Tag: Poland

Dubnow’s classic History of the Jews in Poland and Russia

Born in Belarussia, and later a resident of St. Petersburg, Odessa, Kovno and Riga, Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) published his first essay about the Jews of Russia in 1880, and understood at a relatively early age that the subject would always be of particular significance for him. He wrote in his diary in 1892, “My life’s…

Weiner’s Jewish Roots in Poland a ground-breaking inventory

Miriam Weiner’s Jewish Roots in Poland: Pages from the Past andArchival Inventories is a pioneering work that presents a concise, authoritative inventory of extant Jewish records in the Polish State Archives and its regional (oddzial) branches, and in more than 2,500 Urzad Stanu Cywilnego (USC) or local town hall record offices throughout Poland. It also…

Hundert’s study of 18th-century Opatow, Poland

Professor Gershon Hundert, the distinguished historian and chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University, beguiled an audience of Jewish genealogists last summer in New York with midrash-like tales of early Jewish history in Poland. For centuries, the Jews felt very comfortable in Poland, Hundert said, referring to stories that even the name…

Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead

Lisa Appignanesi, a child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Montreal, recounts her parents’ wartime experiences in Losing the Dead (McArthur & Co., 2000), a family memoir that takes the form of a personal quest of research and discovery. Appignanesi (nee Borensztejn), born in postwar Poland and now living in London, has already proved her…