Escape through Poland: Soviet Jewish Emigration in the 1950s

The emigration movement among Soviet Jews is usually dated to the 1960s–1990s. This essay focuses on the premovement emigration in the 1950s, which prepared the ground for the massive departure of Jews and non-Jewish members of their families, primarily to Israel and the United States. The parameters for leaving the Soviet Union in the 1950s were in many ways similar to the parameters for returning to Poland in the immediate post–World War II years. On paper, the basic pools of emigrants were the same: Jews who at the outbreak of World War II were Polish nationals. In reality, many repatriates of the 1950s were more Soviet than Polish, leaving the country where they had lived for up to twenty years, which often was a lion’s share of their lives. Those—that is, the majority—who ultimately reached Israel went through two repatriation processes: first, as returnees to their pre–World War II homeland and, second, as Jews going back to their historical homeland. As this essay shows, the contemporaneous political and social climates in the Soviet Union and Poland, the nature of those countries’ mutual relations and of their relations with Israel, not present on the map until 1948, framed a unique context for emigration in the early post-Stalinist period.     

Clerks, Jews, and farmers: projects of Jewish agricultural settlement in Poland

This essay discusses the development of policies regarding Jewish agricultural settlement in the Kingdom of Poland during the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the gaps between legal rulings and administrative practices, as well as on declared and hidden motivations. It argues that official policy toward Jewish agricultural settlement reflected the tensions present in so many discussions of the “Jewish question” in Poland between declared ideology and subconscious phobias and stereotypes. As proponents of Enlightenment ideology, Polish liberals advocated projects meant to reform Jewish society, including productivization. At the same time, they expressed misgivings that the strengthening of Jewish society might harm Christians. The result was striking ineffectiveness, which led to repeated failures, a growing disillusionment in Jewish circles, and the failure of the reform projects themselves.     

Jewish Students and Christian Corpses in Interwar Poland: Playing with the Language of Blood Libel

This article focuses on the antisemitic discourse that surrounded the controversy over the provision of cadavers to medical departments in the Second Polish Republic. In the pages of the student press and at student rallies, activists argued that Jewish medical students should be barred from dissecting Christian corpses. They demanded that Jewish communities provide corpses for dissection on a regular basis as a condition for continued training of Jewish doctors. The discourse surrounding the cadaver affair combined nationalist language with religious vocabulary, suggesting that the affair was motivated as much by religious concerns as by nationalist ones. Drawing on notions of Jewish criminality and arrogance, allegations of a Jewish sense of religious superiority and disregard for Christian values, and fears of Jewish exploitation of Christians to fulfill their own collective needs, the cadaver affair played with concepts reminiscent of blood libel.     

The Gendered Politics of Public Health: Jewish Nurses and the American Joint Distribution Committee in Interwar Poland

This article examines the gendered politics of public health initiatives among Jews in interwar Poland by focusing on the establishment and activity of the Warsaw School of Nursing (Szko?a Piel?gniarstwa przy Szypitalu Starozakonnych w Warszawie). Founded in 1923 and funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the school’s staff believed that they could shape the attitudes and behaviors of Polish Jewish women and use them as a conduit to advance their vision for a Polish state committed to the protection of Jews and their equality before the law. Drawing upon the voices of JDC officials, local Jewish health activists, Polish government officials, and young Jewish women in the Second Polish Republic, the article highlights the multiple and frequently conflicting ways in which gender figured in their political imagination. It also sheds light on the efforts of American Jewish humanitarian activists and Polish Jewish women alike—much like their counterparts throughout Europe and North America—to reframe traditional gendered expectations for women in order to expand their range of professional choices and the roles they could play in public life. The final section of this article recounts the school’s decline and compares its fate to a Jewish nursing school initiative in the city of Vilna. In doing so, it assesses the limits of the Joint Distribution Committee’s interethnic bridge-building initiatives in interwar Poland.     

Jewish Meditation in Counseling

Many counselors integrate meditation into treatment with clients. Although meditation can be presented as a secular practice, it also holds spiritual and religious relevance for many faith communities. In this article, we explore the use of Jewish meditation as a spiritually oriented treatment intervention with Jewish clients. Literature examining the relationships among counseling, the Jewish population, and Jewish meditation is presented. This article also includes practical considerations for integrating Jewish meditation into counseling.     

Virtually Jewish

SUMMARY

The authors created a Web-based tutorial for novice-to-intermediate users of the World Wide Web using primarily Jewish content in order to encourage potential Jewish users of the World Wide Web. The lessons contain information on Jewish-themed Web sites and progressively complex information about how to use the Web. Tips and practice exercises are included.     

Science in Poland

The Nencki Institute in Warsaw was founded in 1918 to honor one of Poland’s most distinguished biochemists, Marceli Nencki. Since its inception, the institute has evolved from a confederation of privately supported laboratories to a center of research productivity intimately associated with the Polish Academy of Sciences. Early relations with Pavlov’s laboratory laid the foundation for the emergence of a Polish School of Neurophysiology under the leadership of Jersy Konorski. The impact of Konorski and his colleagues has transformed the interpretation of conditioning to include a systematic physiologic basis that more adequately considers the psychology of learning processes. The prestige of the Nencki Institute within contemporary Eastern European and Soviet science was achieved despite the economic pressures on a new nation and its total devastation of World War II. Moreover, the more than 60 years of scientific work in an independent Poland have provided a critical transition between Eastern and Western research efforts, and the Nencki Institute has filled a leading role in facilitating communication among scientists.     

Pregnancy reduction in Jewish law

10% of infertile women who become pregnant with the aid of hormonal stimulation become pregnant with multiple fetuses. 20% of mothers of triplets experience preeclampsia and 35% risk serious postpartum hemorrhage. Risk increases with the number of fetuses for venous stasis, varicose veins, phlebothrombosis, thrombophlebitis, and embolic phenomena. Risk increases proportionally with increased number of fetuses for fetal morbidity and mortality. Selective abortion is often used as a method of reducing risk to both the woman and the fetuses, thus increasing the chance that 1 or 2 fetuses will be born healthy. A related issue is the selective reduction of fetuses in multiple pregnancies that may have a genetic defect like Hurler's syndrome, microcephaly, Tay-Sachs disease, spina bifida, hemophilia A, or thalassemia major. In cases where 1 fetus in a set of twins is so inclined, the reduction of the defective fetus increased the success of the remaining co-twin. Selective reduction should not pose a problem for Jewish women since the procedure does not violate any Jewish legal or moral rules. In Jewish law an unborn fetus is not considered a person until it is born. Until the 40th day of pregnancy it is considered as 'mere fluid.' In order to stress the positive aspect of selective reduction it should be called "enhanced survival of multifetal pregnancies."     

Education in the Jewish State

This essay argues that schooling in Israel is tied too closely to ideology. This results in an indoctrinary orientation that contributes to divisiveness and imperils Israeli democracy. After reviewing and critiquing the roots of this orientation, I advance an alternative that understands education as an agent of the good rather than ideology. Israeli schooling requires a vision of goodness broad enough to encompass competing conceptions of Jewish life espoused by the majority as well as non-Jewish orientations affirmed by various minorities. Such a vision can be grounded, I contend, in a democratic Jewish theology that emphasizes God as teacher rather than tyrant.