Since the Holocaust, traces of memory are virtually all that remain
in Poland today after more than eight hundred years of Jewish life
there. This remarkable album, published on behalf of the Galicia
Jewish Museum in Krakow, offers a sensitive way of looking at that
past. Based entirely on arresting, present-day colour photographs
of Polish Galicia, it shows how much of that past can still be seen
today if one knows how to look and how to interpret what one sees.
The traces of the Jewish past in Polish Galicia can be approached
from many angles. Jewish life in Poland was in ruins after the
Holocaust, and so too were most of its synagogues and cemeteries.
Much evidence of ruin remains, but, astonishingly, there are also
traces that bear witness to the great Jewish civilization that once
flourished there-synagogues and cemeteries of astounding beauty in
villages and small towns as well as in the larger cities. One can
also see the exact locations where the Germans murdered the Jews of
Galicia in the Holocaust: not only in the infamous death camps and
ghettos, but also in fields, in forests, and in rivers. The Germans
tried to destroy even the memory of the Jews in Poland, and to a
very great extent they succeeded; then came forty years of
communism, including the antisemitic campaign of 1968. But now that
Poland is once again part of a multicultural Europe, the great
Jewish civilization that once flourished on Polish lands is
increasingly being memorialized, by local Poles as well as by
foreign Jews. Synagogues and cemeteries are being renovated,
monuments are being erected, museums are being set up, pilgrimages
are taking place, festivals of Jewish culture are being organized,
books about Jews are being published, and there are once again
rabbis and kosher food. So the traces of memory include how the
past is being remembered in Poland today, and the people doing the
remembering. Given all these perspectives, the contact with
contemporary realities involves a complex emotional journey: grief
at a civilization in ruins; pride in its spiritual and cultural
achievements; anger at its destruction; nostalgia for a past that
is gone; hope for the future. Considering each element in turn and
offering cultural insights and information to support each of these
responses, the combination of photos and text in this book not only
informs but also suggests both how to make sense of the past and
how to discover its relevance for the present. The seventy-four
photographs are all fully captioned, with additional detailed
background notes to explain and contextualize them. The idea is to
help people understand the Jewish civilization of Polish Galicia in
its local context on the basis of what can still be seen there
today. People who have family connections with Polish Galicia will
find this an invaluable sourcebook on their own heritage, but its
innovative approach to understanding the past will appeal to anyone
concerned with questions of history, memory, and identity, and how
photography can make the past accessible. Published for the Galicia
Jewish Museum, Krakow, by the Littman Library of Jewish
Civilization and Indiana University Press
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