Jewish Absence Through Post-Socialist Eyes: Photography and the Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Triangle

• In Event: Museums, Memory, and Violence: From Colonial Turkestan to Soviet Estonia and Post-Socialist Poland

Abstract

Scholars on Jewish heritage have recently shifted from a traumatic post-Holocaust narrative to a portrayal of eastern Europe, Poland in particular, as a place of Jewish revival, either through meaningful Jewish and non-Jewish collaboration or a philosemitic “Jewish Disneyland.“ In this paper, I aim to redirect our attention from the reinvention of Jewish culture to the places of death where no traces or collective memory remain. Specifically, I will explore the interplay between the memory of genocidal violence and post-socialist transformation in eastern Europe, focusing on the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, Poland, as a case study. From 2014 to 2016, this museum featured two permanent photographic exhibitions on Jewish heritage in the former Habsburg province of Galicia: “Traces of Memory” by Chris Schwarz, which depicted the region’s western part in Poland in the late 1990s, and “An Unfinished Memory” by Jason Francisco, capturing the eastern part in western Ukraine in the early 2010s. Both showcased different artistic approaches, particularly in their portrayal of locals as agents of Jewish memory. While the Polish section celebrated non-Jewish activism, the Ukrainian part emphasized the absence of memory in places of genocidal violence. By juxtaposing both narratives, the museum provoked visitors to engage with different paths of nearly two decades of post-socialist transformation and ultimately, question a shared Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish memory. In a region marked by competing narratives of national victimhood, as I argue, photography serves as a medium to reconsider an integrative approach to Jewish memory in post-socialist eastern Europe.

Author

• Oskar Czendze, U of Toronto (Canada)