Calendar

While the historical shtetl has been studied extensively, the post-Jewish town, as a historical phenomenon and evolving site of contested memory, has received less attention. After the Holocaust, the many towns where Jewish communities had lived for centuries and where they had created a distinctive way of life became places without Jews. We want to explore this process of transforming shtetls into post-Jewish space.

The conference is organized as part of the events accompanying the new temporary exhibition of POLIN Museum “(post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt” opening on May 17, 2024. The exhibition will juxtapose postwar memories of prewar Jewish life in Polish Opatów, as recorded in words and paintings by a self-taught artist – Mayer Kirshenblatt, with the postwar post-Jewish town.

Program: 

Day 1: Sunday, September 8

• • 14:30–15:30 Tour of post-Jewish: Shtetl Opatów through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt (registration limit exhausted)

• • 15:30–16:00 Coffee break

• • 16.00–17:00 Opening Roundtable – Defining the post-Jewish Town
    Moderator: Aleksandra Jakubczak
     Dariusz Stola, Antony Polonsky, Natalia Romik
  • 17:00–17:30 Joanna Król-Komła presenting “Virtual Shtetl”
    Moderator: Aleksandra Jakubczak

• • 17:30–18:00 Coffee break

• • 18:00–19:30 Keynote: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Jewish Memories of Small-Town Life in Post-1945 Ukraine

• 19:30 Dinner for the conference speakers

Day 2: Monday, September 9

• • 9:30–11:00 The Shtetl as Material Witnesses
    Chair: Magdalena Waligórska
     Małgorzata Michalska-Nakonieczna, Elements of Jewish Architectural Heritage within the Urban Structures and Cultural Landscapes of Small Towns in the Lublin Region

    Emil Majuk, Destination Shtetl: Traces of Jewish Heritage in Towns in the Borderlands of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine

    Yechiel Weizman, Golgotha in Paradise: Rajgród and the Memory of its Jews

  • 11:00–11:30 Coffee break

• • 11:30–13:00 Post-Jewish Topographies
    Chair: Antony Polonsky
     Aleksandra Szczepan, Tender Geographies and Communities of Memory: Intimate Cartographies of Polish shtetlekh

    Joanna Kabrońska, Post-Jewish Urban Space in Kartuzy/Karthaus, Pomerania

    Clare Fester, Scavenging for Traces in the Post-Jewish Town: A Case Study of Memorial Book Maps

  • 13:00–14:00 Lunch

• • 14:00–15:30 Roundtable – The Dead Remain: Cemeteries in Former Shtetls
    Moderator: Yechiel Weizman
     Krzysztof Bielawski, Monika Tarajko, Aleksandra Janus
  • 15:30–15:50 Szymon Lenarczyk, Archeological Finds
    Moderator: Natalia Romik

• • 15:50–16:20 Coffee break

• 16:20–18:20 Becoming post-Jewish Towns
  Chair: Jeffrey Veidlinger
   Karolina Panz, “Died […] [at the Hands] of True Poles”: How Nowy Targ Became a Non-Jewish Town [cancelled]

  Anna Wylegała, Doctors, Craftsmen, and Shoemakers: The Changing Economy of the Shtetl and its Surroundings During and After World War II

  Mikhail Mitsel, Former Jewish Towns during Late Stalinism in Ukraine

  Tomasz Rakowski, Anthropology of Thrift in the Shtetl

Day 3: Tuesday, September 10

• • 10:00–11:30 The Shtetl: Transnational Perspectives
    Chair: Barbara Tornquist-PlewaKamil Kijek, The Last Polish Shtetl? The Jewish Community of Post-war Dzierżoniów: Continuity/Discontinuity of Jewish Life in Early Post-Holocaust Poland, 1945-1950

    Hune Margulies, Configuration of Space in Contemporary Shtetls in Metropolitan New York: Between Territorial Positioning, Cultural Resistance, and New Ethnicities

    David Assaf and Yael Darr, A Vanished Community and Its Changing Memory: The Case of Nowy Dwόr

  • 11:30–11:50 Jewish Heritage Europe, Natalia Romik in conversation with Ruth Ellen Gruber

• • 11:50–12:20 Coffee break

• 12:20–14:00 Things Left Behind
  Chair: Anna WylegałaMarta Frączkiewicz and Przemysław Kaniecki, Items Left Behind: Post-Jewish Objects in POLIN Museum’s Collection

  Magdalena Waligórska, Prêt-à-priver: Plundered Jewish Clothing in Post-Jewish Towns: A History of Intimate Dispossession

  Marta Duch-Dyngosz, Social Transactions Involving Jewish Property in Post-Jewish Towns: Jewish Agency vs. the Social Order

• 14:00 Closing Remarks: Future Directions

The conference aims “to foster debate on the strategies applied by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the field of Jewish cemetery preservation, as well as the research methods used by specialists and examples of the preservation of Jewish cemeteries from the perspective of their signification as cultural heritage of living communities.”

The conference is supported by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, the Alba Iulia Jewish Community, Bar Ilan University, and Alba County Council, among others.

It is seen as a follow up to several other conferences, including European Jewish Cemeteries: An Interdisciplinary Conference, co-organized by JHE in Vilnius, 2015 and Urban Jewish Heritage: Presence and Absence, Kraków, 2018; as well as published research such as Rudolf Klein’s Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries of the 19th and 20th Centuries in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Study, 2018; and projects devoted such as those by the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, initiated in 2015.