Abstract: This essay provides insight into the life and work of Yekhezkel Wilczyński (1892–1943), a fascinating yet overlooked contributor to the Oyneg Shabes Archive: a mechanical engineer from Częstochowa, a YIVO zamler (collector), a devoted Yiddish writer and literary critic; and eventually a self-taught researcher and historian of Polish Jews in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. The article shows that both his biography and achievements are in the stage of initial research, as part of the process of editing of the entire Ringelblum Archive, including prewar materials of the contributors. It argues that both Wilczyński's scholarly contribution to Jewish history and his documentation of the ghetto experience deserve wider attention and incorporation into the discourses in both domains.
Abstract: This article examines the different ways that Jewish writers attempted to make sense of the mass violence that erupted in approximately six hundred different towns and cities across the Russian empire in the midst of the Revolution of 1905. Starting immediately after the announcement of the October Manifesto and leading to approximately three thousand Jewish fatalities, the violence of late 1905 is often viewed and presented as part of successive waves of pogroms (anti-Jewish violence) in Eastern Europe which began in 1881–82, recurred in 1903–6 and 1918–21, and continued into the late 1930s, the Holocaust and the immediate postwar era. However, a close reading of a range of first-hand accounts written by leading Jewish political and cultural figures such as Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ahad Ha'am, and Simon Dubnow demonstrates that many contemporary observers were not always sure how to describe or understand the violence of late 1905 and that they repeatedly struggled as they searched for the proper words, conceptual frameworks, and historical narratives to detail and explain the seemingly unprecedented acts and level of violence. An analysis of a number of fascinating sources from the period reveals the uneven, indirect, and at times unpredictable ways that Jewish intellectuals attempted to make sense of and lend meaning to violence. In doing so, this article not only sheds light on the different strategies that individuals employ in response to moments of disorder and destruction but also raises critical questions regarding a central concept used to research, frame and narrate modern Jewish history in Russia and Eastern Europe: "pogroms."
Abstract: In the wake of World War I and postwar pogroms, Jewish traditionalist institutions in Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," underwent a remarkable reconstruction. Vilna's rabbinic leaders were paradoxically galvanized by both the physical destruction and the spiritual threat of rising secularist competition. They created ambitious philanthropic institutions and rebuilt kheyderim , Talmud Torahs, and yeshivas in Vilna and across eastern Poland, successfully competing with secularist Jewish organizations like YIVO for private and communal resources. By focusing on the adaptivity of Jewish traditionalism, this article presents Vilna as a culturally dynamic and contested space while complicating reigning conceptions of Jewish secularization in Eastern Europe.
