Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis Frontispiece Bernardo Belotto, known as Canaletto, Bridgettine Church and the Arsenal, 1775. Detail presenting Jews standing in front of a small manor house on the corner of Długa and Bielańska streets, Royal Castle in Warsaw ( fot. Andrzej Ring). IJS STUDIES IN JUDAICA Conference Proceedings of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London Series Editors Mark Geller François Guesnet Ada Rapoport-Albert VOLUME 15 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ijs Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky Edited by Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet LEIDEN | BOSTON Warsaw. the Jewish metropolis : essays in honor of the 75th birthday of professor Antony Polonsky / edited by Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet. pages cm. — (IJS studies in Judaica ; volume 15) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29180-5 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-29181-2 (e-book) 1. Jews—Poland— Warsaw—History. 2. Jews—Poland—Warsaw—Social conditions—History. 3. Jews—Poland— Warsaw—Economic conditions—History 4. Jews—Poland—Warsaw—Intellectual life. 5. Warsaw (Poland)—Ethnic relations. I. Dynner, Glenn, 1969- editor. II. Guesnet, François, editor. III. Polonsky, Antony, honoree. IV. Title: Jewish metropolis. DS134.64.W36 2015 305.892’4043841—dc23 2015005127 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1570-1581 isbn 978-90-04-29180-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29181-2 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Acknowledgements viii Notes on the Contributors ix List of Illustrations and Maps xiv Introduction 1 PART 1 The Rise of the Metropolis 1 Illegal Immigrants: The Jews of Warsaw, 1527–1792 19 Hanna Węgrzynek 2 Merchants, Army Suppliers, Bankers: Transnational Connections and the Rise of Warsaw’s Jewish Mercantile Elite (1770–1820) 42 Cornelia Aust 3 In Warsaw and Beyond: The Contribution of Hayim Zelig Slonimski to Jewish Modernization 70 Ela Bauer 4 The Garment of Torah: Clothing Decrees and the Warsaw Career of the First Gerer Rebbe 91 Glenn Dynner 5 From Community to Metropolis: The Jews of Warsaw, 1850–1880 128 François Guesnet 6 An Unhappy Community and an Even Unhappier Rabbi 154 Shaul Stampfer 7 Distributing Knowledge: Warsaw as a Center of Jewish Publishing, 1850–1914 180 Nathan Cohen vi contents 8 In Kotik’s Corner: Urban Culture, Bourgeois Politics and the Struggle for Jewish Civility in Turn of the Century Eastern Europe 207 Scott Ury 9 Hope and Fear: Y.L. Peretz and the Dialectics of Diaspora Nationalism, 1905–12 227 Michael C. Steinlauf 10 “Di Haynt-mishpokhe”: Study for a Group Picture 252 Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov 11 A Warsaw Story: Polish-Jewish Relations during the First World War 271 Robert Blobaum 12 The Capital of “Yiddishland”? 298 Kalman Weiser 13 The Kultur-Lige in Warsaw: A Stopover in the Yiddishists’ Journey between Kiev and Paris 323 Gennady Estraikh 14 Enduring Prestige, Eroded Authority: The Warsaw Rabbinate in the Interwar Period 347 Gershon Bacon 15 From Galicia to Warsaw: Interwar Historians of Polish Jewry 370 Natalia Aleksiun 16 Negotiating Jewish Nationalism in Interwar Warsaw 390 Kenneth B. Moss PART 2 Destruction of the Metropolis and Its Aftermath 17 The Polish Underground Press and the Jews: The Holocaust in the Pages of the Home Army’s Biuletyn Informacyjny, 1940–1943 437 Joshua D. Zimmerman contents vii 18 “The Work of My Hands is Drowning in the Sea, and You Would Offer Me Song?!”: Orthodox Behaviour and Leadership in Warsaw during the Holocaust 467 Havi Dreifuss 19 The Warsaw Ghetto in the Writings of Rachel Auerbach 496 Samuel Kassow 20 Stories of Rescue Activities in the Letters of Jewish Survivors about Christian Polish Rescuers, 1944–1949 515 Joanna B. Michlic 21 The Politics of Retribution in Postwar Warsaw: In the Honor Court of the Central Committee of Polish Jews 539 Gabriel N. Finder 22 The End of a Jewish Metropolis? The Ambivalence of Reconstruction in the Aftermath of the Holocaust 562 David Engel 23 The Reconstruction of Jewish Life in Warsaw after the Holocaust: A Case Study of a Building and Its Residents 570 Karen Auerbach 24 In Search of Meaning after Marxism: The Komandosi, March 1968, and the Ideas that Followed 590 Marci Shore 25 “Context is Everything.” Reflections on Studying with Antony Polonsky 613 Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern Name Index 617 Acknowledgements The current volume is an outgrowth of a conference held at University College London on June 22–25, 2010, at the Institute of Jewish Studies at University College, London. We would like to thank the initial sponsors and support- ers of that conference, including the Embassy of the Republic of Poland; Dr. Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, President of the City of Warsaw; The American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies, Cambridge, MA; Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris; The Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Warsaw; The Department of Culture, City of Warsaw; The Polish Cultural Institute, London; The Littauer Foundation, New York; The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization; The Institute for Polish Jewish Studies, Oxford; The Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw; and The Polin Museum for the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. The conference would scarcely have been possible without their support. We also would like to acknowledge the diligence of the staff at the UCL Institute of Jewish Studies, particularly Sara Ben-Isaac. We are grateful to all speakers, chairs and commentators at the conference, notably to Professor Norman Davies for his opening keynote, and to all contributors to the present volume. In addition, we thank Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz for her careful translation of Havi Dreifuss’ article, Jim Dingley for his contribution to copy-editing this vol- ume, and Anastasiya Novatorskaya who, with the support of the office of the Dean of Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, compiled the Name Index. We are grateful to the staff at Brill Academic Publishers for their exemplary support in putting together this large volume—Jennifer Pavelko assisted us at the begin- ning, with Katelyn Chin, Meghan Connolly and Paige Sammartino taking good care to complete the task. Finally, we would like to thank Professor Antony Polonsky, who has inspired this volume with his decades-long devotion to the field of Polish Jewish Studies. It is to him that we dedicate this volume. Notes on the Contributors Karen Auerbach is Assistant Professor and Stuart E. Eizenstat Fellow at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She is author of The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw after the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2013). Natalia Aleksiun is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History, Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies; and Assistant Professor, Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences. She is author of Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944–1950 (in Polish; Warsaw, 2002), and co-editor of Polin 20, devoted to the memory of the Holocaust. Cornelia Aust is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Leibniz-Institute for European History in Mainz. She is author of “Between Amsterdam and Warsaw. Commercial Networks of the Ashkenazic Mercantile Elite in Central Europe,” Jewish History 27.1 (2013): 41–71. Gershon Bacon is an associate professor in the Jewish History Department at Bar-Ilan University, where he holds the Marcell and Maria Roth Chair in the History and Culture of Polish Jewry. He is the author of, among other works, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland, 1916–1939 (Jerusalem, 1996; revised and expanded Hebrew version, 2005), and the forthcoming The Jews of Modern Poland, 1772–2000, to be published by the University of California Press. Ela Bauer teaches at Kibbutzim College in Tel Aviv. She is author of Between Poles and Jews: The Development of Nahum Sokolow’s Political Thought (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2005); and “The Ideological Roots of the Polish Jewish Intelligentsia.” Robert Blobaum is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of History at West Virginia University. He is editor of Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), and author of Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904– 1907 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Feliks Dzierżyński and the x notes on the contributors SDKPiL: A Study in the Origins of Polish Communism (Boulder and New York: East European Monographs and Columbia University Press, 1984). Nathan Cohen is Associate Professor of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar Ilan University. He is author of Sefer, Sofer v’iton: merkaz ha-tarbut ha-yehudit b’varsha, 1918– 1942 (Jerusalem Magnes Press, 2003). Havi Dreifuss is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University, and director of the Center for the Research of the Holocaust in Poland at the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research. She is author of We Polish Jews? The Relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust—The Jewish Perspective (in Hebrew; Yad Vashem, 2010); and Changing Perspectives on Polish-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust (Yad Vashem, 2012).