The Sacralization and Secularization of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (original) (raw)
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Holocaust Studies, 2024
Focused on the post-1944 history of Jewish cemeteries in three towns: Iŭje (Belarus), Berezne (Ukraine) and Biłgoraj (Poland) this paper examines different local trajectories of repurposing and overwriting Jewish cemeteries. This comparative study goes beyond the top-down policy analysis to include the ways the local population participated in and reacted to these acts of overwriting. We complement the historical consideration with an ethnographic approach that explores how ‘overwritten’ Jewish cemeteries have been used by the local inhabitants, how they featured on their mental maps, what myths and narratives they triggered, and what spatial practices their new status afforded.
In-between Graves: Space and Class in Cemetery Conflicts among the Jews of Interwar Poland
This paper considers how Jews carved out new burial grounds, a specialized and permanent form of Jewish space, in Poland between the World Wars in Poland. Jewish burial space in the Polish lands was at a premium beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, particularly in the most densely populated cities. Analyzing the process of purchasing new burial grounds reveals the stalemate — characterized by bureaucracy impediments — that under-girded Jewish relations with state bodies in the twenties and thirties. Jewish officials, however, did not enact any policies that halted the decline in the quality of the care of their indigent Jewish dead, reinforcing the class divide in Polish-Jewish Society society.
Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries from the Baltic to the Balkans -historical study in situ
Зборник Матице српске за ликовне уметности 47, 2019
In contrast to the Christian burial tradition, according to which the care of the cemetery disappears with the termination of the care of the family about the graves of their loved ones, the tradition and religious practice of the Halachah make the burial places of the Jewish last forever. Although the time-decay, the turbulent historical turmoil and the social climate of the last century left a visible trace on the appearance of Jewish cemeteries in Central and Eastern Europe, they have survived, integrally or partially. Thanks to the "religious laws that (at least theoretically) contribute to the preservation of Jewish graves and cemeteries in an efficient way", they still testify to the existence, place and role of the Jewish community in the European society of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. In order to preserve, "read" and interpret this group of monuments, a systematic survey of representative Jewish cemeteries in 13 European countries was conducted under the auspices of the National Committee ICOMOS Germany in the past few years. The results of this complex project were presented to the public in the form of the magisterial new book of Rudolf Klein's academic opus-Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries of the 19 th and 20 th Century in Central and Eastern Europe-A Comparative Study, published by the National Committee ICOMOS Germany in 2018. In the focus of the research were 21 cemetery sites which differ in the time of their establishment, urban micro and macro location, topography, morphology, typology of gravestones, landscape design, authenticity, as well as its cultural, historical and artistic importance within the Jewish history and a wider, European context. Based on the conducted on-site research, the author points to the diversity of Jewish burial culture in various European regions, as a consequence of extensive changes within Judaism and the emancipation of Jews in the secular Europe of the 19 th century. As the author points out, "the art of Jewish graves reveals the dual nature of Jewish life in the diaspora: fidelity to Jewish heritage and openness to external influences, … and the fine nuances could be read only in the widest cultural and artistic context of place and time." As a consequence, Jewish funerary art and culture, as well as the Jewish cemeteries as its immediate expression, could be read on two levels: as a source of knowledge about the Jewish community in some of the European regions-"about its specifics, aspirations and religious orientation" on the one hand, and as a source of knowledge about "the wider milieu it belonged to, including local gentile traditions and Jewish-gentile dialogue."
JOURNAL OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY , 2019
The Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław offers a unique perspective on the changing tectonics of memory construction in a Central European city. In this article, we trace the little known history of the cemetery and the ways in which its position in the urban imaginary changed in the context of large‐scale geopolitical transformations. Through the cemetery’s history, we can follow the fate of one of the most prominent Jewish communities in pre‐World War II Germany, starting with its emergence following the emancipation of German Jews in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to its demise under Nazi rule. After the city’s transfer to Poland following the Potsdam Conference (1945), the cemetery became an increasingly isolated relic of the Jewish past of the city until its grassroots‐led revitalization commencing during the 1980s Solidarity era. After this important period of civic‐led renaissance tied to the city’s Jewish heritage, today, the cemetery has been pushed again to the periphery, an outcome of a process we refer to as the policy of memory containment.
UBC Journal of Historical Studies, 2020
Previously titled "Interpreting the Reconstruction of Synagogues and Jewish Cemeteries as Holocaust Memorials In Eastern European Urban Landscapes," this paper was originally written for a 3rd/4th year undergraduate seminar paper for GMST 489 (I-witness Holocaust Field School Program) at the University of Victoria. It has since undergone peer-review and has been extensively revised with the assistance of Nathan Deschamps and Dylan Sanderson. After postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper was published in the UBC Journal of Historical Studies (Formerly, the Atlas), an undergraduate journal based out of the University of British Columbia.
The Jewish cemetery - a place absent from urban and habitable space
Romanica Olomucensia
This paper proposes to examine the spatial representation of the Jewish cemetery in the literary works of the French and Luxembourgish writers Henri Calet and Paul Palgen, who are either unknown or forgotten today. Written during the years of the Occupation or in the immediate postwar period, these texts present the Jewish cemetery as a place of annihilation, outside space and territory. Space is understood here in the Lefebvreian sense, having a social character and being a social product. The collage by the Belgian writer and artist Max Servais, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, provides a parallel reading that is divided between text and image and allows the spatial dimension of the Jewish cemetery to be understood in relation to both temporality and memory. The works presented here thus question, through various forms (narrative, poem, collage), this undertaking of plural effacement-of History, but also of men-by modern barbarities. The space of the Jewish cemetery, unveiled here afrom a bird's-eye view or in close-up, is one that can be shaped, and which remains in permanent "production" (a Lefebvrean word) in the present in which it is inscribed, despite the gap it marks with the past to which it simultaneously refers (the Holocaust).
After the Void. The Afterlife of the Shtetl in Postwar Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.
Holocaust Studies, 2024
Introduction to the special issue "After the Void", co-edited with Magdalena Waligórska. Concentrating on Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, the special issue combines historical, cultural, architectonic, and sociological perspectives to offer complex insights into the questions of dispossession, appropriation, and repurposing of Jewish spaces, the overwriting of Jewish material heritage, as well as Jewish attempts to seek justice and retribution and to preserve the memory of the shtetl, both locally and in the Diaspora. In different ways and using diverse materials, the papers explore the ways non-Jews interacted with formerly Jewish spaces, adopting and adapting them for new use, seeking to preserve them, or effacing the last traces of material Jewish heritage.