REMAKING OF JEWISH SOCIALITY IN CONTEMPORARY POLAND: HAUNTING LEGACIES, GLOBAL CONNECTIONS. A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in the Faculty of Humanities. 2013 JAN LORENZ SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES List of contents Abstract 3 Declaration 4 Copyright statement 4 Acknowledgements 5 PART I Chapter 1 Introduction 7 Chapter 2 Framing the research. Methodology and visual media 38 Chapter 3 Film and ethnography 54 PART II Chapter 4 The haunting 73 Chapter 5 Belonging 111 Chapter 6 Gmina 151 Chapter 7 Interzone 172 Chapter 8 Becoming 203 Chapter 9 Conclusions 222 Bibliography 230 Word count: 87 797 2 Abstract The University of Manchester Jan Lorenz PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media “Remaking Jewish sociality in contemporary Poland: haunting legacies, global connections.” 2013 The Holocaust and post-war anti-Semitism-propelled migration changed the face of Poland, a country that for centuries has been the heartland of the Jewish diaspora. Remnants of the Polish Jewry that did not emigrate, regardless of whether they considered themselves Poles, Poles of Jewish descent or Polish Jews, often felt fearful about speaking of their ancestry, let alone acting upon it. Jewish organizations and social life did not disappear, but religious congregations in particular gradually diminished in number and activity. Post-socialist Poland has become an arena of profound transformation of Jewish communal life, fostered by stakeholders with distinct agendas and resources: empowered and politically emancipated Jewish Religious Communities, now-marginalized secular organizations of the communist era, a nascent generation of Polish Jewish activists and volunteers, and transnational Jewish non-governmental organizations. My thesis explores Polish Jewish communal life and experiences of being and becoming Jewish. It is a study after the ‘revival’, but revealing its looming presence in unsolved predicaments over a Jewish future, global structural dependencies, and temporal dynamics of programs of socialization. I argue that the post-socialist reality not only witnessed the coming of a new Polish Jewish generation, but also the emergence of a new sociality, shaped in two decades of continuous friction between ontologies, agendas and hopes originating in different locations within, and on different scales of, the Polish Jewish contemporaneity. This new Polish Jewish reality invites us to rethink the impact of globalization on the Jewish diaspora in Eastern Europe, and also offers a new perspective on the role of global NGOs in the contemporary world. 3 Declaration I declare that no portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning. Copyright Statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=487 ), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses 4 Acknowledgements I wish to thank the affiliates of the Wrocław branch of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland and the Wrocław Jewish Club Sof haDerech, as well as numerous people involved in Polish Jewish social life who allowed me to become part of their lives for more than a year, shared with me their stories and provided me with research materials, advice and generous support. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the late chairman of the Wrocław Jewish congregation, Mr Józef Kożuch, as well as other leaders of Jewish organizations in Poland and abroad, including Baruch and Dorota Ciesielsy of the Ronald Lauder Foundation in Poland, Michael Freund of the Shavei Israel and Kamila Sokołowska of the Polish division of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. I am most grateful to Rabbi Yitzchak Rapoport, who at the time of my research was the Rabbi of Wrocław and Silesia, and to Rabbi Boas Pash who during my fieldwork was the Rabbi of Kraków. I am equally grateful to the Shavei Israel and its chairman, Michael Freund, for generously allowing me to participate in the summer seminar in Israel for the purpose of my study. This thesis would have never been possible without the support of my academic supervisors, Prof. Sharon Macdonald and Dr Angela Torresan and I owe them an immense debt of gratitude. I wish to thank the lecturers and fellow students I met during five years at the Social Anthropology department of the University of Manchester and the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology – some of whom are no longer here. Intellectual life at the department and the conversations I had shaped not only my research, but also me as a person and a scholar. My thanks go in particular to Prof. Jeanette Edwards, Prof. Nina Glick Schiller, Prof. Paul Henley, Prof. Richard Werbner, Dr Jonathan Mair and Dr Madeleine Reeves for their support and advice. Very special words of gratitude go to Dr Ian Fairweather and Dr Petra Tjitske Kalshoven with whom I worked as a teaching assistant for several years and to my undergraduate students for making my time at the university so personally and professionally rewarding. I also wish to thank Dr Ewa Ochman from the department of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Manchester for her advice and encouragement in critical reflection on the entanglements of Polish Jewish history. Dr Itsushi Kawase from the 5 National Museum of Ethnology in Japan shared with me not only his interest in visual anthropology, but also his friendship during his stay in Manchester, for which I thank him. I wish to express my gratitude to the Polish scholars who supported me at earlier stages of my academic career, in particular Prof. Michał Buchowski and Prof. Aleksander Posern-Zieliński from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and Prof. Beata Sierocka from the University of Lower Silesia. Without their mentorship I would have never made it this far. Amongst my fellow postgraduate students across the world there were several whom I wish to thank in particular for their friendship, comments and support: Piotr Goldstein, María E. González, Alyssa Grossman, Laura Jordan, Jonathan Kurzwelly and Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski. A very special thanks goes to Hannah Wadle, not least for our discussions about contemporary Poland. I also wish to thank my proof- reader, Julia Podziewska, for her utmost dedication. Last but not least I would like to thank Henrietta and Nadia Lorenz, Prof. Jerzy Rozenblit, Zvi and Dvora Kwartler and the rest of my family for their love, patience and unwavering support at every stage of my work. No words can express my appreciation and gratitude to Matylda Chmielewska, for all she has given me in the last few years. This doctoral thesis is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Dr Julian Rozenblit. 6 Chapter 1 Introduction That is why we send our students home each Friday with freshly baked challahs. With the blessings our teachers have taught them, they cross the vast gray cities of Warsaw and Minsk, the cobbled alleys of Prague and Vienna, the great boulevards of Budapest and Bucharest. In hundreds of homes that have not heard such prayers for generations, Judaism is returning over a loaf of bread, a pair of candles, a child’s voice. A fragment of Ronald S. Lauder Foundation mission statement (2013) A meeting On a cold November morning in 2009 we gathered in front of a glass and plastic Helios multiplex cinema in the centre of still sleepy Wrocław, a large city in South-West Poland. The spot was not far from the White Stork Synagogue and a compound building surrounding it, where the Jewish Club Sof haDerech used to hold its meetings and the local Jewish congregation had its offices and rabbi’s quarters. As I clumsily clambered out of a taxi, and waved my hand, I could not help but notice a few faces, immediately apparent in a collectivity where everyone knows or at least recognizes each other. In a few hours we were going to arrive at the ‘Hotel Boss’, ‘a large conference-training centre’ located on the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland’s capital. 7 There we would take part in a massive educational conference Limud Keszet 2009, a local franchise of a cyclical UK Jewish event that had gone international.