Conference launching vol. 36 of Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry

Organised by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and the UCL Institute of Jewish Studies, in partnership with the Polin Museum of History of Polish Jews, Warsaw.

The conference will take the form of two online discussions hosted in cooperation with the Polin Museum of History of Polish Jews. This volume is an examination of the history of children, childhood and child-rearing in Jewish Eastern Europe. The contributors, drawn from Israel, Poland, Western Europe and North America, have endevoured throughout to let children and teenagers speak for themselves and, while aware of the limits of their freedom of action, to assess their degree of agency. At the same time, close attention has been paid to ideas and ideals about Jewish children and Jewish childhood expressed by those with a degree of power over these children’s lives: not only their parents, but religious and communal leaders, educators and political activists invested in mobilizing the youth.

PROGRAMME

1 – 2:45 pm GMT

Welcome: Dr Michał Trębacz (Polin Museum of History of Polish Jews, Warsaw), Prof François Guesnet (UCL)

Panel One: Jewish childhood in the early 20^th Century

Online, in partnership with the Polin Museum Warsaw

Chair: François Guesnet

Jan Rybak: Refugee Children into Pillars of the Nation: Zionist Care Work for Galician Jewish Refugee Children in WW1 Vienna

Ula Madej-Krupitski: Polish Jewish Youth Encounters the ‘Other’ while Vacationing in the Second Polish Republic

Anna Sternshis: Yiddish Childrens’ songs of the Holocaust in Transnistria

2.45-3:15 Break

3:15 – 5:00 pm GMT

Panel Two: The Holocaust and Its Aftermath

Online, in partnership with the Polin Museum Warsaw

Chair: Natalia Aleksiun

Yehoshua Ecker: The Jewish Galician countryside experience from a child’s perspective

Joanna Śliwa: Jewish Children Seeking Help from Catholic Institutions in Kraków during the Holocaust

Boaz Cohen: Rehabilitating Holocaust child victims in postwar Poland