scholarly journals Translating Jewish Poland into Canadian Yiddish: Symcha Petrushka’s Mishnayes

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Margolis

In 1945, with European Jewry in ruins, Polish-born Symcha Petrushka published the first of six volumes of his Yiddish translation and interpretation of the Mishna. Produced in Petrushka’s adopted home in Montreal, the Mishnayes was conceived as a work of popularization to render one of the core texts of the Jewish tradition accessible to the Jewish masses in their common vernacular, and on the eve of World War II Yiddish was the lingua franca of millions of Jews in Europe as well as worldwide. However, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the destruction of the locus of Yiddish civilization and millions of speakers combined with acculturation away from Yiddish in Jewish population centres in North America, Petrushka’s Mishnayes remains a tribute to the vanished world of Polish Jewry.


2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 97-106
Author(s):  
Waldemar Cudny

The Radegast Station Holocaust Monument - Its History, Contemporary Function and Perception in the Eyes of Tourists and Lodz Inhabitants The article presents the problems of the Lodz Ghetto organized by the Germans during World War II and the role of the ghetto railway station - called Radegast Station. The author also describes the contemporary function of the station, paying particular attention to the initiative of the local authorities, which led to building a monument within its premises, commemorating the Holocaust of the Lodz Jewish population. Following that, the author presents the results of a survey conducted in the monument area in 2007, which allowed the local authorities' activity and its indirect influence on the image of Lodz to be assessed.



Author(s):  
Hannah Pollin-Galay

This book reassesses contemporary Holocaust testimony, focusing on the power of language and place to shape personal narrative. Oral histories of Lithuanian Jews serve as the textual base for this exploration. Comparing the remembrances of Holocaust victims who remained in Lithuania with those who resettled in Israel and North America after World War II, the analysis reveals meaningful differences based on where they chose to live out their postwar lives and whether their language of testimony was Yiddish, English, or Hebrew. The differences between their testimonies relate to notions of love, justice, community—and how the Holocaust did violence to these aspects of the self. The argument illuminates the multiple places that the Holocaust can fill in Jewish historical memory. Beyond the particular Jewish case, the book raises fundamental questions about how people draw from their linguistic and physical environments in order to understand their own suffering. The analysis challenges the assumption of a universal vocabulary for describing and healing human pain.



2006 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 17-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
John-Paul Himka

Sixty years after its conclusion, World War II still fills the world's memory. Massive demonstrations in China last winter recalled Japanese atrocities during the war, while just over a month ago the world marked the sixtieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Monuments and museums continue to be erected to commemorate the Holocaust. And films on the war, as the recent success of Downfall demonstrates, continue to attract viewers. Some of the things that happened during World War II seem to us to be unforgettable.



Author(s):  
Łukasz Połomski ◽  

The author presents various sources for researching the genealogy of Jewish families. The basic documents are record books, but also censuses, court and tax documentation. They often complement each other, recreating for us the history of the inhabitants of Galicia. Books of births, deaths and marriages, which have been preserved in many record districts of former Galicia, are particularly important. The specificity of entries in these sources presented in the article allows them to be understood and facilitates the search. It is conditioned by Jewish tradition and religion. Many archives were destroyed during World War II, which makes work difficult for researchers of Jewish genealogy. The author points to documents and websites that can help in researching one’s family’s past, also during the Holocaust.



2008 ◽  
pp. 177-205
Author(s):  
Adam Kopciowski

In the early years following World War II, the Lublin region was one of the most important centres of Jewish life. At the same time, during 1944-1946 it was the scene of anti-Jewish incidents: from anti-Semitic propaganda, accusation of ritual murder, economic boycott, to cases of individual or collective murder. The wave of anti-Jewish that lasted until autumn of 1946 resulted in a lengthy and, no doubt incomplete, list of 118 murdered Jews. Escalating anti-Jewish violence in the immediate post-war years was one of the main factors, albeit not the only one, to affect the demography (mass emigration) and the socio-political condition of the Jewish population in the Lublin region



2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
mayer kirshenblatt ◽  
barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.



Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.



2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-161
Author(s):  
Christian Klösch

In March 1938 the National Socialists seized power in Austria. One of their first measures against the Jewish population was to confiscate their vehicles. In Vienna alone, a fifth of all cars were stolen from their legal owners, the greatest auto theft in Austrian history. Many benefited from the confiscations: the local population, the Nazi Party, the state and the army. Car confiscation was the first step to the ban on mobility for Jews in the German Reich. Some vehicles that survived World War II were given back to the families of the original owners. The research uses a new online database on Nazi vehicle seizures.



2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Duindam

Why do we attach so much value to sites of Holocaust memory, if all we ever encounter are fragments of a past that can never be fully comprehended? David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, fell into disrepair after World War II before it became the first Holocaust memorial museum of the Netherlands. Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory combines a detailed historical study of the postwar period of this site with a critical analysis of its contemporary presentation by placing it within international debates concerning memory, emotionally fraught heritage and museum studies. A case is made for the continued importance of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and other comparable sites, arguing that these will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the memory of the Holocaust on a personal and affective level.



2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-261
Author(s):  
Shaul Katzir

Historians, philosophers, and physicists portray the 1920s and 1930s as a period of major theoretical breakthrough in physics, quantum mechanics, which led to the expansion of physics into the core of the atom and the growth and strengthening of the discipline. These important developments in scientific inquiry into the micro-world and light have turned historical attention away from other significant historical processes and from other equally important causes for the expansion of physics. World War II, on the other hand, is often seen as the watershed moment when physics achieved new levels of social and technical engagement at a truly industrial scale. Historians have shown that military interests and government funding have shaped physics to unprecedented degree, and according to some, to the extent of discontinuity with earlier practices of research (Forman 1987; Kevles 1990; Kaiser 2002). In this vein, Stuart Leslie wrote, “Nothing in the prewar experience fully prepared academic scientists and their institutions for the scale and scope of a wartime mobilization that would transform the university, industry, and the federal government and their mutual interrelationships” (Leslie 1993, 6). While one can never befullyready for novelties, the contributors to this issue show that developments in interwar physics did prepare participants for their cold war interactions with industry and government.



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