Self-Government between the Village and the Shtetl: Village Heads (Sołtysi) in the Lublin Region, 1918-1939

• In Event: National Projects and Local Realities: Nationalism, Rural Identities, and Governance in the Eastern Borderlands of Interwar Poland

Abstract

As part of the structures of self-government in the Polish Second Republic, villagers elected representatives to serve the everyday administrative needs of rural communities. The lowest level of commune (gmina) government were village heads, who were tasked with organizing taxation, social services, infrastructure, agriculture, and security, among other responsibilities. While the vast majority of interwar rural-dwellers – and thus elected sołtysi – were Christian, a number of Jewish communities in the Lublin region were represented by their own Jewish village leader. Christian and Jewish village representatives shared the same administrative agenda, which was established at weekly meetings organized by the wójt (commune head) and starosta (county head). Highlighting moments of exchange between Jews and Polish village heads, their supervisors, and their multiethnic constituents, this paper considers the institution of the sołtys as a site of interaction between Jewish and Gentile residents of the shtetl and the village. Based on gmina and powiat (county) administrative records from the Lublin state archive – including local election records, complaint files, and memoirs – I offer an initial portrait of Jewish village elders and their roles within communities surrounding the city of Lublin and the rural self-governing structures of the Second Republic. While, as I argue, interwar Polish village administration is both a Jewish and a Gentile history, when placed in its administrative hierarchy vis-à-vis the disciplinary power of the wójt and starosta the position of Jewish village head illustrates the limited agency of Jewish participation in rural self-government within the Christian majority state and further draws attention to rising antisemitic violence in the interwar years.

Author

• Miranda Brethour, CUNY Graduate Center