Sovietization on the Jewish Street: Polish Jewish Responses to the New Order in 1939
Eliyana Adler
Pennsylvania State UniversityApril 3, 2017 / 4.00 pm
Center for Urban History, Lviv
This presentation examined the ways in which Soviet policies were introduced in the Polish territories acquired in 1939, as well as how Polish Jews responded to their changed circumstances. The research is based primarily on memoirs and testimonies produced by refugees who fled their homes under German occupation to the cities in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. It is part of a larger project about Polish Jews who survived World War II in the unoccupied regions of the USSR. For today the focus will be on Lviv and Bialystok in particular, and how the urban environment both complicated and eased the adjustment of the refugees.
Urban Seminar will be held in English.
Eliyana Adler
an Associate Professor at the Pennsylvania State University in the US, is currently a research fellow at the German Historical Institute of Warsaw. After publishing several articles on the topic, she is writing a book about Polish Jews who survived the Second World War as refugees and deportees in the Soviet Union. She is the author of In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (Wayne State University Press, 2011), and co-editor of Jewish Literature and History: An Interdisciplinary Conversation (University Press of Maryland, 2008); Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades and volume 30 of Polin, dedicated to the history of Jewish education in Eastern Europe.
Credits
Сover Image: Białystok under Soviet occupation, 1941 (Plaque with inscriptions in Yiddish: Election Day for Delegates to the People's Assembly of Western Belarus)