Search

A city in Greater Poland, which belonged to the province of South Prussia from 1793 to 1807 and to the Prussian province of Posen from 1815 to 1919. At the end of the 18th century, this area contained the largest closed community of settlements of Jews in Prussia. The transformation of previously Polish Jews into German citizens, which took place under Prussian rule, raised questions and conflicts concerned with acculturation, assimilation, and migration, in which the Prussian-Polish nationality…

Title of the 1954 novel by the Soviet-Jewish author and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967). Published one year after Stalin’s death, Ottepel’ (“​The Thaw,” 1955) marked the start of extensive discussions on socialist realism, but also on the political conditions during and after Stalin’s rule; the novel’s title became synonymous with the beginning, short though it was, of Soviet reform. Characterized by ambivalences and abrupt breaks, Ehrenburg’s work referred to the specific experiences of Jewish communi…

The southern Polish city of Cracow (Pol. Kraków; Yidd. Kroke) and its associated settlement of Kazimierz, outside the walls of the city proper, formed an important center of Jewish culture and learning in Eastern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. After Kazimierz was incorporated into the larger city in the early days of the Second Partition of Poland, and with the city under Habsburg rule between 1795 and 1918, Cracow went on to become a focal point for the particular history of Galician Jewish eman…