The history and culture of the Jews as reflected in post‐Communist Polish historiography and related activities

A Jewish European Modern Intellectual. Moses Gaster: Memorii, Corespondenta (Moses Gaster: Memoirs and Correspondence). Edited and annotated by Victor Eskenasy. Bucharest: Hasefer Publishing House 1998. xxxv+467pp. (Romanian with English and German summaries)

A Very Selective Reading. Cecil D. Edy, Hungary at War (Pennsylvania State University Press 1998), xx+318pp., price unknown

’Setting the Record Straight‘. The Story of Two Shtetls, Bransk and Ejszyszki. An Overview of Polish‐Jewish Relations in Northeastern Poland during World War II. A Collective Work, Toronto/Chicago: The Polish Educational Foundation in North America 1998. Part 1 190pp., part 2 240pp.

A Symbol of the ‘Story‘. Michael Moshe Checinski, My Father's Watch, New York and Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House 1994, 248pp. Glossary. Hard/softcover, US$30; $14.95

A Curious Experiment. Robert Weinberg, Stalin's Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland. An Illustrated History, 1928–1996. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 ix + 105pp. Biblio. Illus. Notes. Index     

Jews in Belorussia's judicial system, 1944–1953

The relationship and cultural transfer between Jews and Belorussians are still rather unexplored topics. This article aims at analysing a historical process neglected by the historians of both the Jewish people and the Soviet Union: the “Belorussianisation” of the Jewish people in the interwar period. It proposes to scrutinise the impact of the nationalities policy on the crystallisation of a Belorussian‐Jewish identity. On the one hand, it is obvious that Belorussian leading political figures, influenced by Jewish intellectuals, proved to be very favourable to the development of the Jewish culture and to a Jewish‐Belorussian rapprochement. On the other hand, this study suggests that the achievements of the Soviet nationalities policy with regard to the “Belorussianisation” of Jews were ambiguous. In the three fields studied – education, scholarship and art – the results appeared to be mitigated and paradoxical. The “indigenisation” policy led to a separation of the Jewish and Belorussian educational system but stimulated the flourishing of a joined Belorussian‐Jewish scholarship. In contrast, the most profound and fruitful encounter between the Jewish and Belorussian cultures occurred in a domain, the visual arts, where the Belorussian government did not set a clear policy of rapprochement.     

The Black Sheep of the Land: Bandits in the Polish Borderlands, 1918–1925

This article examines banditry in the northeastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic after the First World War and into the mid-1920s. It considers the devastating effects of the war, which ravaged the territory, together with policies of the Polish state that contributed to an increase in bandit activity in the eastern borderland region. This work argues that banditry here worked as a multi-level system and thrived due to the involvement of multiple social actors—the bandits themselves, locals, state authorities, and foreign aid. Furthermore, this article pushes for an examination of bandits—not merely as social outcasts or misfits—but as an integral part of the communities they emerged from. More broadly, the focus on banditry contributes to scholarship dedicated to better understanding the aftermath of the First World War and continued conflict from the perspective of everyday people.     

Jews in the News – Representations of Judaism and the Jewish Minority in the Norwegian Contemporary Press

This article provides an analysis of how Jewish rituals and Jews as a minority group are represented and debated in the Norwegian press: How is “news about the Jews” framed by the media? Which discourses dominate the debates? Are notions of what it “takes to be Norwegian” put forward in these cases? The article is also an analysis of Jewish voices in the press, and based on the fact that Jewish advocates refer to minority-based legal rights suggests that the Jewish minority benefits from the use of a broader international human rights discussion in the press. I claim that a multicultural discourse provides the Jewish minority with language that makes it possible to argue for cultural rights without referring to Jewishness; offering protection against a general fear of anti-Semitism.     

Power and “native” Jews: the Russian imperial bureaucracy and Mountain Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

The 1880s and 1890s witnessed an intensification of Tsarist policy towards the Jews of the Russian Empire. In 1892, for example, a law directed towards the Jews of Kuban and Cossack areas in the Caucasus was promulgated. In preparing the law, officials failed to notice, either intentionally or accidentally, that alongside European Jews of the Kuban and Terek region resided Mountain Jews. There were, therefore, problems with the implementation of this law especially in relation to Mountain Jews. This led to considerable controversy. This study demonstrates the manner in which officials attempted to solve the Jewish question in the Russian Empire. It focuses on the impact of officialdom at various levels of the Tsarist regime on the lives of Mountain Jews. Its principal sources are drawn from various documents and correspondence between government officials on the matter of the Mountain Jews.1 Research for this paper was generously assisted by a Rothschild Foundation grant.      

The final chapter: Agro‐Joint workers – victims of the Great Terror in the USSR, 1937–40

This article deals with the final chapter in the history of the Agro‐Joint, an organisation created by the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and operating in the USSR between 1924 and 1938. Among a large number of “counter‐revolutionaries” – a term used in the USSR during the time of the Great Purge of 1937–8 – one of the lesser‐known repressed groups consisted of the workers of the Agro‐Joint. With the opening of ex‐KGB archives in the former Soviet Union additional aspects of the Agro‐Joint venture have emerged in chilling detail. By virtue of their organisational status and their association with foreigners, many Agro‐Joint workers became direct subjects of the “operational orders” of the NKVD and were persecuted in three areas; Moscow, Ukraine and Crimea. There was an extraordinary brutality to the sentences; around 30 Agro‐Joint employees (from directors to members of collective farms) were arrested and a majority of them were sentenced to death. Employees of the three Agro‐Joint offices, refugee doctors whom Agro‐Joint brought into the USSR from Germany, Jewish religious activists and the staff of the Soviet organizations KOMZET and OZET were all caught in the same web, and accused of “collaboration with a counterrevolutionary organization, founded by the director of Agro‐Joint Dr. Rosen.” Accompanied by two sample documents from interrogation files as well as a list of Agro‐Joint workers who fell in the line of duty, the article presents a new outlook on this important era in the history of the JDC and Soviet Jewry.     

Trapped in migrants’ sectors? Polish women in the Icelandic labour market

The employment‐driven migrations from Poland to Iceland have largely been pioneered by Polish women. They outnumbered men among Polish residents in this country until the economic boom since 2005 triggered large‐scale male immigration. This trend slowed down with the outbreak of the financial crisis, as the recession severely affected the male‐dominated construction industry. The analysis of Polish female migrants’ working experiences shows that recent inflows are mainly shaped by the nature of labour demand as well as the social policies and care services in Iceland. Although economically integrated, compared with native women Polish women tend to occupy rather disadvantaged positions. They seem concentrated in a few low‐skilled occupations that bring little prestige and low income. On the other hand, they were less affected by the financial crisis, in the sense that many of them maintained work, though some experienced lowering of salaries or reduction of working hours.     

Jewish response to the non-Jewish question: “Where were the Jews during the fighting?” 1941–5

ABSTRACT

The war of the USSR against Nazi Germany led to an increase of negative expressions in regard to Jews. Often members of the Soviet population accused Jews of avoiding combat, of cowardice, and of an inherent incapacity to feel patriotic toward Russia. Such a view was an adaptation of prewar anti-Jewish prejudices to war-time conditions. Some Jews, both at the front and in the rear, viewed these expressions as a sign of the emergence of an ethnic inequality that did not exist in the prewar Soviet Union. Increased Jewish sensitivity to one aspect of the theme of equality (the idea that Jews were fighting as well and as bravely as members of other ethnic groups) inclined Soviet Jews to prefer the term and concept of “Soviet” rather than those of “Russian.” The former represented for them a state of all its ethnic groups, including the Jews, while the latter appeared to reflect a priority accorded to a single ethnic group, the Russians. Anti-Jewish attitudes in the Soviet rear and, to some extent, at the front as well, was one factor that led to the reinforcement of the Soviet Jewish identity.