Unsettled possession: the question of ownership of Jewish sites in Poland after the Holocaust from a local perspective.

This essay examines how the question of the ownership of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues was perceived and negotiated by local officials and bureaucrats during the first decade of communist rule in Poland. Drawing on correspondences between local and state officials and Jewish associations in the early postwar years, it indicates the discrepancy between the central and local authorities’ attitude towards Jewish sites. While Jewish communal property was nationalized and disinherited by the state, on the local level, mainly in provincial towns, Jewish representatives were frequently treated as ‘property owners’ in legal, conceptual, and moral terms. The essay argues that this ‘inability’ of local officials to fully internalize the new status of Jewish sites reflected pre-legal sensibilities and conceptions regarding the ownership issue, which evolved in light of the effects of the Holocaust and its aftermath on the Polish society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]