Lavy Conference discusses Polish Jews in the 1930s

The Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Program in Jewish Studies hosted the 10th Lavy International Conference on Monday and Tuesday.

This year’s topic was “The Polish Jewish Condition? Polish Jewish Social Thought and the Challenges of the 1930s.”

Kenneth Moss, the director of the Jewish Studies Program and an associate professor of Modern Jewish History, was involved in organizing the event. He selected both of the topics for this year’s conference.

“[The topic] is what I’m working on right now in my own work, so this is one of those very rare and wonderful opportunities to bring world-class, A-list experts on something I’m thinking about [together] to tell me what I’m getting wrong and hopefully also what I’m getting right,” Moss said.

Each year, a different professor organizes the conference.

The conference featured 15 speakers from universities and colleges around the world. They spoke about a variety of issues relating to Polish Jewish social thought in the 1930s, including the Jewish Polish identity press, nationalism, political culture, education, suicide and religious and economic issues.

Professor Joshua Karlip of Yeshiva University spoke about Zelig Hirsch Kalamanovich, a Lithuanian Jewish scholar. He was an early director of YIVO, known in English as the Institute for Jewish Research, which preserves, studies and teaches Yiddish, along with the cultural history of Jews in Eastern Europe and Germany.

Kalamanovich tried to establish Yiddish as the language of the Jewish school system. However, he faced fierce resistance from the Jewish people, who wanted their children to be educated in more widely spoken languages, such as Russian. Karlip explained that the anti-Semitism that Kalamanovich was trying to rally against was, in fact, the reason for the Jewish disownment of Yiddish.

“In an environment that dismissed Judaism, Jewish nationalism and Yiddishism as heretical, hatred of Yiddish resulted naturally,” Karlip said.

Karlip read an excerpt from a letter that Kalamanovich wrote to his son about the survival of Yiddish in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power and the possibility of the founding of a Jewish state.

“What is the solution... perhaps, to gather and to decide to establish a place for ourselves in which nobody will exist who wants to or can expel us... a place in which we will be able to live as the Lithuanians in Lithuania,” he wrote.

Professor Gertrud Pickhan of Frele Universität Berlin spoke about Victor Alter, another prominent Polish Jewish activist in the 1930s. Alter, a proponent of personal liberty, explored the relationship between the individual and society.

“For [Alter], freedom was inextricably linked with democracy, which he understood not as majority rule but rather as protection of minority rights,” Pickhan said.

The speakers at the conference also discussed the increasingly poor economic and political prospects for Jews in Lithuania and Poland in the 1930s.

“While many Jewish businessmen were continuing to do pretty well right up until [the] 1930s, the trend was downhill,” Professor Samuel Kassow of Trinity College said. “But politically, Lithuanian Jewry was still better off than Polish Jewry in many respects.”

Antony Polonsky, a professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and the chief historian of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, spoke at the conference.

“Many of the key figures in the field from the United States, Poland and Israel were present, and the level of the papers, which covered a wide range of topics... [was] extremely high, and I learned a great deal,” Polonsky said.