Mazel tov to JHE friend Prof. Marcin Wodziński, recipient of a prestigious 2024 Foundation for Polish Science (FNP) Award, considered the most important scientific distinction in Poland.
Wodziński, who heads the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław, received the Prize in the field of humanities and social sciences “for an innovative study of Hasidism that explains the role of culture, politics, and geography in shaping religious identities and interethnic relations.”
He is one of four recipients of this year’s prize, in for areas of scholarship and science. The others are Prof. Sebastian Glatt in the field of life sciences; Prof. Janusz Lewiński for chemical and material sciences; and Prof. Krzysztof Sacha in math, physics, and engineering.
The award, the FNP states, “honors outstanding achievements and scientific discoveries that push the boundaries of cognition and open new research perspectives, provide an exceptional contribution to Poland’s civilizational and cultural advancement and assure the country with a significant position for undertaking the most ambitious challenges of the modern world. The amount of the award is PLN 250,000 (c. €57,000).”
Wodziński has written extensively on Hasidism, Jewish cemeteries, and other aspects of Jewish heritage and culture. His book Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton University Press), with detailed cartography by Waldemar Spallek, won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in the Scholarship category.
Moshe Idel, author of Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic, described Wodziński’s book as “the richest and most updated illustrated history of the entire process of emergence, growth, suffering, decimation in the Holocaust, and then the surprising renewal of Hasidism in modern times. A must for understanding this most vital aspect of Judaism.”
Wodziński wrote a Have Your Say essay for JHE in 2019, in which he described how he was drawn to study Hasidism and explained how his book “atlasses” the rich material heritage of the Hasidic movement — physically, geographically, and spiritually — through maps and other in-depth exploration.
His first visits to Jewish cemeteries in Poland, where he found graves covered with kvitlekh and Hasidic pilgrims paying homage at the sites, he wrote, “opened to me an entirely new perspective on Poland, its history, and its geography. I understood, or rather experienced, that what for me was a small and insignificant village might be an important spiritual center for somebody else.”
Click here to read the FNP announcement of the Award
Click to read Wodziński’s 2019 JHE Have Your Say Essay
1 comment on “Poland: Mazel tov to Prof. Marcin Wodziński, recipient of a prestigious Foundation for Polish Science Award for 2024”
CONGRATULATIONS!
Michael B