Jewish Cemeteries in Poland as a Testimony to the State of Affairs: The Ruined Garden, Twenty Years Later
Abstract
This project is a quest into the vanished world of Polish Jewry, a world that flourished
for about a millennium until its brutal annihilation in recent history. I investigate
the most abundant vestiges of that world: Poland’s Jewish cemeteries, comparing their
present states to that of twenty years ago. The inspiration for this project came
from an oeuvre of Monica Krajewska, published in 1993, which documents and poetically
describes 54 Jewish cemeteries in Poland. My project explores 15 of the 54 cemeteries
documented by Krajewska, and compares pictures of the same sites taken twenty years
apart: by her, in 1993 and by me, in 2013. In addition to photo comparison, the project
presents rich anthropological material gathered by interviewing people connected in
different ways to the cemeteries I visited. The various conditions of these sites
including a frequent lack of adequate care, often unsuccessful efforts to rescue them,
the questionable involvement of different organizations and individuals, and the financial
problems connected to these exquisite sites offer a window into the complex reality
of Polish/Jewish relations. The situation of the Jewish cemeteries in Poland becomes
a testimony to the current state of affairs.
Type
Master's thesisDepartment
Graduate Liberal StudiesPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9250Citation
Szajnert-Klein, Anna (2014). Jewish Cemeteries in Poland as a Testimony to the State of Affairs: The Ruined Garden,
Twenty Years Later. Master's thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9250.Collections
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