Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland

Description

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In a time of national introspection regarding the country's involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. The essays in this book explore issues of the restoration, restitution, memorializing, and tourism that have brought present inhabitants into contact with initiatives to revive Jewish sites. They reveal that an emergent Jewish presence in both urban and rural landscapes exists in conflict and collaboration with other remembered minorities, engaging in complex negotiations with local, regional, national, and international groups and interests. With its emphasis on spaces and built environments, this volume illuminates the role of the material world in the complex encounter with the Jewish past in contemporary Poland.

Introduction / Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng
1. "Oświęcim"/ "Auschwitz": Archeology of a Mnemonic Battleground / Geneviève Zubrzycki
2. Restitution of Communal Property and the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland / Stanislaw Tyszka
3. Muranów as a Ruin: Layered Memories in Postwar Warsaw / Michael Meng
4. Stettin, Szczecin, and the "Third Space." Urban nostalgia in the German/Polish/Jewish borderlands / Magdalena Waligórska
5. Rediscovering the Jewish Past in the Polish Provinces: The Socio-Economics of Nostalgia / Monika Murzyn-Kupisz
6. Amnesia, Nostalgia, and Reconstruction: Shifting Modes of Memory in Poland's Jewish Spaces / Slawomir Kapralski
7. Jewish Heritage, Pluralism, and Milieux de Memoire: the case of Krakow's Kazimierz / Erica Lehrer
8. The Ethnic Cleansing of the German-Polish-Jewish 'Lodzermensch' / Winson Chu
9. Stony Survivors: Images of Jewish Space on the Polish Landscape / Robert L. Cohn
10. Reading the Palimpsest / Konstanty Gebert
11. A Jew, a Cemetery, and a Polish Village: A Tale of the Restoration of Memory
Jonathan Webber
12. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews: A Post-War, Post-Holocaust, Post-Communist Story / Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Epilogue: Jewish Spaces and their Future / Diana Pinto
Notes
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Jewish Studies
• Jewish
• Former Soviet Union
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Jews
• URSS
• General officer
• Eastern Europe
• Russian
• Russia
• General
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 27 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253015068
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

JEWISH SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY POLAND
JEWISH SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY POLAND
EDITED BY
Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2015 by Indiana University Press
2015 by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, The Museum of the History of Polish Jews: A Postwar, Post-Holocaust, Post-Communist Story
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-01500-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-01503-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-01506-8 (ebook)
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng
1 O wi cim / Auschwitz : Archeology of a Mnemonic Battleground / Genevi ve Zubrzycki
2 Restitution of Communal Property and the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland / Stanis aw Tyszka
3 Muran w as a Ruin: Layered Memories in Postwar Warsaw / Michael Meng
4 Stettin, Szczecin, and the Third Space : Urban Nostalgia in the German/Polish/Jewish Borderlands / Magdalena Walig rska
5 Rediscovering the Jewish Past in the Polish Provinces: The Socioeconomics of Nostalgia / Monika Murzyn-Kupisz
6 Amnesia, Nostalgia, and Reconstruction: Shifting Modes of Memory in Poland s Jewish Spaces / S awomir Kapralski
7 Jewish Heritage, Pluralism, and Milieux de M moire: The Case of Krak w s Kazimierz / Erica Lehrer
8 Lodzermensch and Litzmannstadt: Making Virtually German Sites in d after 1989 / Winson Chu
9 Stony Survivors: Images of Jewish Space on the Polish Landscape / Robert L. Cohn
10 Reading the Palimpsest / Konstanty Gebert
11 A Jew, a Cemetery, and a Polish Village: A Tale of the Restoration of Memory / Jonathan Webber
12 The Museum of the History of Polish Jews: A Postwar, Post-Holocaust, Post-Communist Story / Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Epilogue: Jewish Spaces and Their Future / Diana Pinto
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
T HE EDITORS WISH to thank the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for its generous sponsorship of the summer workshop The Politics of Jewish Spaces in Contemporary Poland in July 2010, out of which this volume grew. We are also grateful to Janet Rabinowitch, former director of Indiana University Press, for her sustaining support for the idea of the book. At IUP, we also wish to thank Raina Polivka and Darja Malcolm-Clarke for seeing the book to press. Kamila D browska and Dobrochna Ka wa offered constructive comments on the penultimate version of the manuscript at the 2013 Recovering Forgotten History workshop in Krak w. The editors also gratefully acknowledge a grant from Concordia University, Montreal, which was integral to the realization of this project. Finally, we thank our copy editor Margaret Hogan; proofreader Douglas Vipond; student assistants Kimberly Moore, Mary Caple, Stephen Milder, and Paul Brown; and of course all the contributors to the volume itself.
JEWISH SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY POLAND
Introduction
Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng
A MONG OUTSIDE OBSERVERS of Polish-Jewish relations, two divergent images of Poland coexist, each with its own set of powerful emotions. The first is more familiar to North American readers: Poland as an historically blighted land of pogroms, antisemitism, Jewish exclusion, persecution, and murder, and today a place of historical denial by Poles and lingering fear and hostility for Jews, set against a backdrop of silent Jewish ruins, debased and left to crumble. But another image of Poland is emerging among a new generation of close observers. This Poland opposes antisemitism, is embroiled in a process of earnest introspection regarding the involvement of Poles in the historical persecution of Jews, and, most saliently for the present volume, is dedicated to reenvisioning spaces of and for Jewishness, past and present, in the Polish landscape-physical, social, and discursive.
Claude Lanzmann s epic 1983 film Shoah seared the image of Poland as a landscape of Jewish death and denial into a generation of viewers, with images of Polish peasant eyewitnesses expressing unreconstructed antisemitic myths and nervously snickering as they talked about the murder of their former Jewish neighbors and the confiscation of those Jews property. The film suggests that any habitable physical and social Jewish space in Poland was permanently obliterated along with the country s Jewish population. 1 But a pair of new films-Yael Bartana s And Europe Will Be Stunned and W adys aw Pasikowski s Pok osie ( Aftermath )-powerfully evoke spaces of not only past and present but also future Jewishness, in ways that suggest the advent of a new historical moment. While not nearly as widely viewed-and employing a fictional approach as opposed to using the documentary genre-these films reflect significant present-day social realities: both the inchoate yearnings of and the actual grassroots efforts by non-Jewish Poles and Jews in and beyond Poland to reclaim and expand Poland s Jewish spaces.
Pasikowski s 2012 Polish-made film Pok osie is an allegorical treatment of sociologist-historian Jan Gross s powerful book Neighbors , which laid bare the public secret that a community of Poles in 1941 had driven their Jewish neighbors into a barn and burned it down. 2 The filmic treatment follows the present-day moral awakening of a young Polish villager who feels an inexplicable pull to collect and reassemble the fragments of his local Jewish cemetery. In his scavenger hunt for the missing tombstones-an endeavor replicated in many Jewish cemeteries across Poland in the last fifteen years-he both uncovers the terrifying truth of what happened to the village s Jews during World War II and incurs the wrath of his fellow townsfolk for his audacity in restoring both the Jewish story and the cemetery s physical space.
Israeli-Dutch artist Yael Bartana s And Europe Will Be Stunned is a trilogy of short films developed in collaboration with progressive Polish intellectuals and shot in Warsaw from 2007 to 2011. They chronicle the fictional Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), a vibrant, youth-based political campaign that has called on 3.3 million Jews to return to Poland. The first film, Mary Koszmary ( Nightmares , 2007), features the movement s leader, performed by young Polish leftist-activist S awomir Sierakowski, pleading for Jews to return to Poland. He longs for Jews and wants them back, unsettling the archetypal antisemitic Pole as construed by Shoah while underlining the ambivalent role of nostalgia in even such progressive Polish approaches to Jewishness. Bartana s project dares to envision-however fantastically-Poland as a center of future Jewish life, building on a deep reservoir of largely repressed yearnings for the vanished world of the shtetl that exist on both the Polish and Jewish sides of the equation. Indeed, provocatively underscoring the generative intersections of vision and reality, Bartana broke the filmic frame to build a temporary kibbutz training camp in Muran w, the site of the Warsaw ghetto, and the JRMiP itself has a website and manifesto, and held its first congress in Berlin in May 2012. 3
A range of such new visions of Jewish Poland, both pragmatic and utopian, appear throughout this volume. Shadowed by the earlier image offered by Shoah , they provide emotion-laden narratives and counternarratives that offer alternatives and responses to its bleak perspective. Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland showcases research by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, illuminating lesser-known engagements with the Polish-Jewish past over the last twenty years. In this period, non-Jewish Poles and Jews (both Polish and foreign) have made Poland home to profound debate and reflection on the loss of its once large-and today minuscule-Jewish minority, representing perhaps the cutting edge of Holocaust memory work in Europe more generally.
This explosion of the past into the present is visible in a variety of media: print, film, photography, theater, music, and even food. But it has been expressed perhaps most strikingly in the built environment and the cultural meanings such physical heritage enables. Across the country, dilapidated synagogues and cemeteries are being restored, Jewish streets recreated, and Jewish museums built. Because Poland was the geographic epicenter of the Holocaust, few other European countries have attracted as much global interest or experienced such intense reflection on the Jewish genocide. But Poland s new conjurings of Jewishness should not be read as simple gestures of reparation for past wrongs, nor as mere mercenary projects of development or instrumental national self-fashioning. Rather, a Jewish presence in both urban and rural landscapes has reemerged in tension and synergy with other remembered minorities, and in complex negotiations with at times divergent local, regional, national, and inte