giving several million Poles possession of property first from the relocated Jews, and then from murdered ones.”° Nor was Polish society completely immune to the German antisemitic propaganda. 20 T have in mind moral corruption as in the common understanding of the word corruption, in that the Nazis demonstrated that they could commit crimes against the Jews with impunity, and made Poles the primary recipients of homes and property lost by the Jews in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust in Polish Consciousness 325 This mental block against the Holocaust is also the result—in spite of the almost total absence of Jews from Polish territory—of the ever present pockets of xenophobia in Polish society, and thus also (but not especially) the perception of the Jew as the ‘other’, from whom nothing good for Poland can be expected. It 1s possible that this stereotype is no longer dominant, but it is still common enough. The main symptoms of this mental block are: (a) the phenomenon mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that the majority of Poles do not believe that the Holocaust constitutes a moral catastrophe for Western civilization (this dimension only recently

became an object of wider reflection in the public consciousness of the West); (b) the majority of Poles do not believe that this catastrophe likewise concerns Poland. Throughout the world tens of thousands of eyewitness reports have been pre-

served: written records, videos (for example those collected by the Spielberg Foundation), administrative documents, diaries, journals, and memoirs (both Polish and Jewish) published in various languages. All these allow us to reconstruct the circumstances in which the Jews died. It is time to bring into line, through normal heuristic methods, what is known from these sources with what is taught on the national history of Poland. Otherwise we will continue to have the Jewish truth and

the Polish truth, and this option is difficult for the historian to accept. History cannot be written in relativistic terms. Thus if today we complain of the relatively low level of historical consciousness, cultural awareness, and, finally, moral sensitivity regarding the Holocaust, we must ask the logical question: where was it to come from, since for half a century very few people worked at developing it? It seems to me that the effects of today’s wider presence of the issue of the Holocaust in the media, literature, and textbooks will only be visible after at least a decade or more. Translated from Polish by Christopher Garbowski

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PART III

Reviews

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REVIEW ESSAYS

John Paul II on Jews and Judaism ROBERT S. WISTRICH THE history of relations between Catholics and Jews over the last 2,000 years has all too often been a tale of anguish, suffering, and persecution when viewed from a Jewish perspective. The beginnings of what has been a fundamental change in those relations during the last thirty-five years date back to the document Nostra aetate (‘In our Time’) released by the Vatican in 1965. In fifteen long Latin sentences Rome removed the collective burden of deicide from the Jewish people and deplored ‘all hatreds, persecutions, displays of antisemitism levelled at any time or from any source against the Jews’. Pope John XXIII, who had inspired Vatican II, was the first pope in history, shortly before his untimely death in 1963, to ask forgiveness for ‘the curse which we unjustly laid on the name of the Jews’. He was the first to begin reversing the long-standing Augustinian theology of the Church that the Jews would for ever bear the mark of Cain for the crime of rejecting and ‘crucifying’ Jesus.

Of no less importance has been the personal commitment shown by the current pope, the first non-Italian to sit on St Peter’s Chair for more than 400 years. Since his election in 1978 John Paul II has repeatedly broken new ground in relations with the Jewish community. As the texts on Jews and Judaism compiled under the title Spiritual Pilgrimage by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) show, his writings, homilies, and speeches on Jewish themes represent a remarkable contribution to the historic dialogue between Jews and Catholics today.’ This ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ culminated in his becoming the first Roman pontiff to visit a synagogue in the Eternal City (or elsewhere) in 1986, followed seven years later by the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the state of Israel. Nor has any previous pope been as consistent, firm, and unequivocal in his denunciations of antisemitism as John Paul II.

Indeed, the anthology of texts edited by Eugene Fisher (representing the National Conference of Catholic Bishops) and Rabbi Leon Klenicki (of the ADL) concludes with the following resounding call by the Pope in January 1995: ‘Never again anti-Semitism! Never again the arrogance of nationalism! Never again genocide! May the third millennium usher in a season of peace and mutual respect ‘ Pope John Paul I, Spiritual Pilgrimage: Texts on Jews and Judaism 1979-1995, ed. Eugene J. Fisher and Leon Klenicki (New York: Crossroad, 1995).

330 Robert S. Wistrich among peoples.’ ‘There is no doubt that the present pope has had a far more direct experience of Jewish life and suffering than any of his predecessors. As a young man growing up in the small Polish town of Wadowice (about thirty miles from Krakow), where nearly a quarter of the population were Jews, he counted them among his closest friends. Asa result of these friendships he became familiar with the rhythms of Jewish observance and family life. Later, after 1939, Karol Wojtyta (as John Paul II was then called) would witness the murder of Poland’s Jews and the martyrdom

of his fellow Poles while studying secretly for the priesthood in Nazi-occupied Krakow. These macabre events left an indelible impression on the young man (in 1940 he was only 20 years old) and they inform his repeated reminders to Catholics that Europe’s Jews were exterminated ‘only for the reason that they were Jews’—a

bitter reality that he would internalize as part of his most intimate credo. When Karol Wojtyta returned in 1948 from Rome to Krakow after a two-year period of study, he was shocked to discover that all his Jewish friends in Wadowice had vanished. Speaking of his home town in 1994, John Paul II remarked that it was ‘from there that I have this attitude of community, of communal feelings about the Jews’.” These recollections are vividly expressed in his letter to classmate Jerzy Kluger (dated 30 March 1989), which comments on the plaque to be unveiled in commemoration of the Jews of Wadowice who were exterminated by the Nazis. ‘The Pope wrote: ‘I remember very clearly the Wadowice synagogue, which was near our high

school. I have before my eyes the numerous worshippers, who during their Holidays passed on their way to pray there.’

The Pope stressed his veneration for the memory of the Wadowice Jews so cruelly killed by the Germans, and for the place of worship which the Nazi invaders destroyed. Quoting from his own words of 14 June 1987, pronounced to the representatives of the Warsaw Jewish community during his third papal pilgrimage to Poland, John Paul II stated: The Church and all peoples and nations within this Church are united with you . . . Indeed, when they speak with warning to people, nations, and even to whole humanity, they place in the forefront your nation, its suffering, its persecutions, its extermination. The pope also raises his voice of warning in your name. This has a special significance to the pope from Poland, because together with you, he survived all that happened in this land. (pp. 129-30)

It was no accident that the Pope should confide such a powerful testament of solidarity with the Jews of Wadowice to Jerzy Kluger, though few indeed were those in the wider world who knew of their lifelong friendship. It is this relationship with Jerzy Kluger, a Polish Jew and the Pope’s last surviving classmate from Wadowice

(who today still lives in Rome), that lies at the centre of Darcy O’Brien’s heartwarming book—made all the more poignant by the author’s untimely death on * Darcy O’Brien, The Hidden Pope: The Untold Story of a Lifelong Friendship that 1s Changing the Relationship between Catholics and Jews: The Personal Journey of John Paul II and Jerzy Kluger (New York: Daybreak Books, 1998), 368.

John Paul IT on Jews and Fudaism 331 2 March 1998 in Tulsa at the age of 58. What is remarkable about O’Brien’s book is the way in which he brings to bear the personal experience of Karol Wojtyta (nicknamed Lolek through much of the story) as a young man, an adolescent, and then a young priest in post-war communist Poland to illuminate his theology, his politics, and his attitudes to Jews and Judaism. The relations between Polish Catholics and Jews are humanized through the warm filter of the interaction between two boys— one Catholic and one Jewish—whose friendship survived the genocidal storm that devastated Poland in the middle of this century. Darcy O’Brien’s book The Hidden Pope does not ignore the historical forces that led to this disaster, though the interested reader would be advised to look elsewhere to understand them more adequately. But its real strength as a book lies in its offering of a case-study of how the personal can become political and of how the experi-

ence of adversity relates to the eternal truths of faith. In the example of Karol Wojtyta we can paradoxically see the roots of his rapprochement with Jews and his atoning for Rome’s historic complicity in antisemitism in the Poland of the 1930s— a hotbed of ethnic and exclusivist nationalism. What is so striking is just how free

this Polish teenager from Wadowice appears to have been from the antisemitic sentiments then raging in Poland, especially in the heart of the Catholic Church.

As an example O’Brien quotes from the notorious 1936 speech of Cardinal Hlond, primate of Poland, then advocating a boycott of Jewish businesses. The cardinal had claimed ‘that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism, subversion .. . Itis a fact that Jews deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on Polish people is a negative one.’ If this was the inflammatory tone of Poland’s leading Catholic on the eve of the Holocaust, it takes little imagination to grasp the growing threat posed to Polish Jews by antisemitic rowdyism at the street level. Karol Wojtyla, like his father (who was an upstanding, pious Polish Catholic and former officer in the Austrian army), appears to have been quite immune to this kind of Catholic nationalist rhetoric which branded Polish Jews as immoral, materialistic Christ-killers. O’Brien recounts the following revealing episode, which involved Ginka Beer, a beautiful Jewish girl and neighbour of the Wojtytas, who was two years older than Karol and had gone in 1936 to study at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Within a year she was back in Wadowice, stunned by the rampant anti-

semitism among Polish students and preparing, on the urging of her parents, to emigrate to Palestine. Years later, in Israel, she recalled how she broke the news of her imminent departure to the 17-year-old Karol Wojtyta (Lolek) and his father. There was only one family who never showed any racial hostility toward us, and that was Lolek and his dad . . . [When I was about] to leave Poland for Palestine because . . . disaster faced the Jews ... I went to say goodbye to Lolek and his father. Mr Wojtyta was upset about my departure, and when he asked me why, I told him. Again and again he said to me, ‘Not all Poles are anti-Semitic. You know I am not!’

332 Robert S. Wistrich I spoke to him frankly and said that very few Poles were like him. He was very upset. But Lolek was even more upset than his father. He did not say a word, but his face went very red. I said farewell to him as kindly as I could, but he was so moved that he could not find a single word in reply.

The Hidden Pope is full of such telling episodes which reveal not only the extent

of Polish antisemitism but also that there were Polish Catholic families in which such sentiments appeared as shameful and foreign to their outlook. Unfortunately, O’Brien never really comes to grips with the issue of whether the Wojtytas were an exception to the antisemitic rule or not. What he does provide, however, 1s a vivid portrait of the lasting friendship with Jerzy Kluger that seemed to cancel out the potentially poisonous effects of the increasingly pervasive Polish antisemitic nationalism of the 1930s. Kluger, it should be noted, was a member of Wadowice’s most prominent Jewish family and came from an affluent, liberal middle-class background. His father, Dr Wilhelm Kluger, was a successful lawyer and head of the local Jewish community. Jerzy Kluger was also a fine sportsman, a fact of no small importance in shielding Jewish boys in Poland (as elsewhere) from the more commonplace non-Jewish stereotypes and prejudices about Jews. The present pope, too, was an athletically inclined youth who played in goal for the local Jewish

soccer team, even against his fellow Catholics. I find something symbolically appealing in this image of Wojtyta trying to save Jews from defeat or possibly helping them to victory in a sporting contest.

, For reasons which will soon be apparent, I also found O’Brien’s evocation of Jerzy’s father particularly fascinating. Wilhelm Kluger emerges as a firm Polish patriot who spoke regularly in tribute to Poland’s ruler Marshal Jozef Pitsudski and proudly wore the legionnaire’s uniform. The Klugers were clearly Poles first and Jews only second. Dr Kluger was convinced, however, that both Poles and Jews would have to stand together to defend Polish freedom. He genuinely felt that his roots in Polish life, history, and culture were as deep as those of any Catholic. (In this, of course, he differed from the majority of pre-war Polish Jews, who identified either with Orthodoxy or with the Zionists.) A Western-oriented Jew of the cosmopolitan persuasion, he felt that anything that served to exclude Jews from Polish life could only cause trouble. Hence, he concluded that Yiddish was an encumbrance (though he spoke it fluently) and a source of separateness. This attitude seems to have corresponded to Dr Kluger’s passage from being a one-time Bundist | agitator to becoming a supporter of the moderate wing of the Polish Socialist Party. Dr Kluger was determined to preserve good relations between Jews and Catholics

despite the intensifying antisemitism at the end of the 1930s. His efforts at interfaith communication included the promotion of dialogue through music, and it was

this (as well as his friendship with Jerzy) that particularly encouraged the very musical young Wojtyta to visit the Kluger household regularly. His respect for Dr Kluger was further increased by the courageous way that he defended both Jews and Catholics in legal cases.

John Paul IT on Jews and Judaism 333 If I have dealt at some length with Jerzy’s father, it is not only because I found O’Brien’s portrait of him so interesting but also for a more personal reason. During the 1950s Dr Kluger was a tenant in my grandparents’ house in Golders Green (in north-west London), where he lived on the first floor. I remember him as a kindly, distinguished-looking elderly man who was a compulsive newspaper reader and seemed extremely well informed about current events. Every day after primary school ended at 4 p.m., I would go to my grandparents and also visit Dr Kluger’s room (which reeked of strong tobacco) to ask for one of his papers. His favourite reading was the Labour Daily Herald (which no longer exists), the Manchester Guardian (as it was then called), and the Polish-language gazette Dziennik polski. He took a great interest in me during those years (when I was between 6 and 11 years old), treating me almost like a grandson and encouraging my precocious appetite for what was happening in the wider world. Frequently he would eat with my grandparents, who were modern Orthodox Jews from Krakow recently landed on British shores, and they would, of course, converse in Polish. I vaguely knew that Dr Kluger had once been a prominent lawyer and a Polish army captain (in the reserves). I also knew that, like my parents, he had been in L’viv in 1940 (then under Soviet occupation), having escaped from the Germans. Again, like them, he and his son Jerzy had been relocated to the interior of the Soviet Union. The Klugers’ itinerary was remarkably parallel to that of my own family. They had arrived in a work camp somewhere within the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (about 400 miles east of Moscow), in the middle of a dense forest. Like many other Poles, having been classified as a kind of ‘slave labour’, they had to cut timber with handsaws and drag it to the railway line or the nearby River Volga for transport downstream. Jerzy (better known as Jurek) always managed to fulfil the norm imposed by the labour camp administrator and showed the kind of enterprise in adapting to the hardships of Russia that reminds me of the stories of my American cousins who lived through similar experiences in their early twenties. Like them, he was physically strong, had an eye for the women, and was constantly getting in and out of trouble. One difference between the Klugers and the Wistreichs (at any rate those of my father’s family who found themselves in Russia) was that both Wilhelm and Jerzy were so determined to serve in the Polish armed forces. They managed, after vari1ous adventures, to join General Anders’s Polish army, which finally succeeded in evacuating about 150,000 Polish troops from the wartime Soviet Union. Jurek and his father eventually arrived in Palestine, were transferred like their fellow Poles to the British army, and (in Jurek’s case) fought valiantly in North Africa and Italy for the Allied cause. O’Brien narrates these adventures with skill and gusto, while simultaneously following Karol Wojtyta’s painful experiences in German-occupied Poland between 1939 and 1944. Lolek lost his father (his mother had died when he was a young boy), then worked for a time as a quarry labourer, before beginning clandestine

334 Robert S. Wistrich studies for the priesthood in 1942 under the wing of Krakow’s princely archbishop Adam Sapieha. He was ordained in Krakow on the Feast of All Saints in 1946, before being sent to Rome to write his doctoral dissertation at the Dominican Angelicum University—a thesis entitled “The Issue of Faith in Saint John of the Cross’, which he completed two years later. In the 1950s Wojtyta went on to teach ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin (the only such institution in the Communist bloc) while still living in Krakow. He continued to write scholarly and religious articles as well as poems, plays, and theatrical reviews under a nom de plume. In 1958 Wojtyta was appointed a bishop (by the dying Pope Pius XII), and four years later he was already one of the youngest bishops to attend the historic debates over Vatican II in Rome, which would open up a new page in Catholic—Jewish relations. Nominated as archbishop of Krakow in 1964, Wojtyta emerged at the Vatican Council as a modernizer, with a particular enthusiasm for Rome’s pruning of the doctrinal deadwood about Judaism in its epochal Nostra aetate of 1965. It was in the same year that Jurek Kluger, now living in Rome (having completed his studies in Italy after demobilization), first read of a speech given in his new adopted home by the archbishop of Krakow, one Karol Wojtyta—his former classmate and closest friend whom he had not seen for twenty-seven years! The renewal of their friend-

ship would, ironically enough, bring Jurek back to his Jewish roots as well as | enabling him to know the Catholic clergy better, not just as priests but as human beings.

In the immediate post-war years Jurek, having married a Catholic, began to move in predominantly non-Jewish circles. He had virtually no connection with Jewish communal life in Rome. But under the prodding of Karol Wojtyta (since 1967 a cardinal, and hence a more frequent visitor to Rome) the Jewish past began to come more alive for him. There were now even issues over which he disagreed as a Jew with his old friend, such as the beatification of Father Maximilian Kolbe—a Polish Franciscan priest who had been martyred in Auschwitz in 1941. Wojtyta had been one of the most active advocates of his beatification in 1971 (later, as pope, he

would elevate Kolbe to sainthood), despite the fact that he had been the founder and director of a publishing house that issued Maty dziennik, the most antisemitic Church-affiliated daily newspaper in pre-war Poland. Kolbe was arguably more of a passive than a militant antisemite; he was undoubtedly an anti-Nazi (whose outspokenness had landed him in Auschwitz), and his heroic sacrificial death made him a Polish national symbol. But for Kluger, as for most Jews, a priest who had abetted antisemitic hatred in Poland (however indirectly he had done so) could not be a worthy candidate for sainthood, unless his martyrdom had involved the saving of Jewish lives—which was not the case. Moreover, this beatification took place at a

time when the Polish communist regime refused to acknowledge that the Jews constituted the majority of victims murdered at Auschwitz. O’Brien does not gloss over such differences, and generally handles them with tact and fairness. At the same time he emphasizes that only after Cardinal Wojtyta

Fohn Paul IT on Jews and Judaism 335 became Pope John Paul II in 1978 did it become apparent that he ‘would make the reversal of a lamented Catholic record [on Judaism, Israel, and antisemitism] the major theme of his papacy’. Possibly the author goes a little too far in insisting on the present pope’s ‘unprecedented Catholic affirmation of the eternal validity of Judaism, an idea that was previously inconceivable’ (p. 274); it was not quite so

unprecedented or inconceivable as this implies, nor is the Pope’s affirmation entirely devoid of ambiguity. Moreover, it might be questioned whether the revolutionary change in attitudes to Jews and Judaism is really on a par with, for example, John Paul II’s impact in wrenching Poland from the Soviet empire and sapping

the moral foundations of communism. |

But O’Brien is certainly right to stress the importance of the Pope’s constant reaffirmation of the special character of Jewish suffering in the Second World War, a leitmotif which began with his first papal visit to Poland in June 1979. His homily at Auschwitz, recited with impressive gravity and tearful eyes, recalled ‘the memory of the people whose sons and daughters were intended for total extermination’; whose origin was from Abraham, ‘our father in faith’, and who had received the

Commandment “Thou shalt not kill’ and had tragically ‘experienced in special measure what is meant by killing’. Despite periodic Jewish concerns that John Paul IIT’s cult of Auschwitz as the ‘Golgotha of the modern world’ might herald an attempt to ‘Christianize the Shoah’ (a point to which I shall return) there can be little doubt that the Pope’s warnings, about the Holocaust have been primarily directed against racism and, more specifically, against antisemitism. Nor is there much doubt that the Pope sees the problem

of antisemitism in the theological framework of a historic misunderstanding of __ God’s Chosen People and of the true connection between Judaism and Christianity, which has been obscured and gravely deformed over the centuries.

As the anthology of his texts entitled Spiritual Pilgrimage makes clear, John Paul II has been working for the last twenty years to re-educate Catholics on these matters, to set the record straight so that Christians and Jews can begin a new

millennium in peace, harmony, and mutual respect. In this endeavour he has continued the work of Pope John XXIII in Vatican II and of a whole generation of pioneering Catholic and Jewish scholars, beginning with the French Jewish historian Jules Isaac. As a result, many Catholics have begun to accept that God does not go back on his promises, that proselytism towards Jews is abhorrent where it is not a matter of free choice, and that the Jewish people and its faith deserve their deepest respect. In a speech on 7 November 1980 to the Jewish community of Berlin, the Polish Pope praised such Jewish thinkers as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, ‘who,

through their creative familiarity with the Jewish and German languages, constructed a wonderful bridge for a deeper meeting of both cultural areas’. Even more significantly, he insisted that the Old Covenant had never been revoked by God; and that ‘Jews and Christians, as children of Abraham, are called to be a blessing for the

336 Robert S. Wistrich world’; and he fervently prayed ‘for the fullness of Shalom for all your brothers in nationality and in faith, and also for the land to which Jews look with particular

veneration . . . May all peoples in Jerusalem soon be reconciled and blessed in Abraham!’ (my italics). The last reference, which includes Muslims as well as Christians and Jews, also highlights another interesting feature of John Paul II’s position on issues of concern to the Jewish people. Already in 1980, by referring to the nationality and the land, he was clearly pointing to Israel and perhaps hinting at the recognition that would eventually come in 1993. But, as the texts also reveal, the Pope did continually raise the Palestinian issue and has been sympathetic to their plight. His position on the

Middle East has been finely balanced between recognition of the rights of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians to a homeland of their own. In the 1980s he received not only Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres (both Polish-born prime ministers of Israel) but also Yasser Arafat in the Vatican, the latter visit provoking much Jewish criticism. So, too, did the pomp-laden official reception in Rome for blacklisted Austrian president Kurt Waldheim (an ex-Nazi and supposedly a good Catholic) in 1987—one of John Paul II’s less felicitous acts of diplomacy. This period between 1985 and 1ggo was one in which Jewish—Catholic relations experienced a number of serious setbacks which, unfortunately, evoke little if any serious reflection or commentary in the anthology Spiritual Pilgrimage. Things began, however, promisingly enough, with Notes on the Correct Way to Present fews and Fudaism in Catholic Preaching and Teaching—a handbook meant to clarify and rectify omissions in the Vatican II document of twenty years earlier. Better still, on 13 April 1986 came the Pope’s historic visit to the synagogue in Rome, one of the most dramatic moments of his entire pontificate. His address on that occasion contained three especially relevant points. First, he declared: “The Jewish religion is not “extrinsic” to us, but in a certain way is intrinsic to our own religion. With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and, ina certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.’ Secondly, John Paul II reaffirmed the

position of Nostra aetate in repudiating any collective or ancestral blame being attached to the Jews for Christ’s passion. Thirdly, the Church rejected any notion which claimed to be based on Scripture, that the Jews were a ‘cursed’ people. On the contrary, in the words of St Paul, the Jews were beloved of God—and to quote the present pope, ‘called ... with an irrevocable calling’. John Paul I?’s message went beyond mere coexistence or a proposal for more intellectual exchange between Jews and Catholics. It was an appeal from the heart for a religious dialogue ‘animated by fraternal love’. He also saw a special role for Jews and Christians in the modern world as ‘the trustees and witnesses of an ethic marked by the Ten Commandments’ to confront a society which is ‘often lost in agnosticism and individualism and which is suffering the bitter consequences of selfishness and violence’ (Spiritual Pilgrimage, 63).

Fohn Paul [1 on fews and Fudaism 337 A more problematic moment during the Pope’s visit was the passing reference to the ‘high price in blood’ paid by the Jewish community of Rome during the Second World War. John Paul II chose only to remember that the Holy See had thrown open Vatican City ‘to offer refuge and safety to so many Jews of Rome being hunted by their persecutors’ (p. 62). This was a somewhat selective remembrance, which, though true as far as it went, ignored the public silence of Pope Pius XII, even as

Roman Jews were being deported under his windows to the death camps in Auschwitz. This contentious issue, which increasingly provokes aggressive and militant rejoinders from certain Catholics—especially those who are dedicated at all costs to presenting Pius XII as a hero of Catholicism—has been profoundly damaging to Catholic—Jewish relations. The present pope, by recently describing his controversial predecessor as ‘a great Pope and a wise diplomat’ and pushing him

onto the fast track for sainthood, has in my judgement made a costly error. The sanctification of Pius XII would be a disaster for Catholic—Jewish dialogue. It was left to the president of the Rome Jewish community, Professor Giacomo Saban, to point quietly to the dark centuries during which John Paul II’s papal pre-

decessors had ghettoized and discriminated against Jews; and in one veiled but unmistakable reference to Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, Saban aptly commented: ‘What was taking place on one of the banks of the Tiber could not have been unknown on the other side of the river, nor could what was happening elsewhere on the European continent’ (p. 72). Despite the impact of the Pope’s strikingly fraternal gestures, Catholic—Jewish relations would, however, be overshadowed for the rest of the 1980s by the affair of the Carmelite nuns in Auschwitz. This episode, which raised both Polish—Jewish and Jewish—Catholic tensions to new heights of ugliness, is unfortunately glossed over by the anthology and treated somewhat sketchily even by O’Brien. It ignited Jewish impatience with the Vatican and anger at a resurgent Polish nationalism that was staking a renewed claim to Auschwitz as being, above all, the site of Polish

martyrdom. It revived Jewish fears that John Paul II (who remained aloof from

the polemics for nearly a decade) might surreptitiously be encouraging the ‘Christianizing’ of the Holocaust. It also produced Cardinal Glemp’s malevolently antisemitic homily against the anti-Polonism of the allegedly all-powerful ‘Jewish’ media. ‘The primate of Poland was beginning to sound like Cardinal Hlond some sixty years earlier. Behind these increasingly venomous polemics (which contributed to a revival of political antisemitism in the Polish elections of the following year) was a real issue that still shows no signs of going away. The feeling exists to this day among many Polish Catholics that, while the Jewish Holocaust is universally honoured (especially in the West), 3 million non-Jewish Poles who lost their lives in the war are being ignored; that, while Auschwitz is widely seen as the symbol of Jewish memory, the blood sacrifice of tens of thousands of Polish Catholic victims in the same death camp is barely known outside of Poland. This sense of frustration and rivalry in

338 Robert S. Wistrich victimhood is by no means restricted solely to antisemitic Poles: it also festers and has found voice among those who had helped Jews during the war. This resentment may be humanly understandable, but it is pure Polish and Catholic paranoia to present this situation as some kind of ‘Jewish conspiracy’. There is, however, even worse news. Today, in the United States, there are militant Catholic voices who are taking this a stage further in a soft form of ‘Holocaust revisionism’, which claims

that 5 million Catholics (sic!) were the anonymous ‘others’ in Hitler’s alleged Holocaust against the Catholic Church. (The 3 million non-Jewish Poles are hereby annexed as ‘Catholics’, though those Nazi executioners who were also nominal Catholics, from Hitler and Himmler down, through the SS and Order Police, are of course, for the purposes of this propaganda, merely ‘neo-pagans’.) The Pope’s role in mediating these conflicts leaves something to be desired, a thankless task though it must doubtless be. Interestingly, as O’Brien shows, Jerzy Kluger played a little-known though not insignificant part in these affairs, as he did in developing channels of communication with the Israelis, which eventually led to the formal recognition of the Jewish state. This is all the more remarkable given that Kluger has never had any known political ambitions, let alone seen himself as a selfconscious ethnic or religious Jew. Nevertheless, the Pope has bestowed at times a unique trust in him, while Kluger himself has readily reciprocated, despite being placed on occasion (as in the Glemp affair) in an excruciating situation. His consolation, as O’Brien puts it, is to have ‘played an important role in the achieving of reconciliation between Catholics and Jews that culminated in the recognition of Israel’. This recognition has been a crucial element in helping to resolve the bimillennial religious and political antagonism between Rome and Jerusalem. On the occasion of his address to the first ambassador of Israel to the Holy See (29 September 1994) the Pope spoke in French about the distinctive nature of the new relations between the two parties. As always, he mentioned the common cultural roots (‘starting with the writings of the Bible, the book of books, an ever-living source’) but also recalled the unique character of the Holy Land, sanctified by the ‘One God’s revelation to men’; more specifically, he evoked the millions of believers of the great monotheistic religions who turn to the Holy City of Jerusalem as to a sacred heritage but

also a scene of division and conflict. For the Pope, ‘the dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people of Israel and of the whole world’ would enable both ‘to better serve the great causes of humanity’ (Spiritual Pilgrimage, 194). Above all, he looked forward to the day that Jews, Christians, and Muslims ‘will hail one another in Jerusalem with the greeting of peace’. That dream is farther away than ever as the Holy Land is ripped apart once more by war between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims. ‘The Pope’s visit to Israel and the territories proved his good faith, astuteness, and special charisma. Unfortunately, the dialogue between Jews and Muslims has scarcely begun.

Recent Developments in the Historiography of Silesian Jews MARCIN WODZINSKI AMONG researchers into the past of the Jews of Silesia, there are only two scholars

of outstanding eminence: Marcus Brann, author of the only monograph on the history of Jews in Silesia, and Bernhard Brilling, who wrote a number of important essays and several books on the subject.! When in the 1970s and 1980s Brilling changed his area of interest and concentrated on the Jewish community of Westphalia, it seemed that Silesian Jews had lost their last historian. Indeed, except for a

few articles by Brilling that continued his earlier studies, and several works in which Silesian Jews appeared either as a marginal topic or within the framework of a larger investigation of German Jewry, that period produced surprisingly little in scholarship. The history of the Jews in Silesia became an abandoned field for nearly two decades. Isolated if sometimes very interesting studies appeared (among them I would mention works by Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Karol Jonca), but they did not maintain the continuity of research, and it could certainly not be said that there was any systematic interest in the subject. With the renaissance of Judaic studies in Germany and Poland in the second half of the 1980s came a revival of interest in Silesian Jewry. Two conferences on the history of the Jewish community in Silesia, organized almost simultaneously, can be regarded as a symbolic double threshold: the first took place at the Institute of History at Wroclaw University in June 1988, the second, a year later in Berlin. The papers of the Wroctaw conference, published in two volumes, generated substantial interest and, despite their obvious flaws, were praised by Silesian historians.” The editor of the two published volumes was aware of these flaws, and

in an introduction explained the reasons for the conference itself, and the postconference publication: ' M. Brann, Geschichte der FJuden in Schlesien, 6 vols. (Breslau, 1896-1917). The most important of Brilling’s works on the subject are Geschichte der Juden in Breslau von 1454 bis 1702 (Stuttgart, 1960); Die jtidischen Gemeinden Mittelschlesiens. Entstehung und Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1972). For a complete bibliography of his works, see ‘Bibliographie Bernhard Brilling 1928—1968’, Theokratia. Jahrbuch des Institutum Fudaicum Delhitschianum, 1 (1967-9), 195-220; ‘Bibliographie Bernhard Brilling 1968-1978’, Theokratia. Jahrbuch des Institutum Judaicum Delitschianum, 3 (1973-5), 264-70.

2 The first volume was published in the journal Sl/gski Kwartalnik Eistoryceny Sobotka, 44/1 (1989); the second is K. Matwijowski (ed.), Z dziejow ludnosci zydowskiej na Slgsku, Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, 1182 (Wroclaw, 1991).

34.0 Marcin Wodzinski The principal task of the conference was to bring to the attention of scholars a large neglected

area in Polish historiography, especially in the last forty years—research on the history of the Jewish community in Silesia, particularly until the end of the eighteenth century . . . Because of the need for new detailed research, no general survey papers were delivered at this conference.®

It seems that the conference was indeed a true reflection of the state of research (or lack thereof) at that time on the history of Silesian Jews. ‘The majority of papers were minor or major comments on detailed issues, generally lacking originality, and sometimes little more than compilations. Moreover, both volumes are filled with factual errors, and most papers (for example, Jan Kwak’s essay on Jews in the towns of Upper Silesia) display a lack of knowledge of the basic literature of the subject; most also make rudimentary errors because of their unfamiliarity with Jewish culture and customs, the bibliography of their topics, and basic facts. None the less, with its exposure of the many weak points in the current state of knowledge, the conference laid the basis for developments which became more marked in the following years. The first of these, and perhaps the easiest to discern, was the transfer of the centre of research on Silesian Jewry from Germany to Poland. Since 1988 the dominance of Poland in this field of research, initially quantitatively, but with time also qualitatively, has become more and more evident. This is fully understandable, and has nothing to do with the ‘re-Polonization’ of Silesia’s past; on the contrary, historians dealing with Silesian Jewry, precisely because of their subject-matter, are generally free from this bias. The topics of the papers presented at the Wroclaw conference reflected well the directions prevalent in research then and later. ‘The subsequent conferences in 1990

and 1993, which were also organized by the Research Centre for the Study of Churches and Minorities (Pracownia Badan Dziejow Kosciot6w 1 Mniejszosci Narodowych) at Wroclaw University’s department of history, did not change much in this regard.* The most researched period has been, and still is, the Holocaust. This is not an accident. Since the 1960s Karol Jonca, Franciszek Potomski, and Alfred Konieczny have published several fundamental works on related topics, and the papers they

presented at the 1988 conference merely reflected subsequent stages in their research: Karol Jonca described the history of Kristallnacht, Alfred Konieczny dealt with the Jewish prisoners of the Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp, and Franciszek Potomski examined the deportations of Jews from Lower Silesia. They later developed the research they discussed at the Wroctaw conference, and their articles appeared in the journal Studia nad faszyzmem 1 zbrodniami hitlerowskim, which is edited by Karol Jonca. In addition, in recent years a few very interesting 3 K. Matwijowski, ‘Slowo wstepne’, S laski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobotka, 44/1 (1989), 2.

* 'The materials of the former were published in S/gski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobotka, 46/2 (1991); of the latter, in K. Matwijowski (ed.), Z historii ludnosct zydowskie] w Polsce i na Slasku, Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, 1568 (Wroclaw, 1994).

The Historiography of Silesian Fews 341 monographs have appeared whose scope has extended to the area of Silesia.” More recently, the three historians mentioned above have been joined by their pupils and younger colleagues: Daniel Bogacz, Bogdan Cybulski, Aleksander Krugtow, and Tomasz Kruszewski; together they have created the Wroctaw school of Holocaust studies. Its connection with the history of law, most visible in Potomski’s studies, 1s also evident 1n the works of other scholars both 1n their general approach to the subject and in the focus of their archival research. Among the most important achievements of the school are a monograph on the events of Kristallnacht, the history of transit camps for Jews in Lower Silesia, as well as studies on the stages of the genocide in Silesia and its legal aspects, especially the expropriatory character of Nazi

anti-Jewish legislation. This last thread seems to me the most interesting. The theory that the Holocaust should be seen as murder for robbery on a large scale 1s not new; it was advanced in Jewish publications shortly after the Second World War. With the passage of time it came to be seen as too banal an explanation for such a horrible crime and was abandoned. The studies on the mass murder of the Jewish

population in Silesia underline again the economic aspect of the genocide. Even today studies on the Holocaust in Silesia are significantly more advanced than other areas of research, and Jonca, Potomski, and Konieczny have rightly become the best-

known historians of the Silesian Jews.® A less significant role in researching the Holocaust in Silesia has been played by

German historians, among them Roland Otto, who has dealt with the persecution , of Jews in the area of Gorlitz.’ An interesting gloss to the history of the Holocaust in

Silesia is provided by memoirs and diaries from that period, a large number of which have recently been published in Germany and the United States. Alongside the most famous, the diaries of Walter Tusk® and Willy Cohn,? which have been known for some time and to which Cohn has now added a volume of memoirs, more recently additional memoirs have appeared by Eliezer Urbach, Karla Wolf, Hans-

Werner Wollenberg, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Semuel Ron, and Erhard LucasBusemann. This type of publication is now an increasingly important source for the history of that period. The most important contribution of Czech historians in recent years to the study ° K. Jonca, ‘Noc Krysztatowa’ i casus Herszela Grynszpana, Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, 1321 (Wroclaw, 1992; 2nd edn. 1998). A. Konieczny, Tormersdorf, Griissau, Riebnig: Obozy przejsciowe dla ZLydow Dolnego Slaska z lat 1941-1943, Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, 1998 (Wroclaw, 1997).

© See e.g. A. Konieczny, ‘The Transit Camp for Breslau Jews at Riebnig in Lower Silesia (1941-1943), Yad Vashem Studies, 25 (1996), 317-42; K. Jonca, ‘Deportation of German Jews from Breslau 1941-1944 as Described in Eyewitness Testimonies’, ibid. 275-316; id., ‘Jewish Resistance to Nazi Racial Legislation in Silesia 1933-1937’, in F. R. Nicosia and L. Stokes (eds.), Germans against Nazism: Nonconformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich. Essays in Honour of Peter Hoff-

mann (New York, 1990); id., ‘Schlesiens Juden unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft 1933-1945’, in F.-C. Schultze-Rhonhof (ed.), Geschichte der Juden im 19. und 20. FJahrhundert (Hanover, 1995); F’. Polomski, ‘Die “Arisierung” des jiidischen Vermogens in Schlesien 1933-1945’, ibid. Die Verfolgung der Juden in Gorlitz unter der faschistischen Diktatur 1933-1945 (Gorlitz, 1990).

© Breslauer Tagebuch 1933-1940 (Berlin, 1988). 9 Als Fude in Breslau 1941 (Jerusalem, 1975).

342 Marcin Wodzinski of the genocide of Silesian Jews was the international conference held in Ostrava in 1995 on the Nisko Plan.'° The monograph by Medcislav Borak on the same subject should also be mentioned.'! Apart from the Nisko Plan, which has aroused special interest as the first deportation of European Jews, other stages of the mass murder of the Jews in Czech Silesia remain poorly researched. Another topic that has been popular in recent years is the demographic, social, and communal development of the Jewish communities in Silesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Zbigniew Kwasny has written a number of works on this topic, as have Janusz Spyra, Wojciech Jaworski, Leszek Wiatrowski,'* Stanistaw

Zyga, and, most importantly, Leszek Ziatkowski. At the 1988 conference Ziatkowski, then a young historian from Wroctaw, emerged as the first Polish historian to have made Silesian Jewry his principal area of interest. He gave a paper on the history of the Jonas Fraenkel Foundation and advanced an interesting hypothesis regarding the medieval Jewish cemetery in Breslau in a paper written with Mateusz Golinski.'* Although the thesis they advanced seems to rest on mistaken premisses and is ultimately unconvincing, the fact that they were prepared to embark on a polemic against established views on the subject is a sign of the revival of interest and of a creative, critical approach to established knowledge. Since then Ziatkowski’s trademark has been detailed studies combining the fields of social history, economic history, and demographics concentrated mainly on the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. His most important works to date are his doctoral thesis, defended in 1994, and a small book on the Jewish population of Breslau in 1812-1914.'* From his sizeable dissertation Ziatkowski chose for publication only that part dealing with demographic issues and the socio-topography of the Jewish community. He draws an interesting picture of the changes in the social attitudes of Breslau Jews in this period, arguing convincingly for the superficial character of their assimilation into German society in the nineteenth century. 10 L. Nesladkova (ed.), Mezindrodni védeckaé konference Akce Nisko v histori ‘konecného reseni Zidovské otazky’: K 55 vyroci proni hromadné deportace evropskych Zidu. Sbornik referatu (Die internationale wissenschaftliche Konferenz Die Aktion Nisko in der Gesamtgeschichte der ‘Endlosung der judenfrage’. Die anldsslich des 55. fahrestages der ersten Massendeportation der europdischen Juden.

Sammelband) (Ostrava, 1995). ; ‘1 Transport do tmy: Proni deportace evropskych Zidi (Ostrava, 1994). 12 7.. Kwasny, ‘Z badan nad rozwojem demograficznym ludnosci zydowskiej na Gornym Slasku w pierwszej polowie XIX wieku’, S/qski Kwartalmk Historyczny Sobétka, 44 (1989), 107-11; id., *Z dziey6w ludnosci zydowskiej w powiecie toszecko-gliwickim w latach 1812-1847’, in Slgsk, Polska, Niemcy (Wroclaw, 1990). J. Spyra, ‘Glowne kierunki rozwoju demograficznego ludnosci z ydowskiej na Slasku Cieszynskim (do 1939 r.)’, Prace Historyczeno-Archiwalne, 5 (1997), 187-208. W. Jaworski, ‘Stosunki demograficzne ludnosci zydowskiej w wojewodztwie slaskim w latach 1922-1939’, Studia 1 Materiatly z Dziejow Slaska, 19 (1991), 217-44. L. Wiatrowski, ‘Zydzi na Slasku w XIX ina poczatku Xx wieku: Struktura demograficzna, dziatalnose gospodarcza, naukowa i kulturalna’, in K. Matwijowski (ed.), Z dziejow ludnosci zydowskiej na S lqsku (Wroclaw, 1991), 5-31.

18M. Golinski and L. Zigtkowski, ‘Sredniowieczne zydowskie cmentarze we Wroclawiu’, S/gski Kwartalnik Historyceny Sobétka, 44 (1989), 35-43. 14 L. Ziatkowski, Ludnosé zydowska we Wroclawiu w latach 1812-1914 (Wroclaw, 1998).

The Eistoriography of Silesian Jews 343 Social issues, especially the emancipation and assimilation of Jews in Silesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have also often been researched by German historians. This choice of area of interest 1s, of course, connected with the accessibility of sources, since the nineteenth-century archival materials and the literature on the subject are almost entirely in German. The habit of ignoring literature in foreign languages is even stronger among German historians than among Polish scholars; they disregard not only texts written in Yiddish and Hebrew, but also Polish historical literature and periodicals, and share with their Polish colleagues a disregard

of writings in Czech. A particularly striking example of this attitude is Hugo Weczerka’s extensive article on the current state of affairs in research on the history of Silesian Jews which mentions only two works in Polish, both by Maciej Lagiewski, probably because they are available in German.'? The author does not even refer to the two scholarly centres in Wroclaw dealing with the subject (the Research Centre for the Study of Churches and Minorities, and the Research Centre for the Study of the Languages and Culture of the Jews in Poland), nor does he record the dozen or so monographs and several hundred Polish and Czech scholarly articles on this subject.

In spite of these obvious shortcomings, German scholars have made several valuable contributions in recent years, starting with the work of the doyen of Silesian Jewish studies Joseph Walk, and including articles by Kurt Schwerin, Hugo Weczerka, Konrad Fuchs, and Peter Maser, and essays by younger historians such as Andreas Reinke and ‘Till van Rahden. Reinke has established his position through his bibliography of the history of Silesian Jews and valuable source studies.1° Although his bibliography does not include materials in Hebrew and Yiddish, and its chapters on the communities in Austrian Silesia, post-war history, and journals are seriously incomplete, this is still the first comprehensive work since Brann, and it will serve future students well. In addition one should note the articles of van Rahden; they are remarkable for their command of the literature on the subject and for the solid methodology they employ (a rare occurrence among researchers in the

subject, both Polish and German).'’ Coupled with his good knowledge of the 19 H. Weczerka, ‘Juden in Schlesien. Ein Literaturbericht’, Zeztschrtift ftir OstmitteleuropaForschung, NS 47/1 (1998), 70-81. M. Eagiewski, Der Alte Fiidische Friedhofin Wroclaw/ Breslau (Wroc-

law, 1988); a much broader version pub. in Polish as Macey mowig (Wroclaw, 1991); id., Breslauer juden 1850-1944 (Wroclaw, 1966); pub. in Polish as Wroctawscy Zydzi 1850-1944 (Wroclaw, 1994).

16M. Heitmann and A. Reinke, Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Juden in Schlesien. In Zusammenarbeit mit Harald Lordick und Heike Tackenbrock (Munich, 1995); A. Reinke, ‘Z-wischen Tradition, Aufklarung und Assimilation. Die Konigliche Wilhelmsschule in Breslau 1791-1848’, Zeitschrift fur Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 43 (1991), 193-214; id., ‘Stufen der Zerstorung. Das Breslauer Jiidische Krankenhaus wahrend des Nationalsozialismus’, Menora. Jahrbuch fiir deutsch-jiidische Geschichte, 5 (1994), 379-414.

, 1” T. van Rahden, ‘Die Grenze vor Ort. Einburrgerung und Ausweisung auslindischer Juden in Breslau 1860-1918, Tel Aviver Fahrbuch fiir Deutsche Geschichte, 27 (1998), 47-69; id., ‘Mingling, Marrying, and Distancing: Jewish Integration in Wilhelminian Breslau and its Erosion in the Early Weimar Republic’, in W. Benz, A. Paucker, and P. Pulzer (eds.), Fiidisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik (Tubingen, 1998).

344 Marcin Wodzinski Silesian archives, his work shows great promise. However, his studies on the scope of Jewish assimilation in Breslau are bound to be incomplete without analysis of the least assimilated part of that community, the ‘Ostjuden’, which requires knowledge of both Yiddish and Hebrew and, in particular, the periodicals issued by this group, such as Unzer leben (1928, 1929). The difference between the perspectives of Polish and German scholars emerges most clearly in works on the social history of Silesian Jews in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. While historians from Poland prefer to see Silesia as a separate area of research, with its own characteristics (unique national structure, national clashes, Silesian autonomy, and influence of Eastern Jewry), German historians often view Silesian Jews as one example of wider processes occurring within German Jewry. They focus on the metropolitan community of Breslau, which they see as typical of larger German Jewish communities, rather than as the capital of Silesia, a region with very specific characteristics. While both perspectives are to

some extent justified, one can discern in them, especially on the Polish side, a heritage of political controversies over Silesia’s past that blur the true picture. Fortunately, among the younger generation of historians these differences are less marked and do not distort the picture. Among these young historians is Wojciech Jaworski of Sosnowiec, one of the few

people working on the history of Jews in the Silesian voivodeship in the period between the two world wars. His doctoral dissertation, which he defended in the Institute of History at Warsaw University, was on the Jewish community in Polish Silesia in the inter-war period; it became the basis for numerous articles, and finally a book-length monograph.'® The strength of his work is its broad approach to the topic combined with rich detail and precision. Unfortunately, this praiseworthy attempt to provide a detailed account does not lead to clear conclusions. The lack of synthesis, of a general view of his subject-matter, marks all Jaworski’s work. It should also be noted that, despite his generally good knowledge of the archives and the Silesian press, he has not used all the available materials, in particular Yiddish newspapers from Bielsko, Sosnowiec, and Bedzin (Shlezishe tsaytung, Shlezishe presse, Dos yidishe vort, Zaglemhter leben, Zaglembter shlezishe velt, Zaglembier shlezish

folksblat, Zaglembier shlezish vort), which were addressed to the Silesian reader and covered local problems. Periodicals in German have also not been used, including the most important of them, fiudisches Volksblatt (1924-33), the newsletters of the Bielsko Makkabi organization (Mitteilungen der Skisektion Makahi, Mitteilungen des B. B. Fiidischen Turnvereins Makkabi-Bielsko, Mitteilungen des ZTTN Makkabi), and periodicals published in Krakow and dealing with Galician—Silesian issues, such as Biuletyn Okregu Krakowsko-Slqskiego Zwigzku Zydéw-Uczestnikow Walk o Niepodlegtosé Polski (1934-8). The unavailability of these periodicals plagues all

historians researching the history of Silesian Jews; some of them, however, are 18 W. Jaworski, Ludnosé Zydowska w wojewddztwie slgskim w latach 1922-1939 (Katowice, 1997).

The Historiography of Silesian Jews 345 accessible in unexpected locations, and it is enough to make a thorough search for them. However, Jaworski’s omission of the Yiddish press has another reason: like other historians of Silesian Jews, he does not know and does not use literature in Jewish languages. The last decade has produced a significant growth in studies on the history of Jewish settlement in Silesia after the Second World War; in this field, however, German historians are absent. The pioneer in this area was Szyja Bronsztejn, who died in 1995. The principal product of the research that he conducted from the 1960s was a small book entitled Z dziejéw ludnosci Zydowskiej na Dolnym Slasku po 1

wojnie Swiatowe (‘On the History of the Jewish Population of Lower Silesia after World War II’).!° This study is very uneven: it is remarkable in its chapters on demographic issues (the area of Professor Bronsztejn’s particular interest), but weak in its description of professional activity and cultural life; more seriously, it completely ignores political activity, religious life, and literature. Fortunately, many topics bypassed by Bronsztejn have recently attracted the interest of younger historians, most notably Ewa Waszkiewicz and Bozena Szaynok. The former has published a few articles on the activities in Lower Silesia of the Jewish fraction of the Polska Partia Robotnicza (Polish Workers’ Party), and a monograph on Jewish religious life in Wroctaw. The latter has dealt with the development of Jewish settlement in the first years after the liberation.2° Other historians continue to research the initial stage of Jewish settlement in Lower Silesia after the Second World War, notably Kazimierz Pudto and Arnold Goldsztejn. Bozena Szaynok and Natalia Aleksiun are at present preparing an account of post-war political life in Poland (including Silesia). Another frequently researched area is the history of legislation concerning the Jews in Silesia. Although many of the studies by Marian Ptak, Kazimierz Orzechowski, and Adam Kazmierczyk have unquestionable scholarly value, the onesidedness of understanding (or perhaps just of approach) is still most obvious in

19 Wroclaw, 1993. .

20 E. Waszkiewicz, ‘Program i dziatalnos¢ polityczna Frakcji Zydowskiej Polskiej Partii Robotnicze; we Wroclawiu w latach 1945-1948’, Slgski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobotka, 19/3-4 (1994), 299-310; ead., ‘Zydzi we Frakcji Polskiej Partii Robotnicze} Dolnego Slaska’, Zblizenia: Polska—Niemcy. Pismo Uniwersytetu Wroctawskiego, 3 (1994), 52-5; ead., ‘Niekt6re aspekty zycia religijnego Zydow w powojennym Wroclawiu’, in C. Lewandowski (ed.), Z badan nad wspétczesng historig 1 mySlq polityczng, Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, 1991 (Wroclaw, 1997); ead., ‘Jewish Congregation in Wroclaw, 1945— 1949’, Jews in Eastern Europe, 1 (1997), 34-44; ead., Kongregacja Wyznania Mojzeszowego na Dolnym Slgsku na tle polityki wyznaniowe; Polskiey Rzeczypospohite; Ludowej 1945-1968, Acta Universitatis

Wratislaviensis, 2171 (Wroclaw, 1999). B. Szaynok, ‘Poczatki osadnictwa zydowskiego na Dolnym Slasku po I wojnie Swiatowej (maj 1945—-styczen 1946)’, Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego,

45/4-46/2 (1994-5), 45-63; pub. in English as ‘The Beginnings of Jewish Settlement in Lower _ Silesia after World War II (May 1945—January 1946)’, Acta Poloniae Historica, 76 (1997), 171-95; ead., ‘Zydzi we Wrochwiu po II wojnie Swiatowej’, Rocznik Wrochwski, 4 (1997), 173-90; ead., Ludnosé zydowska na Dolnym Slasku 1945-1950, Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, 2257 (Wroclaw, 2000).

346 Marcin Wodzinski this area.*4 Only the legislation concerning the Jews is studied, and not the internal regulations of the Jewish community itself. This lack of balance 1s dictated partly by the structure of existing materials, but above all by the language barrier. Nevertheless, their studies of Jewish legislation should be regarded as valuable, especially

since they concentrate on the early modern period, which is least well known. Unfortunately it seems that interest in this subject has faded recently, and for several years no new publications have appeared. An increasingly important area in the history of Silesian Jews is that of Jewish cultural and religious activity. The most famous religious buildings in Silesia, such as the Storch-Synagoge (White Stork synagogue) in Wroctaw and the synagogues designed by Erwin Oppler, have for years been objects of interest for art historians. In recent years a few new studies on them have appeared,”* while much less has been written about other synagogues in Silesia.?? In the last decade, however, interest has shifted from the history of monumental architecture to the history of sepulchral art, especially Hebrew epigraphs in Silesia. The first important publication in this area was the work by Maciej Lagiewski on the Jewish cemetery in Wroclaw already mentioned; however, its main focus on biographical elements (the cemetery as a biographical dictionary of the buried) has made it methodologically outdated, and no attempt has been made to continue this line of research. The 1993 conference on Jewish religious communities and their cemeteries became the turningpoint in researching Silesian cemeteries.** Although Silesia was not the only subject of the conference, the studies on this region constituted a significant part of the proceedings; they demonstrated that there was a group of scholars interested in the subject. At the same time new trends in researching the tombstones of Silesian and Polish Jews emerged, promoted by disciples of Jerzy Woronczak (among whom 21 M. Ptak, ‘Zydzi w élaskich ordynacjach ziemskich’, S lgski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobotka, 44/1 (1989), 55-64; id., ‘Zrodla prawa okreSlajace status ludnosci zydowskiej na Slasku do 1742 r.’, Slqski Kwartalnk Historyczny Sobotka, 46/2 (1991), 139-49. K. Orzechowski, ‘Sprawy ludnosci zydowskie} w Slaskich drukowanych zbiorach prawnych (do polowy xvii w.)’, Slgskt Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobotka, 44/1 (1989), 45—54; id., “The Question of the Jews in the Silesian Convention, 1690-1691’, in A. K. Paluch (ed.), Jews in Poland, 1 (Krakow, 1992), 137-48. A. Kazmierczyk, ‘Problem ekspulsji Zydow w uchwatach seymikowych w 2. polowie XVII wieku’, in K. Matwijowski (ed.), Z histori ludnosci zydowskiej w Polsceina Slasku, Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, 1568 (Wroclaw, 1994), 63-70.

22 e.g. P. Maser, ‘Oberschlesische Synagogen und ihre Gemeinden’, Jahrbuch der schlesischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat zu Breslau, 31 (1990), 217-38; J. K. Kos, “Synagoga “Pod Bialym Bocianem” we Wroclawiu’, Slqgski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobotka, 46/2 (1991), 191-203; J. Walk,

‘“Almemor und Gitter”. Ein Kapitel zur Geschichte der Storch-Synagoge in Breslau’, Menora.

Jahrbuch fiir deutsch-jtidische Geschichte, 5 (1994), 367-77. . 23 FE. Chojecka, ‘Artystyczna geneza synagog Bielska i Bialej’, in J. Polak and J. Spyra (eds.), Zydzi w Bielsku, Biatej i okolicy. Materialy z sesji naukowej odbyte; w dniu 19 stycznia 1996 r. (Bielsko-Biala, 1996); E. Bergman, “Synagoga w Chorzowie’, Zeszyty Chorzowskie, 1 (1996), 86-99; M. Makowski, ‘Glowna synagoga w Cieszynie’, in J. Spyra (ed.), Zydowskie zabytki Cieszyna 1 Czeskiego Cieszyna (Cieszyn, 1999); also many popular articles in the regional press.

_ ** Materials collected in J. Woronczak (ed.), Studia z dziejéw kultury zydowskiey w Polsce, 1: Zydowskie gminy wyznaniowe, i: Cmentarze zydowskie (Wroclaw, 1995).

The Historiography of Silesian fews 347 I number myself). The essence of the new approach can be summarized as the employment of philological methods known for a long time among researchers of ancient epigraphs and used successfully to describe and analyse medieval and modern inscriptions. Articles by Jan Pawet Woronczak and my monograph on Hebrew epigraphs in Silesia of the pre-emancipation period are the results of such studies.?° Another important field which has contributed to our knowledge of the Jewish

past in Silesia is that of regional history. In this area German historians are very active. The most ambitious attempt, which unfortunately proved abortive, was a project initiated by Peter Maser and Adelheid Weiser at Stiftung Haus Oberschlesien which aimed to create a multi-volume encyclopedia of Jewish communities in Upper Silesia. The only published volume contains a general introduction and nine articles on the communities of Bytom, Bielsko, Gliwice, Katowice, Chorzow, Kluczbork, Gtogéw, Opole, and Zory.?° Their selection shows that the authors have followed in the steps of other regional historians, and that they have shied away from undertaking the most difficult, but at the same time most needed, studies of Jewish settlement in the oldest communities of Biata, Osoblaha, and Cieszyn. Their meagre source base also disqualifies the work: the authors have used only printed materials, existing German literature on the topic and a few periodicals. They have not made use of the very rich archives, or of the Jewish press in Upper Silesia in Yiddish, Polish, and even largely in German. Because of the very critical reception of the first volume, further work on the project was abandoned. The revival of interest in Jewish culture resulted in Poland in numerous regional initiatives, popular lectures, and publications which have often proved very valuable. The leading role in this respect belongs undoubtedly to the centre in Cieszyn,

though Janusz Spyra, who is active there, can hardly be labelled a regional historian. He started with small contributions to the history of the Jews in Cieszyn Silesia, but gradually widened his field of interest so that it now encompasses the history of the Jewish population of Austrian Silesia.2” Among his works a cycle of articles on the history of the Jews in Cieszyn Silesia to 1780 deserves particular mention.?° Especially praiseworthy is his excellent command of archival materials 25 J.P. Woronczak, Specyfika kulturowa cmentarzy zydowskich (Katowice, 1993); id., ‘Informacje o poczatkach cmentarza w zydowskich inskrypcjach nagrobnych’, Annales Silesiae, 24 (1994), 49-54; 1d.,

‘Tresci eschatologiczne epitafiow zydowskich Opolszczyzny’, in Woronczak (ed.), Studia z dziejow

(Wroclaw, 1996). ;

kultury zydowskiej w Polsce, vol. ii; M. Wodzinski, Hebrajskie inskrypcje na Slasku XIH—XVIII wieku

(1) (Berlin, 1992). :

26 P. Maser and A. Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, pt. 1: Historischer Uberblick, Fuidische Gemeinden

27 Janusz Spyra has just completed a monograph, Juden in Osterreichisch-Schlesien 1742-1918. Vom judischen Inkolat bis zur jtidischen Kultusgemeinde (Ratingen, forthcoming). 28 J. Spyra, ‘Die Juden im Teschener Schlesien (bis Anfang des 18. Jh.)’, Oberschlesisches Jahrbuch,

9 (1993), 41-66; id., ‘Juden im Teschener Schlesien unter der Herrschaft Karls VI. (1711-1740)’, Oberschlesisches Jahrbuch, 10 (1994), 25-49; id., ‘Juden im Herzogtum Teschen unter der Herrschaft von Maria Theresia (1740—-1780)’, Oberschlesisches Jahrbuch, 11 (1995), 67-96.

348 Marcin Wodzinski in his area of interest. His chief weakness lies in his lack of knowledge of Jewish languages and of contemporary trends and achievements in Jewish historiography. This is a weakness he shares with all (and probably not only) Silesian regional historians. In connection with Janusz Spyra should be mentioned three regional sessions on Jewish topics organized in Cieszyn Silesia. The first took place in Skoczow in 1994, the next in Bielsko in January 1996, and the third and most recent in Cieszyn in November 1998. Each time Spyra was their organizer, and afterwards the editor of the post-conference materials.” The published volumes have the defects of regional, and often amateur, historical research. Alongside very good essays by Ewa Chojecka and Spyra himself, and methodologically satisfactory works by Jaworski, we find relatively weak texts with only a shallow basis in sources, and marked by a lack of understanding of the character of Jewish culture or the general literature on Jewish history. The most interesting outcome of these conferences has been the emergence of a group of regional researchers specializing in Judaic studies. It 1s

not insignificant that the conferences, and the publications that appeared as a result, have aroused great interest and clearly filled a need. (The work on Skoczow has also been translated into English.) The collections of essays and memoirs on Skoczéw and Bielsko substitute for the memorial books (yizkhorbukher) which, with the exception of Katowice, have not yet been written on Silesian communities. | There are also several historians in Upper Silesia who are researching regional history. Janina Wolanin has published essays on the history of the Gliwice Jewish religious community, Walerian Podbucki on Bytom, Wojciech Jaworski on Bierun and Chorzoéw, Dariusz Walerjanski on Zabrze, Maciej Borkowski on Opole, and Jan Pawet Woronczak on Biata near Prudnik.®® The growth of literature on the Czech part of Silesia is equally encouraging. Jiri Demel has written on Bohumin,

Jaromir Polaéek and Milan Myska on Frydek, Antoni Szprync on Jablunkov, Jaroslav Klenovsky on Osoblaha, and Stanistaw Zahradnik on Tyinec.*’ A large 29 J. Spyra (ed.), W cieniu skoczowskiej synagogi. Praca zbiorowa wydana z okazji 100 rocznicy powstania zydowskiej Gminy Wyznaniowe; w Skoczowie (Skoczow, 1994); J. Polak and J. Spyra (eds.), Zydzi w Bielsku, Biatej 1 okolicy. Materialy z sesji naukowey odbytey w dniu 19 stycznia 1996 r. (Bielsko-Biata, 1996); J. Spyra (ed.), Zydowskie zabytki Cieszynai Czeskiego Cieszyna (Cieszyn, 1999). 30 J. Wolanin and H. Stowinska, ‘Zarys dziejow gminy zydowskiej w Gliwicach’, Zeszyty Ghimickie, 22 (1993), 19-25; J. Wolanin, ‘Zarys dziejow gminy zydowskiej w Gliwicach’, in Wybor referatow oraz tez do wystapien pod red. dr. Andrzeja Zielinskiego na seye historyczng organizowang w 60-tq rocznice

Nocy Krysztalowe (Gliwice, 1998); W. Podbucki, “Slady dziatalnosci gminy zydowskiej’, Magazyn Bytomski, 7 (1988), 84-99; W. Jaworski, Z dziejom Zydow bierunskich (n.p., 1989); 1d., “Ludnos¢ zydowska w Chorzowie w latach 1922-1939’, Zeszyty Chorzowskie, 1 (1996), 86-99; D. Walerjanski, Z dziejow spotecznosei zydowskiej na Gornym Slqsku na przykladzie Zabrza (Zabrze, 1990); M. Borkowski, ‘By nie przepadli w mroku: Opolscy Zydzi 1812-1938’, Opolski Rocznik Muzealny, 12 (1998), 11-42; J. P. Woronczak, ‘Mochum Zadek: Zydowska nazwa Bialej?’, Annales Stlesiae, 23 (1993), 131-2.

31 J. Demel, ‘Zanik zidovské komunity na Bohuminsku’, in Zidé a Morava: Sbornik prispéevku prednesenych na konferenci konané 8. listopadu 1995 v Kromeérizi (Kromeriz, 1996); id., ‘Specifické pod-

minky Zivota Zidti na rakousko-pruském pomezi’, in Zidé a Morava: Sbornik prispévku prednesenych na konferenci konané 8. listopadu 1996 v Kromérizi (Kromériz, 1997); J. Polacek, “Ve stinu frydecké

The Estoriography of Silesian Jews 349 survey of Jewish communities in Czech Silesia has been published by Jiri Fiedler.*”

Against a background of general neglect in Czech research on Jewish history, regional history studies appear as an unusually bright spot. Paradoxically, less has been written recently about the Jewish communities in Lower Silesia. Stanistaw Gawlik has written about Jews in Brzeg, Stanistaw Jarowicki on DzierZoniow in the

years 1930-60, and Tadeusz Dzwonkowski on Gtogow in the second half of the sixteenth century.®® A series of popular articles by Piotr Piluk on Jewish communities and antiquities in Lower Silesia appeared in Stowo zydowskie. However, a monograph on Jewish settlement in Gtog6w by Franz D. Lucas and Margret Heitmann remains the most important publication.** It is probably the first thoroughly researched modern monograph on a Silesian Jewish community. After the expulsion of Jews from Silesia in 1584, Gtogow was one of two places where Jewish

settlement was allowed; then in the period of revival of the Jewish population in Silesia 1t supported the new communities with human resources. Knowledge about the history of Jews in Gtogow is therefore indispensable to any further studies of the Jewish population in Lower Silesia in modern times. ‘The monograph by Lucas and Heitmann draws a rich and accurate picture, supported by a broad analysis of the social, economic, and especially cultural life of the Gltogow kehilah. Although the reviewers correctly pointed out inadequate use of the available archival materials by the authors, and their uncritical acceptance of information from older sources, their work is by and large reliable and deserves recognition as the first monograph of its kind on a Silesian Jewish community. It should be mentioned that Biata, the second and indeed the more important of

the Silesian communities that survived 1584, still awaits its modern monograph. Israel Rabin’s ‘Die Juden in Ziilz’, published in 1927,” is still used successfully by historians, but it clearly does not meet the present state of scholarship. The fact that the community in Biata has not been researched yet is even more surprising since the kehilah’s very rich archive is preserved almost intact, and other archival synagogy ’, ibid.; M. MySka, ‘Prispévek k déjinam frydeckych Zidt’, Trinsko: Viastivédny zpravoda okresu Frydek-Mistek a Karvina, 38/4 (1994), 19-21; A. Szprync, ‘Zydzi w dawnym Jablonkowie’, Kalendarz Slgski (1989), 204-5; J. Klenovsky, Zidovska obec v Osoblaze (Olomouc, 1995); S. Zahradnik,

‘Zydzi w Trzyncu’, Zwrot: Miesiecentk spoteczno-kulturalny Polskiego Zwiqgzku Kulturalno-Oswiatowego w Republice Czeskiej, 12 (1997), 9-15.

** “Z, déjin zidovskych obci ve Slezsku’, Zidovské rotenka (1994-5), 67-81; id., ‘Zydowskie gminy wyznaniowe na Slasku czeskim (morawskim) oraz ich cmentarze’, in Woronczak (ed.), Studia z dziejow

kultury zydowskie w Polsce, vol. ii. . 33S. Gawlik, ‘Ludnosé zydowska w Brzegu od XIV w. do 1942’, Biuletyn Zydowmskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 37/3 (1986), 19-33; id., ‘Szkola zydowska w Brzegu’, Kwartalnik Opolski, 40/2 (1994), 11-25; S. Jarowicki, ‘Zydzi w Dzierzoniowie w latach 1930-1960’, Rocanik Dzierzontowsk1, 2 (1992),

16-29; T. Dzwonkowski, ‘Zydzi glogowscy a inne grupy spoleczne w drugiej polowie XVI wieku’, Roczemk Lubuski, 23/1 (1997), 45-54. °4 Stadt des Glaubens. Geschichte und Kultur den Juden in Glogau (Hildesheim, 1992).

35 In J. Chrzaszcz (ed.), Geschichte der Stadt Ziilz in Oberschlesien. Von den altesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart (Ziilz, 1926).

350 Marcin Wodzinski materials on the community are available elsewhere. The situation is even worse in regard to the community of the Moravian enclave in Osoblaha, which in fact served as the Silesian kehilah. So far only a few minor studies on it have been published, and the history of this community remains largely unknown. Yet the early modern period, when there were only a few isolated centres of Jewish settlement in Silesia, is especially suited to regional studies, which should yield exceptionally valuable results. Unfortunately, regional historians prefer to deal with the history of Jewish communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are not the only lacunae in the recent studies on Silesian Jewry. We know even less about the Middle Ages than about the early modern period, and all new

works copy information (including errors) from Brann’s monograph published over a hundred years ago. Mateusz Golinski is the only scholar who has recently published a few new articles, but Jewish settlement is for him just a side interest. We know equally little about the history of the Jewish press in Silesia. Only Monika Zmudzinska and Joseph Walk have written on Fidische Zeitung fiir Ostdeutschland, and Walk on Der Zionist. Besides these there is a short article by Jaworski on the Jewish press in the Silesian voivodeship, and a gloss by Joseph Khrust on the history of Urzedowa Gazeta Gminy Izraelickiej w Katowicach.*® Until now even the oldest Jewish periodical in Germany, Dyhernfurther Privilegierte Zeitung, has not

been researched, and many, sometimes very important, periodicals are entirely unknown to historians. ‘To make matters worse, the section on periodicals in the bibliography by Heitmann and Reinke discussed above is especially weak. Yet without a thorough knowledge of the press, which is one of the main sources, further progress in research is hard to imagine. Another shamefully neglected area is the history of the Orthodox branch of Silesian Jewry, and the history of religious life in general. Except for the famous controversy between the rabbis Tiktin and Geiger in the mid-nineteenth century, and the role of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Wroclaw, we know surprisingly little about the religious life of this community. Ethnographic questions, the history of theatre, and many other areas remain untouched. Recent scholars are not wholly to blame for this situation as these subjects were always remote from the main interest of Silesian historians. What is disturbing 1s the fact that the recent revival in studies has not been accompanied by the develop-

ment of new perspectives, a wider field of interest, or greater independence in research. Too often research focuses on a topic already studied, or an easy issue, and 36 M. Zmudzinska, ‘Wroclawski tygodnik “Jiidische Volkszeitung” i jego ewolucja w latach 1906-1933’, Sobdtka, 46/4 (1991), 515-25; J. Walk, Die ‘fiidische Zeitung fiir Ostdeutschland’ 1924-1937. Zeitgeschichte 1m Spiegel ener regionalen Zeitung (Hildesheim, 1993); id., ‘ “Der Zionist”. Zur Geschichte der altesten zionistischen Zeitung Deutschlands’, in his Wider das Vergessen. Aufsatze und Erinnerungen aus sechs Jahrzehnien, ed. P. Sauer (Gerlingen, 1996); W. Jaworski, ‘Prasa zydowska w wojewodztwie Slaskim (1922-1939), Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 40/4 (1991),

15-19; Y. Khrust, ‘Ha’iton harishmi shel hakehila’, in Y. Khrust and Y. Frenkel (eds.), Katovits: perthatah ushekuatah shel hakehilah hayehudit. Sefer zikaron (Tel Aviv, 1996).

The Historiography of Silesian fews 351 not on the most interesting or important ones. The lack of fundamental studies, and

studies covering the whole of historic Silesia rather than its parts, is especially unfortunate. Another weakness in these works, and obviously detrimental to their value, is that they do not use sources and literature in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Czech, or, in the case of German historians, in Polish. Coupled with a poor knowledge of the archives, this results in a state of affairs where the study of Jewish history in Silesia is far from being able to create a new synthesis to replace Marcus Brann’s remarkable work, which is now more than a century old and clearly out of date. Translated from Polish by Claire Rosenson

A Review of Some Recent Issues of the Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu

-Aistorycznego ABRAHAM BRUMBERG

UNTIL 1974 the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw published its quarterly journal in Yiddish. Since 1993 it has appeared exclusively in Polish, but its standards remain commendably high. The following is a selective review of some articles that appeared in the Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (BZIP) between 1993 and 1997. HELENA DATNER ‘Struktura i wyznaczniki postaw antysemickich’

(‘The Structure and Indices of Antisemitic Attitudes’)

, BZIH, 3—4/ 167-8 (July—Dec. 1993), 126-38 ALINA CALA ‘Autostereotyp 1 stereotypy narodowe’ (‘Self-Stereotype and National Stereotypes’) BZIH, 3—-4/167—-8 (July—Dec. 1993), 139-46

Both these highly sophisticated surveys examine the persistence of antisemitic and other ethnic stereotypes in Europe and particularly in Poland. The authors’ conclusions are that ‘Poland has the highest indices of dislike of Jews in all postcommunist countries with the exception of Slovakia’ (Datner), and that while the most noxious religious prejudices against the Jews have decreased, ‘Polish society has not become more open and tolerant’, with the most disliked nationalities, once

the Jews and the Germans, having been replaced by Gypsies and Arabs (Cata). These are significant conclusions in view of some recent speculations that the grow-

ing interest in Jewish subjects and the burgeoning Jewish activism in Poland 1s accompanied by a simultaneous decline in antisemitic attitudes. PAUL ZAWADZKI ‘ “Protokoty Medrcow Syjonu” w polskiej mysli antysemickiey’ (‘ “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in Polish Antisemitic Thought’) BZIH, 3—4/ 167-8 (July—Dec. 1993), 63-82 A detailed examination of the history of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ in Poland and of how Polish communism gradually assimilated the ‘teachings’ of this slander.

Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 353 MARIA FALKOWSKA ‘Blaskii cienie wspétpracy Janusza Korczaka z polskim radiem’ (‘Highlights and Shadows of Janusz Korczak’s Cooperation with Polish Radio’) BZIH, 3-4/ 167-8 (July—Dec. 1993), 83-096

In 1934 Janusz Korczak, under the pseudonym Stary Doktor (the Old Doctor), began broadcasting ‘chats’ on Polish Radio directed exclusively at children—a passionate interest of his since 1926. They were a resounding success both with children and with most Polish educators. None the less, two years later the proerammes were suddenly discontinued, clearly in response to pressure from the far right of the Polish government, although nowhere was Korczak identified by his real name or his ethnic background. In 1938-9 he staged a partial comeback, this time

addressing himself to various audiences, and not just children. Maria Fatkowska provides as thorough an account as is possible of this chapter of Korczak’s activities, a difficult job in that many of the texts of Korczak’s ‘chats’ have not been preserved. BOHDAN HALCZAK ‘Cele polityki endeckiej wobec mniejszosci zydowskie} w Polsce w latach 1919-1939’ (‘The Aims of National Democratic Policies towards the Jewish Minority in Poland in the Years 1919-1939’) BZIH, 3-2/173-4 (July 1995—June 1996), 37-48

While antisemitism swept nearly all Polish political parties in the 1930s, it was a powerful feature of the National Democratic Party (the Endecja) from the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s one element of this propaganda was the publication of statistics that vastly inflated the number of Jews in Poland, for example

4,800,000 out of the overall population of Poland in 1923, 5,000,000 out of 32,000,000 in 1932. According to the Endeks, Jews had cornered Polish commerce

and skilled labour, and were ‘exporting rotten eggs, rancid butter, and shoddy clothing in order to embarrass Polish industry in the eyes of the outside world’. ‘The sheer magnitude and eccentricity of the charges, which gradually assumed expli-

citly racist dimensions, suggests that a good part of the Polish population had indeed collectively succumbed to a form of clinical paranoia. N. ALEKSIUN-MADRZAK ‘Nielegalna emigracja Zydow z Polski w latach 45-47’ (“The Illegal Emigration of Jews from Poland in the Years 1945-1947’) BZIH, 3-2/ 173-4 (July 1995—June 1996), 67-90

This is a thorough and astute study of the emigration of Jews from Poland during the first few years after the end of the Second World War. Based on numerous Polish, Israeli, Czech, and German sources, the study gives a panoramic view of the magnitude, manner of, and complex reasons for the mass emigration. Among the latter was , a desperate sense of loneliness experienced by most Holocaust survivors (including thousands who came back from Russia). It was also painful to consider rebuilding

354 Abraham Brumberg one’s life upon the graveyards of millions of fellow Jews—among whom were the survivors’ own relatives—and amid the complete destruction of the pre-war infrastructure of Jewish life. Most unbearable, however, was the hostility of most Poles: hundreds of Jews lost their lives in attacks by antisemitic gangs or ordinary citizens,

who were provoked by reports of Jewish killings of Christian children and felt licensed by the general indifference towards Jews as millions were murdered. The notorious Kielce pogrom of July 1946 alone caused the exodus of about 75,000 Jews.

The author also deals with the immense attraction of Zionism for the remnant of Polish Jewry, and the attempts of the communists and the Bund to persuade them to stay. She also provides a detailed history of the ‘Brikha’ movement, organized in 1945 by Zionists to facilitate the illegal emigration of east European Jews to Palestine. The study is continued and concluded in the two subsequent issues of the Bizuletyn. ANATOL LESZCZYNSKI ‘Sprawa naczelnego redaktora Folkssztyme, Grzegorza Smolara na tle wydarzen z lat 1967—1968’ (“The Case of the Editor-in-Chief of Folkssztyme, Grzegorz Smolar, against the Background of the Events of 1967—1968’) BZIH, 3-2/ 173-4 (July 1995—June 1996), 131-52

In January 1967 Grzegorz Smolar, editor of the Yiddish newspaper Folkssztyme and long-time communist activist, went to Israel at the invitation of the Hebrew daily Kol ha’am, organ of the non-Moscow-affiliated communist party of Israel, Maki. The pro-Moscow party Rakakh was incensed by Smolar’s visit and launched a vitriolic attack on him for having apparently likened Syria to Nazi Germany, a typical case of Stalinist distortion. ‘The documents cited by the author illustrate the train of events triggered by the accusation, which eventually led to the discrediting of Smolar (who later emigrated to Israel). BARBARA LETOCHA ‘Prasa zydowska we Lwowie 1918-1939’ (‘The Jewish Press in L’ viv, 1918-1939’)

BZIH, 3/178 (July—Aug. 1996), 17-32

This report on the Jewish periodicals and papers in L’viv in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew is exhaustive but devoid of analysis. Clearly the majority of papers in that city were of a Zionist and/or assimilationist persuasion. ‘Dyskusja o stanie badan nad pogromem w Kielcach w Zydowskim Instytucie

Historycznym (12/III 1996) z referatem wprowadzajacym | prof. Krystyny Kersten’ (‘Discussion on the State of Research on the Kielce Pogrom, held in the Jewish Historical Institute on 12 March 1996, with an introductory paper by

Professor Krystyna Kersten’) BZIH, 4/179 (Oct.—Dec. 1996), 3-36

Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 355 This is the report of a rather bizarre discussion about the state of research on the Kielce pogrom. Professor Kersten maintains that the idea that the pogrom was provoked by one force or another is baseless, yet she also assumes that the pogrom is still subject to further investigation. Others, such as the head of the institute, Feliks Tych, reject the idea that the ‘conspiracy’ thesis is in need of additional probing. The killers, he points out, were run-of-the-mill Poles, and their bestial instincts were given free rein by the unpunished slaughter of millions of Jews which had taken place before their eyes only three to four years earlier. The text of the discussion is accompanied by several documentary accounts by witnesses to and survivors of the massacre. FELIKS TYCH ‘Zakres odpowiedzialnosci spoteczenstwa niemieckiego za zagtade Zydow’ (“The Extent of German Society’s Responsibility for the Extermination of the Jews’) BZIH, 4/179 (Oct.—Dec. 1996), 37-48

This is a review of Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Tych praises it mainly for the light it throws on the collective responsibility of the German people for the Holocaust. Unfortunately, the essay fails to consider the sweeping and historically inaccurate charges that Goldhagen levels at the whole German people, during and before the Nazi period, which were subject to scathing criticism by numerous distinguished historians, including the Canadian historian Bettina Birn, whose essay appeared in book form, together with another essay, in 1998. N. ALEKSIUN-MADRZAK ‘Sytuacja Zydow w Europie Wschodniej w latach 1945-1947 w Swietle raport6w przedstawicieli dyplomatycznych Wielkiej Brytanii’ (“The Situation of Jews in Eastern Europe in the Years 1945-1947 in the Light of Reports by Diplomatic Representatives of Great Britain’) BZIH, 1/ 180-1 (Jan.—Mar. 1997), 37-48

This conscientious survey shows the British concern for the mood and political tendencies of Jews in eastern Europe and shows the mounting evidence—which Great

Britain avoided acknowledging until the last possible moment—that opening Palestine to Jewish immigration was an essential step to remedy the situation of Jews in eastern Europe. J. HONIGSMAN ‘Gi6d lat 1932-1933 1 upadek zydowskiego rolnictwa na Ukrainie’ (‘Famine in the Years 1932-1933 and the Collapse of Jewish Agriculture in the Ukraine’) BZIH, 1/ 180-1 (Jan.—Mar. 1997), 53-64

This is a fascinating study of the demise of Jewish agriculture in the Ukraine and also partly in Belarus in the early 1930s. Jewish agricultural colonies had existed in

356 Abraham Brumberg the Ukraine, and in particular in the Crimea, since the end of the nineteenth century. In their efforts to ‘productivize’ the Jewish population, the Soviet government and the Evsektsiia (Jewish section of the Communist Party Central Committee) founded a special body, the Komzet, in 1924 in order to accelerate the growth of Jewish peasant communities. In early 1931 there were almost 260,000 Jews working in agricul-

ture all over the Soviet Union, not including Birobidjan. But by early 1932 the number began to dwindle as mass collectivization took its toll. By the late 1930s Jewish collective farms virtually disappeared. Some of the farmers tried to emigrate to Birobidjan, some died of hunger, some left for the cities. The fate of the Jewish

farmers was in fact not much different from that of non-Jewish peasants. The responsibility for this barbarous policy clearly does not lie, as some scholars maintain, with Stalin’s genocidal attitude towards the Ukrainians, but with the insane results of ruthless (and ideologically determined) ‘social engineering’.

Discussion BZIH 3—-4/ 182-4 (July—Dec. 1997)

This issue is entirely devoted to an examination of how Jewish topics, from communal and religious life in medieval Poland to the Holocaust, are presented in elementary and secondary school textbooks. The results of the survey, in which a number of distinguished historians, both Jewish and non-Jewish, participated, are appalling. With a few exceptions, the books from which young people are to learn about a once significant section of the population who were then almost exterminated proffer either scant or no information whatever on important areas, or are so patently tendentious that it is to be wondered how they could have been approved by the Ministry of Education that commissioned and paid for them. The ministry’s guidelines on Holocaust teaching make it possible for teachers to avoid the subject altogether (which many of them do), or to present Nazi massacres as part of an assault on Polish society in general, and Jewish resistance—if mentioned at all—as an insignificant part of Polish opposition to the Nazis. Some books carry nothing about the Warsaw ghetto uprising or about Jewish resistance in other

towns or Jews in the partisan movement. , As emerges from Alina Cata’s painstaking study, most of the textbooks are shockingly inaccurate on the subject of Jews in inter-war Poland, passing over in silence, for instance, the poisonous antisemitic propaganda disseminated at that time by the

Catholic Church, which borrowed liberally from the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ to paint a picture of an international Jewish cabal plotting to subjugate all of Christendom. Some of the books—which were suggested reading for secondary school students c.1997—8—speak of a ‘World Organization of Jews’, brand the Bund

as a Bolshevik party, describe the Zionist movement as a religious movement preaching the notion of the Jews as ‘God’s chosen people’, and repeat some of the fabrications of the notorious pre-war antisemitic priest Stanislaw Trzeciak.

Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 357 One of the most notable culprits is the writer Andrzej Leszek Szczesniak, who, despite being the object of numerous criticisms during the last few years of the twentieth century, made by the distinguished Polish historian Jerzy ‘Tomaszewski amongst others, is still favoured by the Ministry of Education and keeps publishing one book after another. These are scrutinized en masse by Alina Cata, who shows that just as this bogus historian draws on Trzeciak and similarly unreliable sources

for his information on inter-war Poland, so in his discussion of the events of 1967-8, for example, he relies on the antisemitic concoctions of General Moczar, deputy head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and sworn enemy of Gomutka. At the same time he describes many of the communist and especially secret police officials as being of ‘nebulous’ (read: Jewish) descent, thus proving once again that there is no flagrant contradiction a good demagogue will spurn. Cata mentions, among other of Szczesniak’s canards, that ‘Jews allowed themselves to be herded into ghettos by the Nazis’, to which Feliks Tych also calls attention in an article published in an issue of the Warsaw weekly Polityka, dated 21 November 1998. A reviewer is expected to maintain objectivity and sang-froid towards his subject, and I have kept this directive in mind throughout this essay, but I must confess that I cannot apply it here. ‘That such preposterous lies can appear in Poland today under official aegis, and despite the much-vaunted progress in Polish—Jewish relations and the notable efforts made by the small Jewish minority to reassess and reassert its identity, is nothing short of mind-boggling. Was Krzysztof Sliwinski, formerly Poland’s ambassador to the Jewish Diaspora, aware of these textbooks, whose existence has already been discussed in Poland since the mid-1ggo0s, and to which the Ministry of Education had promised to put an end? If he was aware, why did he refrain from saying anything about it in the address published in volume to of Polin? It is true that recent research by Professor Monika Garbowska of the department of Jewish studies of the University of Lublin has shown that most secondary schools now use the textbooks of Wojciech Roszkowski and Anna Radziwiit, which give a much more balanced view of Polish—Jewish relations. But much more remains to be done. My review, I know, is not exactly the proper venue to raise these questions. But I cannot discuss the study without raising them. ‘There is no way to escape them; and there is no way in which the Jewish community in Poland, the Lauder Foundation, and all the other organizations so valiantly trying to help build a new Jewish life in Poland can possibly escape them without making themselves accomplices to this travesty.

Gates of Heaven ELEONORA BERGMAN The wooden synagogue of Merwinsk enjoyed a certain reputation among those of _ the garrison who were artistically inclined. Weather-beaten and very old, of a deep metallic dull-green hue, it towered impressively above the market square, topped with its pagoda pinnacles and sloping shingle roofs that revealed so clearly the interrelation of the rooms within: the two aisles to right and left, the vestibule, and the holy place itself. The roof above the whole structure lay furthest back and was loftier than the rest, while the three-storeyed facade, crowned with a small turret, and resting upon the wooden pillars, dominated the street. Small windows, with crooked frames and awkward low-roofed entrances; but the whole edifice had an insolent Oriental air, as of a foreign citadel of prayer looming above the busy little habitation at its feet. ARNOLD ZWEIG

The Case of Sergeant Grisha

As I looked at the pictures in Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka’s new book Bramy nieba: Boznice drewniane na ziemiach dawne] Rzeczypospolite; (‘Gates of Heaven: Wooden Synagogues in the Lands of the Former Polish Commonwealth’), I wondered many times: did Zweig maybe see one of these synagogues during his threeyear service on the eastern front, which started in 1915? Not one of them exists any more. Only books pass on the knowledge of these magnificent buildings which for

, several centuries adorned the Polish landscape. The first book on wooden synagogues published by the Piechotkas more than forty years ago, Béznice drewniane (‘Wooden Synagogues’),? has for a long time been considered a /ocus classicus on synagogue architecture. Bramy nieba is of course

its sequel, but it also offers a new approach to many issues, and summarizes the research conducted by the authors over these years. This research has encompassed primarily the architectural history, furnishings, and internal decoration of wooden synagogues. It was broadened to include the neighbouring fields of art and sculpture, and was anchored in studies of Jewish religion and its different currents. In his foreword to the Piechotkas’ earlier book Jan Zachwatowicz described their studies as a continuation of the work of Oskar Sosnowski, and especially of Szymon Zajczyk.

Bramy nieba is dedicated to the latter; his works are still among the fundamental sources of knowledge about synagogues in Poland. * Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krupskii Ska, 1996. 2 Warsaw, 1957; Eng. trans. 1959.

Gates of Heaven 359 The new book is not simply an album, or a textbook, or a scholarly monograph, or a catalogue—but all of these at once. It contains an enormous quantity of illustra-

tive material and descriptions which are themselves the results of competent research, but which could also provide a starting-point for further studies. The Piechotkas’ analysis is based mainly on iconography and architectural surveys, and their introduction emphasizes the number of sources they have used. In the earlier book only two collections were used (other than illustrations reprinted from the literature then available), i.e. the Zaktad Architektury Polskiej Politechniki Warszawskiej (Department of Polish Architecture at Warsaw Technical University)

and the Instytut Sztuki Polskie} Akademii Nauk (Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences). In the new book these have been augmented by numerous institutions and collections, not only in Poland but worldwide. The bibliographic base has become approximately three times larger, and includes, among other things,

writings in Hebrew and Yiddish. Sixty-nine architectural units were analysed in the earlier book, and the same number were discussed in the album (in addition, the map marked forty-seven synagogues mentioned in the literature). The new album includes ninety-three architectural units (including six from among the abovementioned forty-seven), but this time they have been selected from among 179 which are the subject of analysis; in addition, there is a list of 152 units known only from comments in various sources. The number of plates has grown from 293 to 635, with many new photographs and a range of new drawings. All of this shows the scale of the research undertaken.

The structure of the book is clear. It consists of a survey section containing | introductory information on synagogues, and a comprehensive study of wooden synagogues; this is followed by the album, organized in alphabetical order by placenames, with a list of sources for the synagogues included in the album, and a general bibliography. Two lists form an important appendix: ‘Synagogues not included in the album which are the subject of analysis’ and ‘List of wooden synagogues men-

tioned in archival sources and the subject literature for which no information is available about their architectural form’. These give the sources of information and the principal data on the synagogues. Maps with indexes and a list of illustrations complete the book.

THE SURVEY SECTION This section is a lengthy treatise that synthesizes knowledge of the liturgical determinants, historical situation, construction, and artistic values of the wooden synagogues.*® Not only the form but also the nature and function of the synagogue are 3 Before I proceed, let me put forward my view on the usage and declension of the Hebrew term aron hakodesh (the sacred Ark, lit. ‘the ark of holiness’, where Torah scrolls are stored for ritual use), which will appear here many times, as it does in the book under review. The declension of this Hebrew term in

360 Eleonora Bergman discussed, as well as its components and furnishings, with their history and meaning. Compared with the earlier book, the lack of information on the synagogues’ spatial context comes as a surprise. For this we must wait for the volume on Jewish towns and quarters, already promised by the authors. On the other hand, because of the logic in explaining the origins of the spatial layout of synagogues, the authors decided to include in the present book an extensive chapter on masonry synagogues, even though they are to be the subject of a separate volume. The longest chapters are of course on wooden synagogues themselves, starting with a presentation of their place among other wooden buildings erected during the First Polish Republic: Catholic and Orthodox churches, manors, palaces, resi-

dential houses, warehouses. Discussed in detail are the functional and spatial requirements of synagogues, the construction and architecture of roofs and vaultings, the structure, and the architectural details, and especially the interior of the main prayer hall and its furnishing and painting. In spite of the formal time-frames (the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries), the authors have added a chapter on nineteenth- and twentieth-century synagogues. This section also includes a recapitulation on the synagogues’ builders. The Piechotkas comprehensively discuss the origins of the form, and the changes in the structures, of synagogues. Unfortunately, the lack of documents showing these buildings in their original form often precludes any definite statement on this

| subject because, by the time these synagogues were researched and catalogued, their structures had usually undergone many changes. ‘The authors attempt to trace the process of remodelling the synagogues, with their added women’s balconies (babince), alcoves, inside and outside galleries, and so on. They point out the differences in the current state of knowledge about synagogues in Ukraine, on the one hand, and in Lithuania—Belarus on the other. In relation to the former, there is con-

tinuity in the records from the mid-seventeenth century; in regard to the latter, a gap in our knowledge of several decades exists between the erection of the synagogue in Zabtudow in the mid-seventeenth century and the synagogues of the so-called Grodno—Biatystok group. This was the most distinctive group, with the most developed structures, and mostly plain interiors, with no paintings. Conversely, as the authors claim, ‘in the south the exterior forms were rather raw’ (p. 73) while the interiors were exceedingly richly adorned even if the forms of the vaultings (except in the synagogue in Gwozdziec) were rather simple: barrelvaulting in Janow Trembowelski and Chodorow, and four-sided domes in Felsztyn Polish texts causes many problems. The authors of the book decline it by case and number, adding Polish suffixes only to the second part of this compound noun kodesh (aron hakodesza, aron hakodesze, etc.). I do not agree with this. Having considered many different solutions to this problem, I prefer to use the undeclined Hebrew forms, i.e. avon hakodesh in the singular, aronot hakodesh in the plural. One

argument in support of this is that with Latin words, even those with Polonized spellings, we use the Latin plural, e.g. tabernakulum—tabernakula. No one would write tabernakulumy. And we do not inflect foreign words such as tableau and panneau.

Gates of Heaven 361 and Michatpol. Synagogues in Mazovia and central Poland had the most diverse outside forms, and interesting, richly decorated built-in vaultings appeared there, for example in Pilica and Przedborz. The authors’ proposal that these buildings were inspired by the synagogues of Renaissance Krakow is very enlightening. Importantly, the authors emphasize both the highly developed forms of the synagogues’ construction and their similarity over widely separated regions (Zabtudow and Chodorow). This applies, among other things, to the built-in vaulting, and to

some extent to the interior painting. The authors give examples of the relation between the roof construction and its outside shape, providing a systematic overview of the types of roof truss and built-in vaulting. They state (cautiously): “The close interrelation between the outside shape of the roof and its construction, and the way in which the main hall was covered often enables . . . [one] to determine whether the hall was covered with a built-in vaulting, and even guess its shape’ (p. 46).* I should like to point out that the lack of outside domes before the midnineteenth century made the appearance of synagogues distinctly different from Catholic or Orthodox churches. Although there is no known legislation prohibiting the crowning of synagogues with domes, it seems that in old Poland it was an unwritten custom. The drawings made under the authors’ supervision as a part of a research programme for the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences reveal the secrets of the magical baroque effects, and allow informed appreciation of the refinements of the carpentry constructions. However, I have to admit that while I was reading the very detailed and technical descriptions of these constructions, I wondered how many readers could actually understand them. Even the vast majority of contemporary architects do not know what a setka (straining beam) 1s, or a wrogntk (triangular vault at the dome’s base in the corner of the hall), or an oczep (horizontal supporting beam at the base of the roof truss). It was an excellent idea to draw the synagogues’ interiors as if seen from the southern wall; these are perhaps the last works of this kind created without a computer. Side perspectives have been drawn for thirteen synagogues (compared with the earlier book, which included perspective drawings of four synagogues), showing their structure and the elements of sections, and perspective drawings of only three synagogue interiors (in the traditional axial perspective). The side perspective gives us the opportunity to look at the interior in a way that pre-war photography could not. * The same goes for wooden vaultings in the 17th-cent. masonry synagogues, for example in | KuZznica Bialostocka, in Kazimierz nad Wisla, and probably in Kleck. The vaulting in the synagogue in

Oszmiana draws on the same tradition. However, the relation between the shape of the roof and the vaulting is not always obvious, for example in the synagogues in Gwozdziec or Pilica. This lack of inter-

relation is noted by Thomas Hubka in his chapter on the group of synagogues in the Gwozdziec— Chodorow region (T. C. Hubka, ‘Jewish Art and Architecture in the East European Context: ‘The Gwozdziec-Chodor6w Group of Wooden Synagogues’, Polin, 10 (1997), 147). Cf. the remarks on domes and roofs in the Orthodox churches in R. Brykowski, Drewniana architektura cerkiewna na koronnych ziemiach Rzeczypospolite; (Warsaw, 1995), 40-2.

362 Eleonora Bergman In discussing the spatial structures of the main prayer halls, the authors focus on the extent to which the proportions of a plan are reflected in the form of vaulting. Weare given information on the so-called ‘raw’ space, to which the aron hakodesh and _ the bimah were only later added, and which was then adorned with paintings and enriched with many chandeliers, reflectors, etc., or which made an impression only by the use of illusory galleries. The authors describe the medieval rectangular prayer halls, gradually disappearing to be replaced by square Renaissance ones, which they

say were orientated towards the centre. This does not seem accurate because, regardless of the proportions of the plan, and even the central location of the bimah, the bimah and the aron hakodesh have always stood along one axis of the interior. Sometimes these main halls were covered with ‘central’ roofs, for example pavilion roofs (sometimes multi-tiered), as in Katuszyn or Wysokie Mazowieckie. If these square halls were covered separately, it would often be by a saddleback roof, or a half-hipped roof, or a hipped roof with a short ridge, so that the roof would give the structure an elongated external appearance. Of course, the square plan was related to the built-in vaulting, and in Wotpa, for example, as in many masonry synagogues, to the structural connection of the vaulting and the dimah. On the other hand, ‘centralizing’ vaultings were also established on rectangular plans (in Grodno and Kornik.) The Piechotkas attempt to categorize the layouts of the synagogues (not just their main halls) in two types: elongated and central. Here I have even more doubts than I doin regard to the analysis of the main halls. Put simply, there was no central layout because the eastern wall had to be free of attachments. The authors, too, have a problem with this, and in the caption to the map on page 412 they use the phrases: __ ‘the so-called perpendicular layout’ and ‘the so-called central layout’. On page 41 there is an impressive comparison of the types of synagogue: (a) a single space without divisions; (4) types with four columns which, depending on their distribution of pillars, are classified as: (br) the so-called nine-field layout with more or less equal fields; (42) the layout with a relatively smaller central field; (63) the layout with a relatively larger central field; and (c) the three-nave layout. The authors very briefly discuss this categorization of synagogues without ascribing them to particular types, which would be especially useful in regard to the varieties of type b. The synagogue in Targowica is perhaps the only one among those described in the album that can be included in category 43. It is noteworthy that it had a (very simple) cupola, the so-called Byzantine dome similar to the one found in the masonry Ha’ari synagogue (perhaps from the sixteenth century)

in far-off Galilean Safed. This pattern was often used in nineteenth-century synagogues and in western Europe. I respectfully disagree with the authors in regard to the categorization of the synagogue in Pohrebyszcze, which is included among the three-nave ones, whereas its construction resembles the churches with the so-called inboxing (a construction where the upper part of the presbytery in

a wooden church extends over the main nave) that was in use by the fifteenth

Gates of Heaven 363 century.’ Because of this it should be classified as uni-spatial. Of course, the majority of known synagogues belonged to type a.

The chapter on the interior of the main prayer hall is undoubtedly the most | important in the survey section of the book. Here the authors discuss the hall’s principal elements in sections entitled ‘Signs and Symbols’, “The Aron Hakodesh’, ‘The Bimah’, ‘Wall Paintings’. The leitmotiv in their analysis of the main hall’s interior is the reference to the biblical tabernacle depicted as a tent. ‘This connection

had already been made in an essay by Szymon Zajczyk quoted by the authors, where it referred to the synagogue in Wotpa. The Piechotkas have developed this thread, and support it with many detailed studies. They have expanded on their conclusions previously published in Polska sztuka ludowa.® In the book, signs and

symbols are discussed in a chapter separate from, and not even adjacent to, the chapter on wall paintings. Although there is obviously a close relationship between them, the separation has allowed the authors to explain systematically the symbols employed not only in wall paintings, but also in the frames of aronot hakodesh and other interior decorative elements.

The authors should be commended for incorporating in their study materials that until now have rarely been used, 1.e. the texts that are integral to the synagogue wall paintings. Interpretation of these was enabled by the Piechotkas’ impressive

knowledge of the kabbalah and Jewish mythology, with their related symbols. However, they had to rely on the help of a Hebrew specialist. Unfortunately this help was probably limited to translating only parts of the texts, and it did not include reviewing translations over a hundred years old. I wonder why the authors did not

try to decipher anew the texts transcribed by Ludwik Wierzbicki from the synagogue in Jablonow. For example, it is hard to understand why in his translation a part of the name is missing (plate 176, the right window strip) when it can be read even from the illustration: Nehemiah. Wierzbicki’s calculations should also be verified; for example, he wrote, “The marking of the dates yields the number 440 = 1684’, while 440 is in fact 1680. While the material presented greatly enhances our knowledge of the wall paintings and artistic programmes in synagogues, there is still much to be done; for example, a comparison with the interior artwork of masonry synagogues. In the notes (pp. 156~7), especially in notes 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8, the authors give a great deal of valuable information regarding the authorship, dates, and discoveries of paintings in synagogues which should have been included in the main text. It is well known that the detailed survey of only a small number of wall paintings in synagogues has been done. Most, with the exception of a few in Germany, are

known only from the chance preservation of photographs. At that time taking © See R. Brykowski and M. Kornecki, Drewniane koscioly w Matopolsce Poludniowej (Wroclaw, 1984), 17 ff.; among the later ones is the church in Rabka, which dates from the beginning of the 17th cent. (fig. 93). © ‘Polichromie polskich boznic drewnianych’, Polska sztuka ludowa, 1-2 (1989), 65-87.

364 Eleonora Bergman photographs such as these was not an easy task. Writing on the problems of photographic documentation of synagogue interiors, Edward Herstein, a forgotten architect and photographer who collaborated with Szymon Zajczyk in photographing

Jewish antiquities, said: In wooden synagogues, the walls, which are brightly illuminated through the windows, become a tiered dome, sometimes finely painted with floral and animal motifs and inscriptions. High above, the dome’s top is in semi-darkness, gradually diffusing downwards to turn rapidly into the bright light of the synagogue’s windows . . . In order to equalize the exposure of the top and bottom parts of the plate, a filter with decreasing density is necessary ... For photographing synagogue paintings, plates sensitive to all colours (panchromatic) are needed, sometimes combined with a medium density filter . . .’

These are some reflections that came to mind. Even if the rich seventeenth- and

eighteenth-century decoration inside the synagogues contrasted, as the authors claim, with the mundane living conditions of the majority of worshippers (though we should remember that their pauperization occurred on a large scale only in the nineteenth century), it also reflected the stability of the communities that could afford such decorations. Even if the interiors were intended to be reminiscent of a tent, perhaps to strengthen in the worshippers an awareness of the temporary, it 1s likely that this was just the sponsors’ and artists’ idea (where they did not simply replicate common patterns). We do not know whether the worshippers interpreted it this way. Moreover, it seems to me that we cannot relate the ‘process of sacralization’ of the synagogue’s interior to this or that event or trend (see pp. 42, 82, 169).

All the parts of the interior, and the relations between them, had always had a sacred dimension; all of them contain references to the Temple in Jerusalem | and/or the Bible; all are discussed and explained in the Talmud. I believe that at the end of the seventeenth century the immediate reason for using this decoration rich in both its form and content was a reaction by the official synagogue (originally in the south-eastern areas of the Polish republic) to numerous defections and the increasing influence of the Sabbatians and their successors. This reaction seems to be in some way comparable to the Counter-Reformation in the Catholic Church. In practice it meant that ‘the soul can be best reached through the eyes’, a principle professed by the Jesuits.» We must remember that interiors with symbolic decoration were a feature of synagogues belonging to the Orthodox current in Judaism. The hasidim did not follow a tradition of decorating the interiors of their prayer houses. The section on aronot hakodesh is an interesting and magnificently illustrated separate study encompassing analyses of both their forms and symbols, especially kabbalah references. I should like to add just a few remarks. Aronot hakodesh are often, as in this book, compared to altars. In fact the frames of aronot hakodesh (for example, on p. 24) should rather be compared to retables. I realize this error 1s ’ E. Herstein, ‘O technice inwentaryzacji fotograficznej’, Wiadomosci Krajoznaweze, 13 (Warsaw,

1929), 2-4. 8 Quoted from J. Tazbir (ed.), Zarys historit Polski (Warsaw, 1980), 249.

Gates of Heaven 365 common, and it persists in the literature at least from the times of Stronczynski and Bersohn, as well as in the writings of Bataban and Zajczyk. It is a shorthand that is unfortunate, because a synagogue should not be associated with an altar, whose purpose is offering. Incidentally, the framings and doors of aronot hakodesh often reveal more similarities with the so-called ‘tsar’s gates’ of iconostases in Orthodox churches than with the retables in Catholic churches (see Figures 1-4). The authors mention on page 104 that common armoires with added religious symbols were often used as aronot hakodesh. In addition to the examples provided by the authors, we know of approximately ten cases in which such armoires were used 1n small synagogues in Warsaw. In 1940-2 the people deported from small towns to the Warsaw ghetto lived in these synagogues, probably using the armoires for practical purposes. The reconstruction of six aronot hakodesh in the form of drawings has produced very interesting results. This seems to be, in a sense, a continuation of the nineteenth-century surveys such as the detailed survey by Wierzbicki of the synagogue in Jablonow. ‘The new reconstructions demonstrate how much can be deciphered even from photographs (although erroneously the turrets on the sides of the upper part of the framing of the aron hakodesh in Wotpa have been inverted—compare the drawing, plate 147, and the photograph, plate 148). On the other hand, how much less would we know about these magnificent works without photographs, for if the drawings provide a good sense of their proportions and artistic composition, they do not bring out their spaciousness and texture. Let me add a gloss to the discussion on the builders and painters of the synagogues (pp. 167-8). It is based on the history, or rather the legend, written down by Abraham Rechtman, about the wooden synagogue in Radziwittow (of which we know nothing more). It goes as follows. After 1893 a wood sculptor famous in the area was brought to the synagogue from nearby Krzemieniec. Over the period of a year he carved a magnificent frame for the aron hakodesh, and at the bottom he inscribed his name: Oyzer, son of Yehiel. A few months later, during a powerful storm, a thunderbolt crashed down into the synagogue without causing any damage—only the name disappeared. Shortly afterwards it came out that this sculptor had done similar work for a Catholic church, and ‘Heaven decided to erase his name as a punishment’.? We may conclude that if an artist was a Jew and worked for clients of a different religion his name could not be inscribed inside a synagogue; even more so if he was a non-Jew. Besides, there may be in this tale a trace of some

moralizing about Jewish artisans who were baptized, like the painters Ksawery Dominik Heski and his son Jozef Ksawery, who worked at the court in Nieswiez. It is certain that there were Jewish painting and sculpture schools and workshops; but if none was at hand, elements of the interior could be ordered from local artisans

regardless of their religion. Solomon’s temple was erected by many non-Jews, which of course enabled the founders of synagogues to employ them as well.'° ? D. Roskies and D. Roskies, The Shiet/ Book (n.p., 1979), 180. 10 See also M. Balaban, Zabytki historyczne Zydéw w Polsce (Warsaw, 1929), 75.

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Fig. 1. Interior of the synagogue in Fig. 2. Interior of an Orthodox church, Zabludow: the door to the aron hakodesh Uscie Gorlickie: the tsar’s gate Photo: Hermann Struck, 1914-18. Museum of the Arts, Photo: Tadeusz Chrzanowski, 1965. Institute of Art of

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