Jewish Heritage from Belarusian and Polish Perspectives

A review prepared within the joint “Book Review” project of the Political Sphere Institute and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Positive Practices of Preserving and Popularizing Jewish Heritage: A Handbook Based on Polish and Belarusian Experience: [collection of articles from the research and practical conference, Brest, 20–21 August 2011] / edited by A. Bialiauskaya, A. Maksimowska, A. Sidarovich. Warsaw: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2012. 270 pp.

Review prepared by Aliaksei Bratochkin.

The book Positive Practices of Preserving and Popularizing Jewish Heritage…, published in 2012, is part of a Polish-Belarusian project devoted to describing Jewish shtetls on the outskirts of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The book raises questions about what Belarusian and Jewish identity are, how lost historical experience can be restored today, and how mutual understanding can be found.

The book Positive Practices of Preserving and Popularizing Jewish Heritage: A Handbook Based on Polish and Belarusian Experience, published in 2012, is not only a collection of materials from a conference held in Brest in August 2011, but also part of a joint Polish-Belarusian project. This project effectively began in 2009, and its aim was to describe the current state of former Jewish shtetls on the outskirts of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In 2010, “enthusiasts, historians, and photographers” from Poland and Belarus set out on the first research expedition to Belarus in order to collect material for the then not yet opened Museum of Polish Jews and the Virtual Shtetl portal. As noted in the preface, a difference between what was happening in Belarus and in Poland was immediately observed: although in Belarus, during the period of Soviet rule, many religious sites were destroyed, today one can still find some material traces of the life of Jewish communities there (houses, graves, and so on), traces that have already disappeared in Poland or have been “covered over” by advertising billboards and new building materials.

In registering this difference, the participants of the expedition also encountered something greater than simply material traces of the former history of Jews: the phenomenon of a living memory of the shared residence of Belarusians and Jews in shtetls that remained many years later. The results of these expeditions, and more besides, are discussed in the six sections of the book.

The methodology of researching “small urban space”

The first section, “Cultural Landscape, Memory, Identity,” presents materials in which the authors attempt to set out the theoretical framework for research on cultural heritage. In Józef Markiewicz’s (Warsaw) text “The Virtual Shtetl Project as a Practice of the Space of a Belarusian Shtetl,” the study of Jewish shtetls is proposed as an “experience of geographical space (both at the individual and the national level) connected with a sense of history and culture.” This means “appropriating space and even architecture and assigning symbolic meanings to it.” As a result, “mental maps” emerge, through which something more than merely the material traces of history is reconstructed: it becomes necessary to use the category of “memory” (as remembering and, at the same time, forgetting and denial) and to change practices of representing local history.

According to the Polish author, research on Jewish cultural heritage in Poland and Belarus shows precisely that today one cannot speak of the existence of “impermeable, parallel cultural worlds”; rather, local cultural heritage is already “part of global, transnational processes, and part of this heritage is preserved in another country or even on another continent.” The specificity of our region lies in the fact that for a long time (at least until the fall of the Berlin Wall) social memory remained frozen, but now we must rethink all this and recover the lost experience. In addition, “local culture must be ready to accept an influx of alternative narratives or even criticism.”

As Józef Markiewicz indicates, drawing also on other researchers, the Jewish shtetl/miasteczka as part of local culture is something more than a material phenomenon; we are dealing with a “state of consciousness” and other cultural phenomena. The shtetl is a multidimensional phenomenon; its history effectively began in the period of the Pale of Settlement and ended with the establishment of the new communist order and during the Catastrophe of European Jewry in the years of the Second World War. This “small urban space” had its own traditions and underwent its own waves of modernization; the shtetl was also a “social organism” combining various social groups and classes. The space of the shtetl can also be viewed as a “grid of social meanings,” which helps one understand the distribution of symbolic places and monuments that appeared already in the communist era on the site of a former religious “sacred” space.

Identity as a problem

In Agata Maksimowska’s (Warsaw) text “Poles? Belarusians? Jews?” attention is drawn to the problematization of identity that arises in the course of shtetl research. Researchers engaged in this work are, in effect, “searching for themselves” as well, often encountering difficulties in answering questions about how to define correctly the content of one’s own ideas about “Polish Jews,” “Belarusian Jews,” about “who Belarusians are and who Poles are.”

If one attempts to structure the views expressed by the Belarusian participants in the expedition during discussions, then Belarusian identity in these views, according to Agata Maksimowska, can be considered through the idea of the coexistence of Jews and Belarusians and through the shared experience of working through the trauma that emerged in the 1930s with the destruction of the Belarusian and Jewish intelligentsia. Today, Belarusian identity is also problematic because it exists in a space “colonized” by Russian culture, but the restoration of memory about Jewish heritage will also help to delineate more precisely the boundaries of Belarusian identity.

Alla Sidarovich’s (Minsk) text “The City as a Meeting Place of Cultures” discusses the general state of affairs in preserving Jewish cultural and historical heritage in Belarus. The author also draws attention to the fact that the formation of the Belarusian national project in the early twentieth century would not have been possible without the social infrastructure of the shtetls that emerged and existed in Belarus. Traces of this infrastructure can still be found in Belarus, as can traces of direct face-to-face communication that existed between representatives of the Jewish/Judaic and Belarusian/Christian communities, in the form of memories of everyday life, of specific people, and of ties with them.

Visual material, oral history, and the history of everyday life in shtetl studies

The remaining sections of the book describe concrete research experience that emerged from, and was designed for, the Belarusian context. The volume includes texts by Ina Sorkina on the results, problems, and prospects of shtetl research in Belarus, as well as texts describing contemporary practices of working with historical material: an article by Aliaksandr Litin (Mahiliou), “Methods of Collecting Visual Information Based on the Example of the Book The History of Mogilev Jewry: Documents and People,” and a text by Ida Shenderovich, “Narrative as Cultural Heritage: A Chronicle of the Jews of Mahiliou,” which includes the methodology of the oral interviews used. Texts by Anton Astapovich, Anton Vantukh, Nelly Doroshkevich, and others discuss problems of preserving architectural heritage and the religious buildings of Jewish communities. There are also materials on work with Jewish musical culture and literature.

An entire section of the book, “The Experience of Polish and Belarusian Public Organizations in Preserving the Cultural Heritage of European Jews,” discusses the practical experience of public initiatives connected with documenting Jewish graves, organizing local-history trips, and volunteer movements. The project discussed in the collection itself emerged at the intersection of several important discourses: democratization and European integration, economic transformation, and support for civil society. In this sense, the project participants themselves created social networks for exchanging information and support, and included in the collection information on how such public activity can be possible in the Belarusian context.

Memory of the Holocaust in Poland and Belarus

A small section of the book that attracted attention is titled “The Representation of Jewish History in Secondary School Programs.” After all, sustaining public interest in this problem depends precisely on the ways in which research on Jewish history is transmitted through the education system. Unfortunately, the section contains only two texts: one by Hanna Węgrzynek (Warsaw), who studies the problem of how Jewish history and the Holocaust are taught in Polish schools, and another by Marta Szymańska (Warsaw), devoted to how Jewish history is taught in Belarus, based on an analysis of school textbooks published in Belarus between 2000 and 2010.

It was somewhat surprising that the Belarusian situation is presented only through an external view (although it is indicated that the text was written based on materials prepared by Iryna Paliakova, a history teacher from Hrodna), even though such surveys have already been carried out by Belarusian researchers. Nevertheless, it was interesting to become acquainted with this study. Marta Szymańska concludes that the subject of Jewish history and the Holocaust is presented “very superficially,” while “Jews are presented in the textbook in a negative light” — as a “wealthy bourgeoisie that did not treat the Belarusian population well”; the reasons for the Holocaust and the creation of ghettos are not analyzed, and the material on Jewish history and everyday life is extremely fragmentary. While agreeing with the author’s generally critical tone, one can somewhat dispute her claim that Jews are presented in a negative light; rather, school textbooks tend to ignore the meanings and contexts of social and ethnic history. It should be noted that another author, Hanna Węgrzynek, also applies a critical approach to the Polish education system.

Having read Węgrzynek’s text on how Holocaust issues came to be studied in Poland and why they had not been studied for a long time, one can find much in common with the Belarusian situation. After the Second World War, the Jewish population of Poland, as in Belarus, practically disappeared, but the politics of memory carried out in socialist Poland and Soviet Belarus was by no means oriented toward commemorating the murdered Jews. Rather, the central victims were presented as Poles (although Jews made up half of the total number of victims) and “Soviet peaceful civilians” (the national component was leveled in the USSR). The concept of the Holocaust effectively began to be used in both Poland and Belarus only in the early 1990s, after Soviet perestroika and democratic transformations in Poland, although in educational literature the concept began to be used in Poland earlier than in Belarus.

In Poland, public discussions took place about including this topic in school curricula; in Belarus there were no such discussions, and at present the subject of the Holocaust is not widely covered in the public sphere. In a negative sense, Poland and Belarus are also united by educational reforms and a reduction in the number of hours devoted to history in general, which makes it impossible to organize properly the study of any topics, not only the Holocaust and Jewish history. But in Poland society protests against such reductions in hours, whereas in Belarus this subject is discussed little. As a result, one can note a certain “similarity” between the situation in Belarus and in Poland, but with the difference that Poland still has far more opportunities for normal work with the historical past, including within the education system.

That is precisely why cooperation is so necessary today in order to resolve and clarify these shared problems in Belarus and Poland — problems that go far beyond the national level and concern European memory as a whole of Jewish heritage and the Catastrophe. The collection Positive Practices of Preserving and Popularizing Jewish Heritage is a good example of such cooperation.