“Defiant behavior violating the dignity of an academic”. Victims as a Perpetrators: Violence against Jewish Female Students and Ghetto Benches.

• In Event: Feminist Perspectives on the Body

Abstract

The “ghetto benches” was an ethnic segregation system introduced in the eve of Holocaust, at the end of 1937 in the universities of the Interwar Poland to designate separate places for Jewish students in the left side of an academic hall. In the beginning of 1937, so before the segregation was officially sanctioned, a female student of the Vilnius University was deprived of student rights due to the disciplinary proceeding instituted against her. I propose an analysis of a case study – disciplinary proceeding of Jewish female student of university in Vilnius, Rywka Profitkier, who did not want to obey student exclusionary practice, and did not took the designated place in the left side of the lecture hall, and as a consequence, she was pushed out from her sit, and forced to listen to the lecture standing between benches. Yet, we are dealing with situation, where the victim of violence – defined as its instigator – was prosecuted in a trial. The main source of my analysis are archival documents from the Lithuanian State Archive in Vilnius collected during my four-years archival research. Main presentation’s purpose is to show that the introduction of the decree on the “ghetto benches”, so-called “the order of occupying seats in lecture halls” was actually the sanctioning of student practice of forcing the ethnic segregation in Polish universities in the Interwar period. I intend to point out that the physical violence against Jewish female students was an everyday students life in Polish universities of late 30. My analysis focuses on the “mysterious shift” in the decision makers discourse practices that present Jewish female students as a persons whose “defiant behaviour is violating the dignity of an academic” so, even before the “ghetto benches” was sanctioned, it was Jewish students who were accused of violent behaviour.

Author

• Natalia Judzińska, Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences