The Courts

2021 ◽  
pp. 147-154
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Person
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
Jewish Society

This chapter explores the discussion of justice and revenge that began in the Warsaw Ghetto and continued in the chaos of the postwar reconstruction of Jewish life both in Poland and abroad. It highlights how Jewish newspapers, political parties, and social organizations were flooded with denunciations from those who considered themselves to be the victims of policemen. It also refers to the Honor Court of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland that “cleansed” the Jewish society in 1946 of people who cooperated with the Nazi authorities during the occupation, unmasking traitors of the Jewish people. The chapter looks at cases examined by the Honor Court, which largely concerned Jewish policemen from Warsaw, particularly lawyers who had returned to legal practice. It points out how the Honor Court did not consider the responsibility of the Jewish Order Service as an institution, but instead, each policeman was tried individually.

Conclusion

2001 ◽  
pp. 341-348
Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Old World ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
The Past ◽  
Normal Life ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Historical Awareness

This concluding chapter looks at Zionism and its relationship with Haskalah. Maskilic concepts, principles, and outlooks continued to influence the nationalist and Zionist stream in eastern Europe, and the maskilic sense of the past resonated in the Zionist historical awareness. This was particularly true in regard to the Zionists' critical attitude towards Jewish life in the Diaspora. There was also a similarity between the Haskalah and Zionism in their models of the role played by the past: both movements made selective use of the past in order to build their identity, find legitimization, and educate Jewish society. However, while Zionism attempted to construct a new national Judaism, the Haskalah hoped to use the past to build a new, regenerated, and transformed Jewish society and culture, free of all its old flaws and fit for normal life in the modern age. In this sense, maskilic history — the fruit of the maskilim's collective sense of the past over a century — did indeed serve the transformative ideology of the Haskalah of bringing the Jewish people out of the old world into the new.

Conclusion

2012 ◽  
pp. 360-370
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Desire To Change

This concluding chapter examines changes to the role of yeshiva in Jewish society as well as several developments to yeshiva history after the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the changes and conflicts that had struck the Jewish world had affected the yeshiva too. Contemporary discussion of the yeshiva was frequently in the context of the Haskalah and noted its power to effect change. There is no clear answer as to what it was that persuaded young people to abandon traditional Jewish life, but the wholesale attribution of this to the Haskalah is not self-evident. It seems much more likely that the threat to traditional ways came from indifference to Jewish identity rather than from any desire to change that identity. Indifference is naturally hard to identify, and it was easier for conservatives to battle against a concrete enemy, equally eager to do battle, than to engage with an attitude that was so contemptuous of traditional approaches that it did not even bother to argue with them.

Strategy and Ruse in the Haskalah of Mendel Lefin of Satanow

2001 ◽  
pp. 86-102
Author(s):  
Nancy Sinkoff
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
East European ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
European Jewish

This chapter focuses on Menahem Mendel Lefin of Satanow, a fascinating maskil, who was a link between the German and the east European Haskalah. Because he often wrote in Yiddish, he has usually been seen as a populist who advanced the maskilim's criticism of east European Jewish life and culture. He attacked the intoxication with mysticism, became involved in the literary battle against hasidism, and proposed the maskilim as leaders who could heal the ills of Jewish society. In contrast to the view of Lefin as a populist, which was rooted in earlier scholarship's nationalist bias, the chapter notes his sophisticated use of literary strategies aimed at different audiences according to the language of the text. It illustrates these strategies in an analysis of a text written for his fellow Jews; an adaptation and translation of a travel story in the New World meant as a tool of social criticism and anti-hasidic polemics; and also in a text written for a wider audience, an anonymous French memorandum that Lefin submitted to the Polish Sejm in 1791.

Dancing with Death and Salvaging Jewish Culture inAusteriaandThe Dybbuk

Slavic Review ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 761-781 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Safran
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Film Festivals ◽  
The West ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Humanitarian Values ◽  
Polish Government

Jerzy Kawalerowicz told reporters that he made his 1982 film,Austeria(The inn) to commemorate the Polish-Jewish people and culture destroyed in the Holocaust. This non-Jewish Polish director, known best in the west for hisMother Joanna of the Angels(a depiction of death and possession at a medieval French convent), grew up among Jews in the eastern part of Poland. He had been struck by the Polish-Jewish author Julian Stryjkowski's 1966 novella,Austeria,a haunting depiction of Jewish life in Galicia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kawalerowicz—with Stryjkowski—immediately decided to turn the book into a movie. After the Six-Day War in 1967 sparked an “anti-Zionist campaign” in Poland, however, the Polish government found the Jewish topic of their screenplay “politically unacceptable.” In 1981, the film was granted permission and funding. It was completed in 1982, following the crackdown on Solidarity and the imposition of martial law. The authorities allowed its distribution, having determined that it displayed “humanitarian values” and that it did not represent a political threat. In the capacity of a quasiofficial expression of Polish regret at the passing of the Jews, and perhaps as a demonstration of liberalism aimed at the western critics of the new regime,Austeriawas widely promoted and exported to film festivals abroad.

Zionism and the Biology of the Jews

1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 587-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael Falk
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Gene Pool ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Selective Pressures ◽  
The Past ◽  
Life Styles ◽  
Biological Nature

The ArgumentWhereas eugenics aspired to redeem the human species by forcing it to face the realities of its biological nature, Zionism aspired to redeem the Jewish people by forcing it to face the realities of its biological existence. The Zionists claimed that Jews maintained their ancient distinct “racial” identity, and that their regrouping as a nation in their homeland would have profound eugenic consequences, primarily halting the degeneration they fell prey to because of the conditions imposed on them in the past. Some Zionists believed in a Lamarckian driven eugenics that expected the “normalization” of Jewish life styles to change their constitution. Others believed that transforming conditions would shift selective pressures exerted on the Jewish gene pool.

Joint Commission for Korea

1948 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-153
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Joint Commission ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
Korean Government ◽  
Local Organizations ◽  
Basic Issue ◽  
The Joint Commission

Differences between the American and Russian delegations on consultations with Korean political parties arose in the 37th meeting of the Joint Commission on July 2, 1947, and continued unresolved. The basic issue involved in these disputes concerned the composition of the list of parties and organizations to be invited for initial consultation on the formation of a provisional Korean Government. The USSR remained firm in its refusal to allow those parties and organizations falling within the following categories to be included: 1) those not classified by them as social organizations, 2) district and other local organizations, and 3) those which the USSR contended did not intend to support the Moscow decisions, particularly members of the Anti-Trusteeship Committee and similar organizations.

The Sources and Nature of Jewish Law and its Application in the State of Israel, Part III

1968 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 416-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Menachem Elon
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Mental Attitude ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
The Common ◽  
National Significance ◽  
State Of Israel

The rise of Zionism, with its call for renewed national political life and return to the national homeland, inevitably evoked a material change in the mental attitude of the Jewish people towards Jewish Law, a law possessing, as I have already said, not merely religious value but also manifest national significance. Thus a movement was mustered of Jewish lawyers and scholars and others from all ranks of society, which regarded the return of Jewish society to Jewish Law a national restoration, parallel with the restoration of the Jewish homeland and the revival of the Hebrew language.This movement for a restoration of Jewish Law signals also a new trend in its study. From modest beginnings in the 17th century, scientific research into Jewish Law had been occupied with a variety of problems, whether of the parallelism between the Jewish legal system and other systems, the moral and philosophical theories embodied in its institutions and of its vast many-sided historical and literary expression. The common feature in all this research had been that it was pursued for its own sake, for theoretical and not for practical purposes.

Introduction

2001 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Life ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Modern Era

This chapter provides an overview of the Jewish Haskalah of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Jewish Haskalah is the first modern ideology in Jewish history, which appeared at the threshold of the modern era and was promulgated by the maskilim — the first Jews who were conscious of being modern, and who concluded that the modern age called for a comprehensive programme of change in both the cultural and the practical life of Jewish society. For years, historians of the Haskalah movement have almost completely ignored the attitude of the maskilim to history. However, the attraction felt by many maskilim to the biblical past of the Jewish people has not been overlooked by scholars. Nevertheless, new surveys of the history of Jewish historical writing and thought continue to minimize the contribution of the maskilim to this field, and repeat the claim that the Haskalah had but a vague sense of the importance of historical knowledge. This book explores a range of sources from the 100-year period of the Haskalah (1782–1881), which show not only that the maskilim displayed a great interest in history, but also that their attitude to the past was significant both for the Haskalah's ideology and for the development of Jewish historical consciousness.

Introduction

2010 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Family Formation ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Smooth Transition ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
European Jewish

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the author's collection of articles which all deal with aspects of east European Jewish life in the modern period. This was a time of transition from a society in which tradition was a key force to one in which models of the past no longer significantly determined behaviour and thought. This shift took place rapidly and under conditions that were not obviously conducive to a quick and smooth transition, and the consequences are still very evident today. The chapter explains thar divided into three sections, the book studies the workings of Jewish communities, particularly east European Jewish society. The first section deals with family formation, family reformation, and family maintenance. The second section deals with education. Finally, the last section deals with the rabbinate — not with specific rabbis but with the institution.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document