Polish-Jewish relations in Chełm in the 20th century (original) (raw)
Related papers
Jews in the Communist movement in the Second Polish Republic 1918–1938: an outline of the issue
Polish-Jewish Studies, 2021
The article describes the participation of Jews in the revolutionary movement in Russia (especially in Poland) before World War I; the social structure of the Jewish population in Poland; the path of the splinter groups from Jewish left-wing parties to the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland; the attitude of Jewish radicals towards the Bolshevik aggression against Poland in 1920; the number of Jews in the Polish Communist movement, their identity, and their motives for joining the Communist movement. The share of Jews in the Polish Communist movement was several times higher than the share of the Jewish population in the society of the Second Polish Republic. Jews made up about 30 percent of all KPP members, and in the party youth group the figure reached as high as 50 percent. Activists of Jewish origin made up about 40 percent of the party elite, and they even came to predominate in the middle ranks. The reasons for the significant participation of Jews in the Communist movement cannot be explained (which is often done) solely by their difficult social situation and discrimination. Rather, it was a combination of many factors of a different nature, both universal and specifically Jewish.
Democracy and Its Discontents: The Image of "the Jews" and the Transformation of Polish Politics
Ch. 6 of Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry, Stanford University Press, 2012
This chapter argues that the introduction of antisemitic rhetoric and politics into the political mainstream during the elections to the State Dumas of 1906 and 1907 proved to be a critical turning point in the history of antisemitism in Poland and in the history of Polish-Jewish relations.
Stewards of the City? Jews on Kraków City Council in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.
Polin, 2022
Stewards of the City? Jews on Kraków City Council in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century H a n n a Ko z i ń s K a-W i t t J e ws se rved on the councils of 261 cities in Galicia and lacked representation on only forty-five. 1 They constituted 36 per cent of councillors and had an overall majority on twenty-eight councils. 2 In addition, in the second half of the nineteenth century, they served as mayors in ten cities. According to Piotr Wróbel, the ideal of equal rights in the province was most fully realized on city councils, local government being the arena in which constitutional theory came face-to-face with the reality of daily life. 3 This view is worth examining in more detail, since Jewish activity in local government has not up to now been thoroughly investigated. The pioneering history of the Jews in restored Poland after the First World War, written in the 1930s, does allude to Jewish councillors in Galicia, but devotes much more attention to other topics. 4 Zionist Jewish historians argued that Jewish participation in local government during the liberal period from 1866 to 1914 was limited exclusively to supporting groupings and political parties of other nationalities, so that the Jewish role was restricted to casting votes either for candidates proposed by others or to arrangements proposed by the majority. 5 Using Kraków as a case study, I shall examine Jewish participation in local government in the second half of the nineteenth century. Jews represented over 30 per cent of the town's inhabitants, 6 and the community was overwhelmingly Orthodox. 7 From the early nineteenth century there began to develop a progressive group, interested in modernizing ritual and acculturation. 8 By the mid-1860s these two forms of Jewish identity were in sharp conflict. In this chapter, I shall first explore the legal basis for municipal self-government and its election procedures. I shall then review Jewish participation in municipal elections and changes in political mobilization and the ideology of the Jews elected to the city council, followed by an analysis of their activities, distinguishing between interventions of general municipal concern and specifically Jewish ones. A point of interest is the presence of municipal officials in the Jewish district of Kazimierz. In the last section, I discuss antisemitism in the municipal arena.
conference program, 2019
The conference 'Biographies and Politics: The Involvement of Jews and People of Jewish Origin in Leftist Movements in 19th and 20th Century Poland' aims to determine the actual Jewish engagement in leftist movements in Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries from the point of view of their individual ideological choices. Personal histories, family fortunes, and forming political identities will be analyzed using a biographical method. Thus, they will help answer the question of what drove Polish Jews to join leftist organizations.