The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.     

Ethno-religious groups work values and ethics: the case of Jews,Muslims and Christians in Israel

This study examines and compares, for the first time, the MOW (Meaning of Work) among Jews and Arabs (Muslims and Christians) in Israel and attempts to explain the similarities and the differences in work ethics among these ethno-religious groups. The MOW questionnaire was conducted on 898 Jewish, 215 Muslim and 103 Christian respondents who were currently working. The MOW dimensions were: economic orientation, entitlement norms, obligation norms, interpersonal relations orientation, intrinsic orientation and work centrality. The findings reveal significant differences in most of the MOW dimensions between the three religious groups. Overall, demographic factors partially explain the MOW differences. The MOW differences among the three groups can be explained mainly by cultural differences. Since there is mass Arab (Muslims and Christians) immigration from the Middle East to Europe this study provides a better understanding of their perceptions about work and their work values and ethics. The applications of the findings for organizations are discussed.     

Formation of Identity in Wartime El Salvador: Protective and Harmful Factors

In a qualitative study of the effects of war on identity in rural postwar El Salvador, 11 interviews from data collected 3 years after the war were analyzed for social and individual identity factors. Subjects had been adolescents during the civil war. Prolonged war experiences, especially for those who became combatants at a very early age, had a negative impact on identity formation. Those who had the greatest identity problems felt a deep sense of betrayal, abandonment, and/or a general lack of trust. This included those who felt betrayed by their group, which in war consisted of an armed political one.     

The relative centrality of life domains among Jews and Arabs in Israel: the effect of culture,ethnicity, and demographic variables

The centrality of major life domains (work, family community leisure and religion) have not, to date, been studied among Arabs in Israel. This paper examines life domains centrality of 909 Jews and 286 Arabs (or Palestinians that have Israeli citizenship), who work in the Israeli labor market. The findings reveal significant differences in the importance of all life domains. Work centrality, as well as the importance of religion and community is significantly higher among Arabs than among Jews. Among Jews, the importance of family and leisure are significantly higher than among Arabs. A hierarchical regression analysis indicates that demographic variables have a low ability to explain the differences in the centrality of life domains among Jews and Arabs. The findings can be explained by cultural differences, the high degree of segregation, occupational discrimination, and mainly by the regional Palestinian/Arab-Israeli conflict.     

Scotland at the Russian Front in the First World War: Robert Scotland Liddell,War Correspondent and Photographer,Red Cross Worker and Russian Officer

ABSTRACT

It is unlikely that one would encounter the name of Robert Scotland Liddell (1885–1972) in the list of eminent foreign correspondents covering the First World War in Russia for British newspapers and journals, but he deserves to be much better known both for the quality of the reports and photographs he sent from the Russian front for publication in the magazine The Sphere and for the trilogy of books that appeared in 1916–1917. Liddell began as an orderly attached to the Russian Red Cross in Poland in 1916 and after a period spent with Oliver Locker-Lampson’s British Armed Car Division on the Romanian front, he became an officer in a Russian divisional transport unit and narrowly escaped execution by mutinous troops after the October coup before escaping from Russia at the end of 1917. The article, while concentrating on Liddell’s reporting, experiences and exploits in Russia, attempts to survey his career from his early days as a Fleet Street journalist to the post-First World decades, when he wrote books of travel and novels, before sliding into obscurity.     

The Square of Polish Innocence: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and its symbolic topography

The text refers to the space around the Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to the Fighters and Martyrs of the Ghetto and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN in Warsaw (Poland). The site of death – at the heart of the former Warsaw Ghetto – has now become a site overloaded with other symbolic messages. Two main symbolic centers (the 1948 Monument and the 2013 Museum) are today encircled by ten other, additional memorials. The message emerging from the content as well as the proportion of commemorations is that Polish solidarity with the Jews was a fact and it stood the test of terror and death brought by the Germans. Although it does not undermine the veracity of the few and isolated exceptions, such a version of events is drastically different from the actual facts. Both symbolic centers are perceived as emblems of Jewish minority narrative. Additional artefacts are a message formulated by the Polish majority. They constitute a kind of symbolic encirclement, block. Emphasizing the dominant majority’s version of the events in this place is in fact a symbolic pre-emptive action. It is meant to silence the unwanted narrative or suppress even the mere possibility that it might emerge. What turns out to be at stake in the dominant Polish narrative about the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations is the image of Poland and the Poles. This shows not only the topographic and symbolic situation but also the socio-cultural context of the functioning of the new Museum.