Abstract: This chapter focuses on the city of Odesa and its altered reality after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It discusses the different levels of fragmentation that run through the everyday life of a city and its residents and create fissures in identity and kinship, upheavals and reversals of historical memory, and challenges for conducting research during the war. Ukraine has an unusually complex ethno-linguistic and religious composition, with inherited historical divides. As a borderland, it constituted a pronounced case of political and national fragmentation even before the war. Odesa has its own forms of fragmentation, populated as it is by a rich amalgam of people and cut through with the afterlives of empires. The war has intensified all of these forms of fragmentation, bringing different histories into the present. The chapter addresses fragmentation on three different scales: the vignettes of Jewish Odesans reflecting on the war in the contexts of self, family, community, city, and nation; the historical narratives and historical truths revealed by the term “denazification,” which has served as Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine.; and the reflections of a fragmented anthropologist, highlighting ethical dilemmas and practical difficulties of researching a constantly changing and deeply painful reality during the war.
Abstract: Two years after the Tunisian people overthrew an entrenched dictatorship, the country seems to be definitively turning a new page in its history. Its diminutive Jewish community continues to fade away, a vestige from another time now remembered only through writing. This article analyses how four francophone Jewish writers of Tunisian origins, Catherine Dana, Colette Fellous, Corine Scemama-Ammar, and Brigitte Smadja ‘write/return’ to Tunisia in the 1990s and 2000s. Given their own interrupted experience in Tunisia, they end up remembering through and on behalf of others, including elders, grandmothers and mothers, and siblings. Along with (re)visiting the houses and graves of their elders during the last decades of Ben Ali's rule, they negotiate a role for themselves in the complex diasporic identity that emerged after Tunisian Jewry's post-independence migrations. Nevertheless, I argue that the writing of return provides no simple resolution for the rupture experienced by the last generation of Jewish women born in Tunisia before the great exile in the 1960s. Rather physical return to contemporary Tunisia and its inscription in French transforms these women into inadvertent mediators between the past and present, homeland and diaspora, oral history and writing.
Abstract: In this article, I discuss the issues of mixed marriages, referring to research conducted by Polish sociologists, psychologists and educators. On this basis, I try to show possible areas of conflict in this type of relationships, various strategies for working out compromises as well as various relations with the social microstructure. I emphasise problems related to bringing up children in a bi-cultural family environment, in particular aspects of bi-religious home education. My intention is also to identify potential areas of intercultural enrichment and the emergence of new cultural capital in mixed families. I also reflect on Polish- Jewish marriages by recalling the biography of a representative of the third generation of the Holocaust survivors, married to a Catholic, who has introduced, together with her husband, a model of dualistic education. The research was based on the biographical method, unstructured/in-depth interviews. The article presents one of the elements of broader research, which focused on the construction of the socio-cultural identity of the narrators
Abstract: The book "Survival of the Identity of Holocaust Survivors" was prepared on the basis of a doctoral dissertation. It examines how the trauma of the Holocaust led to a shift in identity among survivors during the war, and the long-term consequences of the Holocaust for identity.
The interview material of 11 research participants who survived the Holocaust revealed identity changes caused during the Holocaust war - the survivors' self-perception as a member of society changed due to the exclusion related to nationality; the perception of one's Jewish origin has changed; the perception of one's role in the family has changed, the loss of family members has strengthened family ties among the survivors; life goals changed, survival became the main goal; self-esteem has changed.
The Holocaust caused long-term consequences for identity: the Holocaust shaped the perception of oneself as a "survivor", which acquired a different value in the context of Lithuanian and Israeli societies; survivors perceive themselves as valuing life, understanding the transience of material values; they perceive themselves as accepting God or as denying his existence. Survivors reveals his dual relationship with the Holocaust: he perceives himself as having gained strength, life experience, having found meaning in the Holocaust, or as having lost the continuity of life.
The book has important lasting value because the research participants interviewed in the book were 80 years old or older at the time of the study, and now, several years after the study, some of them are no longer alive.
Abstract: In the last decades, witness to the Shoa has taken on various forms, from story-telling, to trial depositions and evidence collection, from negotiations for compensations, to "second-generation" accounts. Over the years, what used to be a first-hand narrative, the story of what had been actually seen and felt, has become the account of what have been heard. Since witness to the Shoa, in its various forms, has come to be considered as fundamental "evidence" of the tragedy, second-hands accounts may prove fragile documents to this end. What, therefore, are witness narratives? Are they merely legal documents? How do they stand as historical documents? Will Shoa narratives still have a future while witnesses slowly dwindle and disappear?
Abstract: The analysis of survivors’ testimonies was unable to enter history-writing for many decades after the shoah. If nevertheless it was, the testimonies served only as illustrations of the personal experience of victims in the Grand Narrative of historians. However, in the past 20 years, parallel to the opening of digital oral history archives, these testimonies became regular sources of mainstream historical research. Moreover, the memory culture of the Shoah has fundamentally changed in the Western world after 1989. From the perspective of paper, the most relevant changes were a widespread appearance of the concept (cultural, social, historical) of trauma in public history, and the digital turn in testimony collections.It is a commonplace in psychological and sociological research on Holocaust testimonies and other ego-documents that in the case of large digital collections specific analytical methods need to be used. However, Holocaust historians dealing with these sources have hardly applied such methods. My paper proposes specific sociological techniques of using personal accounts in history-writing (such as the intuitive analysis of testimonies by accumulating and testing data; qualitative approaches and quantifying the data of big qualitative collections). It also discusses the historical usage of large testimony collections with the help of current case studies of the Holocaust in Hungary
Abstract: Настоящият сборник съдържа устни разкази на еврейските общности за самите тях и живота им в Русе, Шумен и Варна. Разказите са подредени в осем глави, които съответстват на различните антропологически категории и представят чуто или преживяно от първо лице. Хронологията в книгата е съобразена единствено с битието в житейските цикли и поради това във всяка отделна глава може да се проследи картината за свят на различните поколения хора.
Разказите са резултат от теренно проучване, проведено през пролетта на 2015 година. То отразява не само състоянието на градските общности на евреите в Русе, Шумен и Варна, но осветлява паметта за тях, описва хора и събития, отнасящи се и за онази част от българските евреи, които днес живеят в държавата Израел. Тридесет наши сънародници – 17 жени и 13 мъже, чрез своите разкази и спомени изграждат впечатляващ териториален обхват на проучването, който включва 27 български населени места и в действителност покрива картата на страната.
Abstract: This chapter highlights stories of women’s conversion in contemporary Western European contexts. Theorising the connections among religion, storytelling, identity, subject-formation, and conversion, the chapter conceptualises conversion stories as enabling individual subjects to negotiate a terrain of difference and transformation, including multiple dimensions of belonging. On the basis of a critical operationalisation of Wohlrab-Sahr’s (1999) analytical concepts of ‘syncretism’ and ‘symbolic battle’, the analysis focuses on four memoirs written by women who turn to Judaism and Islam, and looks at motivations for conversion, and understandings of the past and present and different selves. The case studies show that the memoirs construct lifeworlds and selves on a continuum of syncretic and symbolic battle scripts. They moreover demonstrate that converts’ experiences need to be situated within the respective religious traditions, as well as within larger discourses about Judaism and Islam in Western Europe. As such, the chapter contributes empirical insights into experiences of religious, social, and gendered trajectories of conversion/transformation. Moreover, it connects empirical converts’ experiences of becoming Jewish or Muslim to theorising the positions of Judaism and Islam as minoritised traditions and communities in Western Europe.
Abstract: This article presents research notes on an oral history project on the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on Jews over the age of 65 years. During the first stage of the project, we conducted nearly 80 interviews in eight cities worldwide: Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Milan, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and St. Petersburg, and in Israel. The interviews were conducted in the spring of 2020 and reflect the atmosphere and perception of interviewees at the end of the first lockdown.
Based on an analysis of the interviews, the findings are divided into three spheres: (1) the personal experience during the pandemic, including personal difficulties and the impact of the lockdown on family and social contacts; (2) Jewish communal life, manifested in changed functions and emergence of new needs, as well as religious rituals during the pandemic; and (3) perceived relations between the Jewish community and wider society, including relations with state authorities and civil society, attitudes of and towards official media, and the possible impact of COVID-19 on antisemitism. Together, these spheres shed light on how elderly Jews experience their current situation under COVID-19—as individuals and as part of a community.
COVID-19 taught interviewees to reappraise what was important to them. They felt their family relations became stronger under the pandemic, and that their Jewish community was more meaningful than they had thought. They understood that online communication will continue to be present in all three spheres, but concluded that human contact cannot be substituted by technical devices.
