Abstract: The article deals with the complexities of Judaism’s revival in Ukraine, where Jews have enriched the Jewish civilization with Hasidism, gifted the Jewish world with a whole plethora of outstanding Jewish figures and a remarkable cultural heritage both tangible and intangible, and where their religion underwent a monstrous destruction during the Holocaust and the Soviet anti-religious persecutions. Today's Judaism in Ukraine is a complex mixture of at least six decisive components. That is, (i) more than 20 centuries of the Judaism’s history in Ukrainian lands; (ii) the "great religious comeback," which unfolded in the world in the late 1970s; (iii) the religious revival in the space which was subject to a quasi-theistic experiment; (iv) the “upheaval of identities” within the new independent countries; (v) the religious-conservative rise among the World Jewry, and (vi) amazing activity of Israeli and the US-based Jewish religious centers, primarily of Chabad-Lubavitch. Despite the extremely intensive emigration of Jews from Ukraine, which peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Judaism has a considerable demographic base in Ukraine. It includes an “ethnic core,” an enlarged Jewish population, and a community of non-Jews seeking to immerse themselves into the Jewish civilization.
Abstract: The Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) of Birobidzhan in Siberia is still alive. The once famous “Siberian Zion”, at the confluence of the Bira and Bidzhan rivers, a stone’s throw away from China and a day from the Pacific Ocean, 9,000 km and six days by train from Moscow, is still a geographical reality. The political class of the Soviet Union decided to create a territory the size of Belgium for a settlement for Jews, choosing a region on the border between China and the Soviet Union. It believed that Soviet Jews needed, like other national minorities, a homeland with a territory. The Soviet regime thus opted to establish an enclave that would become the JAR in 1934. We should note that the creation of the JAR was the first historically fulfilled case of building an officially recognised Jewish national territory since antiquity and well before Israel. Nevertheless, many historians declared this experiment a failure and the history of the Region only tragic. It is interesting to note, however, that the survival of the JAR in post-Soviet Russia has been not only a historical curiosity, a legacy of Soviet national policy, but today – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – it represents a very interesting case study. It is also a topic useful for the analysis and understanding of inter-ethnic relations, cooperation, and coexistence and it is a unique case of geographic resettlement that produced a special case of “local patriotism”, as an example also for different ethnic groups living in the JAR, based on Jewish and Yiddish roots.
Abstract: This chapter highlights how the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union initiated a new period in the history of the Jews in the area. Poland was now a fully sovereign country, and Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova also became independent states. Post-imperial Russia faced the task of creating a new form of national identity. This was to prove more difficult than in other post-imperial states since, unlike Britain and France, the tsarist empire and its successor, the Soviet Union, had not so much been the ruler of a colonial empire as an empire itself. All of these countries now embarked, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, on the difficult task of creating liberal democratic states with market economies. For the Jews of the area, the new political situation allowed both the creation and development of Jewish institutions and the fostering of Jewish cultural life in much freer conditions, but also facilitated emigration to Israel, North America, and western Europe on a much larger scale.
Abstract: This chapter describes on the Kraków Festival of Jewish Culture, founded in 1988 by Jewish intellectuals Janusz Makuch and Krzysztof Gierat. The public embrace of Jewish culture in Poland had its roots in the anti-communist dissident movements of the 1960s and 1970s and developed steadily after the success of Solidarność in 1980 opened up new cultural and intellectual freedoms that were only partially stifled by the imposition of martial law in 1981. The pervasiveness of underground networks forced some relaxation of official strictures, too. Many taboos remained in place, but from the early 1980s on, with official sanction that at times verged on co-option, books on Jewish topics were published, research on Jewish subjects was carried out, and exhibitions, concerts, and performances on Jewish themes were held with increasing frequency. The Kraków festival was a milestone in this process and throughout the 1990s served as an important, continuing catalyst, changing and developing as overall conditions in post-communist Poland evolved.
Abstract: This response puts Tzuberi's analysis into a broader comparative context. First, the post-1990 attempt to create Jews in the image of the liberal-secular German nation-state met considerable resistance by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. In addition, the majority of post-Soviet Jews showed no interest in liberal Jewish theology or the fantasy of reviving the German-Jewish past. Second, the milieu of Judaizing Germans (core architects of German-Jewish revivalism) shows a strong resemblance to other attempts of escaping colonial whiteness, including patterns of what has been called »ethnic fraud.« Third, in comparison to other cases of minority repatriation, the German practice of expiatory demographic engineering was relatively cost-intensive, but contributed considerably to the country's »nation re-branding« after reunification. Fourth, the German politics of reforestation vis-à-vis its Jewish community points to the rise of a post-migratory »gardening state,« heavily invested in regulating its diverse population through a policy mix of migration, education and surveillance.
Abstract: The Shoah belongs to one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of modern European history. Scholars have used the Holocaust methodology to study other genocides, or forms of ethnic or political violence. Nevertheless, our understanding of the extermination of the European Jewry is limited, fragmented, and changes constantly due to new investigation methods, research interests, and public debates. The first studies on the Holocaust were conducted already during the Shoah but because of different reasons historians in some countries such as Germany and Ukraine did not pay much attention to them and concentrated rather on the documents left by the perpetrators and their fate during the war. While in Poland the research on the Holocaust never stopped, even if it was subjected to various political and ideological limitations, and the Shoah has been publicly debated since the middle of the 1980s, this was not the case in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Nevertheless, in the last two decades, the importance of the Holocaust was discovered in these countries as well and it is currently conceptualized in the framework of regional, national, and European history.
Abstract: After the decades of discrimination against organized Jewish life in the Soviet Union, the present period shows creation and rapid development of Jewish national organizations and institutional infrastructure of Jewish communities in most of the post-Soviet states, especially in Russia and Ukraine. Not a few of these organizations were rooted in history of Jewish life in the USSR after World War II, including the experience of the creation and existence of legal (state-sponsored), illegal (underground national and human rights organizations), and quasi-legal (religious communities) Jewish social institutions in a hostile social and political environment. The Jewish organizations, including local/sectarian institutions, municipal/regional federations, as well as nationwide «umbrella» structures, that were established in the USSR successor states, had to meet the challenge of new conditions of Jewish life in post-communist countries which included a demand for services normally provided by a Jewish community (education, welfare, synagogues, cultural activities, etc.) and a need for an adequate institutional framework which reflected local Jewish identity (whether ethnic nationalism or cultural/religious affiliation)...
Abstract: While the liberation of Europe in 1945 did not result in the end of antisemitism, Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness acquired new value in the aftermath of the Shoah. In democratic Europe, the Jew became at the very least the “enemy that we now must love”. Like antisemitism, European philosemitic discourse mutated over time. To counteract the image of the Jewish enemy, secular and Christian philosemites imagined various types of loveable “good Jews”. This newfound sympathy was not devoid of ambiguities. Philosemitism, broadly conceived as positive discourse on Jews, can indeed easily recycle antisemitic themes, recreate Jewish otherness, or strategically compensate for Holocaust guilt. However, while the Israeli or cosmopolitan Jew continues to fuel antisemitic paranoia, post-Holocaust ‘philosemitism’ has redefined the relationship between contemporary Europe and its Jews.
Abstract: A mentally healthy human being can go insane if suddenly diagnosed with leprosy. Eugen Ionescu finds out that even the “Ionescu” name, an indisputable Romanian father, and the fact of being born Christian can do nothing, nothing, nothing to cover the curse of having Jewish blood in his veins. With resignation and sometimes with I don't know what sad and discouraged pride, we got used to this dear leprosy a long time ago.
With these words, the Romanian–Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian expresses within his private diary some of the darkest moments of a World War II “transfigured” Romania, populated as they are by the gothic characters of legionaries, Nazis, and antisemitism. His death soon followed in 1945, when Romania was at the threshold of fascism and communism. However, with the discovery and the subsequent publishing of Sebastian's diary in 1996, and following 50 years of communist mystification of the Jewish Holocaust, the entire chaotic war atmosphere with the fascist affections of the Romanian intellectual elite was once again brought to light with all the flavor and scent of the dark past. In this entry from Sebastian's diary he speaks of his friend, Eugen Ionescu who, born of a French-related mother and a Romanian father, was living in Bucharest at that time. He would later become known to the world as Eugène Ionesco, the famous French playwright and author of the well-known plays The Bald Soprano and The Rhinoceros. The above quote from Sebastian's journal, predating the international fame of Ionesco, but already marking the end of Sebastian's career under fascism, remains a traumatizing testimony of the Jewish Kafkian torment as “guilt,” a deeply claustrophobic identity that many Eastern European Jewish intellectuals have learned to internalize. Beyond this symbolism, the publishing of Sebastian's diary in Romania unintentionally challenged an existent post-communist tendency of legitimizing inter-war fascist personalities within the framework of a general lack of knowledge about the Jewish Holocaust in both the communist and post-communist periods.
Abstract: Kniha sa zaoberá židovskou komunitou v období po novembri 1989. Úvodné časti (Úvod, Výskum, Literatúra) majú informatívny charakter. Ťažisko knihy tvoria tri kapitoly. Prvá z nich, nazvaná Komunita, sumarizuje vznik Ústredného zväzu Židovských náboženských obcí a jeho vzťahy s náboženskými obcami. Priestor dostala aj charakteristika základných pojomov, súčasné aktivity a dve dôležité inštitúcie židovskej komunity: Dokumentačné stredisko holokaustu a Židovské komunitné múzeum, ktoré pôsobí v priestoroch bratislavskej synagógy.
Druhá kapitola si všíma dva historické sviatky (Pesach a Chanuka), ktoré porovnáva s prejavmi pripomienok holokaustu. Autor analyzuje spoločné a rozdielne znaky, premeny v čase, ale hlavne význam, aký majú tieto príležitosti pre súčasníkov.
V kapitole Symboly autor analyzuje a prepája zdanlivo nesúvisiace fenomény, ako sú synagóga, kaviareň, židovský humor či memoriál Chatama Sofera.
Záver monografie ukazuje, že pre zložité súčasné procesy sú charakteristické tri zdanlivo jednoduché pojmy: zjednodušovanie, individualizácia a najmä selektívny prístup k tradičným religióznym a sviatočným javom. V praxi to znamená prechod od kolektívnej realizácie aktivít k individuálnym prejavom, od verejného k súkromnému a v konečnom dôsledku od komplexného k selektívnemu. Predovšetkým faktor selektívnosti sa javí ako určujúci pri analýze súčasného stavu a úvahách o možných trendoch budúcnosti.
Abstract: Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled—ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated—throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Jelena Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.
Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"—insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.
