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During the Second World War, the Hungarian state treated Jews as secondrank citizens, marginalized them socially and economically, confiscated all their property, and eventually handed them over to a foreign power to be killed. After the Holocaust, the remaining and returning Jews of Cluj faced serious difficulties. The survivors returning from deportation and labor service not only had to deal with the trauma of war, but also had to face the loss of family members and relatives, confiscation of their homes, and the closure of their institutions. Under these circumstances, the survivors’ primary goal was to rebuild their community and create a new livelihood, but they faced many legal and administrative obstacles in their efforts. In this study, we will trace the process of reorganization of the Jewish community in Cluj after the Holocaust, briefly discussing the problem of recovering confiscated property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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]

This study of the afterlife of "abandoned" Jewish property in National Socialist Germany analyzes the emotional impact on Jewish families of the loss of personal belongings, and those belongings' emotional impact on the Gentile families that acquired them. This property could be movable and intimate: jewelry, furniture, porcelain, and the like; as well as immovable: apartments and houses illegitimately wrested from their residents or owners. The author asks how Gentiles' behavior changed in relation to the escalating Holocaust of the Jews. She argues that the reactions of both ordinary Germans and government authorities changed when the mass deportations started, indicating that non-Jewish Germans were very much aware of the experience of their Jewish neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Holocaust: Studies & Materials is the property of Association Polish Center for Holocaust Research / Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badan nad Zaglada Zydow and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Lusitania Sacra is the property of Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Centro de Estudos de Historia Religiosa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study concerns the homecoming story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, Szlomo Himelfarb, who returned to his home town of Solec on the 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) County.

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]

This article discusses the housing situation of Holocaust survivors returning to post-war Kraków and Łódź - cities which were home to two of the largest pre-war Jewish communities in Poland, and which were not destroyed during the Second World War. The author indicates and describes factors which shaped the housing situation, including wartime and post-war displacements, the plunder of Jewish property during and after the war, Polish legislation regarding its restitution, as well as the post-war housing policy of the Polish state. Personal literary accounts by Jewish people reveal not only the creation and functioning of 'camp families,' but also the peculiar, neighbourly communities full of tensions, misunderstandings and, sometimes, violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kolarzowa examines the formation of the ‘discourse of normality' around the Holocaust and its material consequences. She points to the relationship between anti-Semitism and the construction of a new national identity in Poland, as well as the ideological blurring of actual social structures. The intensive operation of ‘enlightening the people’ (1920- 1939) is presented as an immediate source of positions regarding the Holocaust, as this operation was marked by aggressive nationalism, which was legitimized using religion. Kolarzowa suggests that the brutality and dehumanization that Jews experienced in rural communities could have been a form of abreaction, a discharge related to the oppression of serfdom and a transferred form of retaliation. The Jew then became a phantasm of the lord; violence towards Jews - an accessible object - became a substitute for violence towards social sovereigns - a forbidden object. As a consequence, notions were internalized about the right to succession: to inherit the property of those who were put to death and to transfer the subjective position in such a way that the people who took over the Jewish patrimony could view themselves as victims of (potential) claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rules of the reservation. On the book Jewish Poland Revisited by Erica Lehrer 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. Regulamin rezerwatu. O książce Jewish Poland Revisited Eriki Lehrer Artykuł stanowi recenzję książki Jewish Poland Revisited Eriki Lehrer, prezentującej wyniki antropologicznych badań na temat żydowsko-polskich projektów pamięci realizowanych w byłej dzielnicy żydowskiej na krakowskim Kazimierzu. Omawiając tezy pracy, autor poddaje krytycznej analizie proponowany przez Lehrer projekt etnografii możliwości i wynikającą z niego strategię akceptacji współczesnego Kazimierza jako przestrzeni spotkania, za którą idzie akceptacja zasad uczestnictwa narzuconych gościom przez polskich zarządców Kazimierza. W artykule rozpatrywane są dwie takie zasady, warunkujące możliwość uczestnictwa gościa w kurczącej się przestrzeni publicznej Kazimierza. Pierwszą z nich autor opisuje jako nakaz porzucenia bezpośrednio dostępnej, fizycznej przestrzeni dzielnicy i niesionych przez nią historii, których znakiem jest ocalała zabudowa. W to miejsce Lehrer wprowadza podział na przestrzeń społeczną i fizyczną, skutkiem czego stłumione zostają ślady brutalnej przeszłości, w przeciwnym razie bezpośrednio obecne. Drugą zasadę autor odtwarza jako wymóg akceptacji roli współczesnych polskich właścicieli jako brokerów i pośredników żydowskiego dziedzictwa, co w konsekwencji pociąga za sobą akceptację ich wątpliwych prawnie i moralnie roszczeń do zawłaszczonej przestrzeni. Skupienie uwagi na regulaminie uczestnictwa, który ustanawia i utrzymuje warunkowy charakter żydowskiej obecności w przestrzeni Kazimierza, prowadzi autora do wniosku o konieczności rewaluacji i redefinicji tradycyjnego rozdziału dyscyplin, który tworzy konceptualny podział na społeczne przestrzenie i architektoniczne obiekty, oraz do krytycznego namysłu nad obowiązującym obecnie w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej rozumieniem pojęcia „dziedzictwo”. Tego rodzaju poszukiwanie uznaje autor za warunek przezwyciężenia ignorowanego zwykle, choć mimo wszystko obecnego w polsko-żydowskich stosunkach „dziedzictwa”: tradycji przemocy i wykluczenia, tak społecznego, jak i przestrzennego.

The article discusses the competition for Jewish property during the economic colonization of Bukovina dealing with the history of Gentile-Jewish relations during the second world war, Romanianization, and antisemitism.

The article discusses the Jewish Holocaust focusing on the issues related to the handling of personal belongings of the massacred Jews better known as Jewish property in Eastern Galicia, Ukraine dealing with topics such as effects of soviet regime on Polish- Jewish relations and robbery of Jewish property.

The Post-Jewish Space 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, envisaged 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. Przestrzeń pożydowska Artykuł zawiera krytyczną analizę współczesnych strategii zmian oraz modyfikacji w pożydowskich dzielnicach w Polsce. Większość substancji miejskiej w tych rejonach składa się z nieruchomości wcześniej należących do polskich Żydów, a później przywłaszczonych przez Polaków nieżydowskiego pochodzenia podczas Holokaustu oraz po roku 1945. Tego typu nieruchomości nazywa się obecnie „mieniem pożydowskim”. Autor analizuje dwa równolegle działające procesy adaptacji tej przestrzeni miejskiej. Pierwszy z nich zasadza się na koncepcji „przestrzeni żydowskiej”, przedstawionej w 1999 roku przez Dianę Pinto. „Przestrzeń żydowska”, pierwotnie zdefiniowana jako kulturalne i materialne miejsce spotkań europejskich Żydów oraz ludności pochodzenia nieżydowskiego, w polskim kontekście nie wymaga realnej obecności Żydów. Co za tym idzie, praktyki społeczne wynikające z tej interpretacji idei „przestrzeni żydowskiej” daleko odbiegają od pierwotnego zamysłu Pinto. Drugi proces opisany w artykule dotyczy fizycznej realizacji tak zdefiniowanego „miejsca spotkań”. Analizowany jest on na przykładzie Dotleniacza – instalacji miejskiej z 2007 roku autorstwa Joanny Rajkowskiej. Praca Rajkowskiej była jedną z pierwszych prób stworzenia fizycznego miejsca spotkań w Polsce. Pomimo altruistycznych założeń, które legły u podstaw projektu, nie mógł on w pełni wyrwać się z okowów dyskursu na temat „dialogu” ekskluzywistycznego. Tak więc kulturowa interpretacja Dotleniacza została zawężona do znaczeń, których owocem będzie raczej wykluczenie, a nie możliwość uczestnictwa.

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]

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The constitutional review of the restitution proceedings in the Czech Republic belongs to the area characterized by its specific legal and social relevance. The specific sense of restitutions emerges from the effort of the state to remedy past unfairness together with the effort to protect the principle of legal certainty in present. The article attempts to come to terms with these problems, and to link the basic principles of the decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic regarding the restitutions with the special focus on the restitutions of Jewish property. The analysis of these decisions indicates also some of the essential problems in the application of restitution laws. Within the decision-making of the restitution cases, Constitutional Court establishes also the basic general principles of the rule of law and constitutional review in the Czech Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the Dutch public notaries' role in the resale of dispossessed Jewish property during the German occupation of the Netherlands. It is noted that this resale could only be performed with the assistance of notaries, and that although cooperation was voluntary, many Dutch notaries did cooperate. Descriptions are given of post-war decisions made concerning the exculpation of the notaries by the Dutch minister of justice. Comments are included regarding the conflict this arrangement caused between Dutch politicians and legislators.

The author reflects on how historian Professor Andrzej Nowak perceive the 2020 bilateral conference of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR) and the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), which took place in Jerusalem. Topics discussed include reason the issue of Jewish claims to 'heirless' Jewish property in Poland had not been discussed, and how the property of Jews wound up in Polish hands.

This article describes the role played by Dutch banks in the confiscation of Jewish property during World War II. ABN AMRO's predecessors, then seven commercial banks, surrendered the lion's share of Jewish financial assets to the Nazis. How can this be explained? One possible answer is that the banks allowed their own, commercial, interests to prevail over those of their Jewish clients. Other factors were: strategies of deception by the German authorities, low level of resistance among Dutch Jews, German pressure on banks to release Jewish assets and, finally, the lengthy duration of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information that Hebrew Union College has acquired a collection of eighteenth century inventories of the property of estates of AIsatian Jews. It discusses the bliography of published inventories of possessions of individuals and institutions, along with the Inventories of Jewish property of libraries. It mentions that the inventories, written in Hebrew language with a very large proportion of Yiddish words and phrases.