In this lecture, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacred Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Yechiel Weizman is a lecturer at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He received his PhD in 2018 from the University of Haifa. In 2019-2021 He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, in Leipzig and at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at Humboldt University, Berlin.

His research interests focus on the study of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Jewish and non-Jewish relations in 20th century Europe, Jewish Material Culture, and the social history of Communism in Eastern-Europe. He is the author of Unsettled Heritage. Living next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2022).

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In this lecture, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacred Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Yechiel Weizman is a lecturer at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He received his PhD in 2018 from the University of Haifa. In 2019-2021 He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, in Leipzig and at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at Humboldt University, Berlin.

His research interests focus on the study of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Jewish and non-Jewish relations in 20th century Europe, Jewish Material Culture, and the social history of Communism in Eastern-Europe. He is the author of Unsettled Heritage. Living next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2022).

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