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The topic of the Jewish property seized or plundered during the Holocaust resurfaced in the 1990s, becoming one of the most active fields of research in Holocaust Studies. This article attempts to retrace the suggestions made by the World Jewish Congress, starting in 1944, about how to address the problem of restitution and compensation. How did these proposals contend with the persistence of a traditional juridical framework, especially within each system of municipal law? Did international law provide adequate tools for managing such an unprecedented scenario? Was the pressure applied by Jewish organizations successful? This article presents some of the issues that most commonly arose in various Western European countries in regard to Jewish restitution (the problem of heirless property or of 'enemy alien' assets held by a number of national Custodians), shedding light on how conflicts between the criteria of nationality and the yardstick of race often constituted a major obstacle to righting the wrongs Jews had suffered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study concerns the homecoming story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, Szlomo Himelfarb, who returned to his home town of Solec-upon-Vistula, and his murder by local policemen. It is based on the material of so-called sierpniówki [testimonies given in 1944-1946 before summary courts for the prosecution "of fascist crimes against the civilian population and traitors of the Polish Nation"]. In conclusion, the author points to other cases of murders committed immediately after the war in Iłża (Starachowice) District. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a review of Erica Lehrer's Jewish Poland Revisited, a publication presenting outcomes of an anthropological research on Jewish-Polish memory projects in Cracow's former Jewish district of Kazimierz. In a discussion of the book's theses, the author critically analyses Lehrer's postulate of "ethnography of possibility" and the resultant strategy of approval for contemporary Kazimierz as a "space of encounter" alongside with its rules of participation, imposed by the Polish proprietors of the district on its visitors. The article focuses on two such rules that condition a visitor's possibility of participation in shrinking public spaces of Kazimierz. First of these laws is discussed as an imperative of abandoning the immediacy of district's physical space and its histories signified by the surviving built environment. Instead, Lehrer introduces a conceptual division of "social" and "physical" spaces, which leads to silencing of otherwise immediately present evidence of the violent past. The second rule is analyzed as a requirement of accepting the contemporary Polish owners' role of "brokers" and "purveyors" of Jewish heritage, consequential with an approval of a doubtful legal and moral title to the appropriated spaces. Through focusing on these rules of participation that determine and perpetuate the conditionality of Jewish presence in the space of Kazimierz, the author argues for a necessity of questioning and re-defining the traditional divisions of disciplines that establish conceptual separations of "social" and "built" spaces, as well as for a necessity of a critical outlook on contemporary Central European understandings of "heritage." Such an inquiry is discussed as conditional for overcoming the largely avoided yet still present "heritages" in the history of Polish-Jewish relations: the traditions of violence and exclusion, either social and spatial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a critical analysis of a prevalently used contemporary Polish design strategy of alteration and modification, practiced on the former Jewish districts in Poland. A majority of these districts' urban substance consists of property once belonging to Polish Jews, and appropriated by non-Jewish Poles during the Holocaust and after 1945. Such property and its urban space are described in Polish language as a 'post-Jewish' ones (mienie pożydowskie). The article analyses two parallel cultural processes of contemporary adaptation of this urban space. First of these processes is focused on the concept of Jewish Space, a social idea proposed in 1999 by Diana Pinto. The Jewish Space, en visaged as a cultural and material space of an encounter between European Jews and non- -Jews, in its Polish interpretation becomes free from any requirement of a Jewish presence. A social practice resulting from such interpretation differs radically from Pinto's original idea. The second reviewed process concerns the physical construction of thus defined 'space of encounter'. Its practice is analysed on an example of Oxygenator, an urban intervention by Joanna Rajkowska, installed in Warsaw in 2007. This work, one of first Polish attempts to create a physical space of encounter, despite of its altruistic principles could not fully go beyond the boundaries of the Polish discourse on the exclusivist 'dialogue'. Consequently, a cultural vocabulary it allowed remains limited to meanings more likely to result with exclusion than with a possibility of participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since October 2012, the “Landesbibliothekszentrum Rheinland-Pfalz/ Pfälzische Landesbibliothek Speyer" (PLB) has been investigating its inventory to identify books confiscated during the Nazi period. This provenance project - scheduled to last for one year - is supported by the Arbeitsstelle für Provenienzforschung (Post for Provenance Research) in Berlin. In the last six months, 28,000 acquisitions by purchase and 17,000 acquisitions by gift have been checked. As a result, ca. 50 books were found to have originally belonged to Jews from Speyer who were deported to the internment camp of Gurs in Southern France. The books were given to the PLB by the City of Speyer in 1941. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "From the Archives: Lucy S. Dawidowicz and the Restitution of Jewish Property" that was published in the January 2016 issue is presented.

A correction for the article "From the Archives: Lucy S. Dawidowicz and the Restitution of Jewish Property" published in Volume 100, Number 1, January 2016 issue of the journal is presented.