The War That Never Ended: Jewish Experiences of World War I in Central and Eastern Europe, 23-25th November, POLIN Museum, deadline for registration 23rd Nov 2026

This conference examines World War I as a transformative moment in the history of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. Bringing together scholars from a range of countries and disciplines, it explores how war, violence, displacement, military service, and economic and social crisis reshaped Jewish communities during and after the conflict.

Eight panels address anti-Jewish violence and Jewish responses to it, the experiences of refugees and returnees, relief and communal welfare, military service, and the changing political order after 1918. Other contributions examine women’s activism, religious life, statelessness, communal institutions, and the survival of Jewish cultural and sacred objects. The conference also considers how the Great War was remembered in memoirs, intellectual writing, and later historical narratives.

By bringing together social, political, gendered, local, and cultural perspectives, the conference seeks to place World War I more firmly within the history of East European Jewry. Rather than treating the conflict only as a prelude to later catastrophes, it highlights the war itself as a profound rupture whose effects continued to shape Jewish society, politics, memory, and communal life throughout the interwar period and beyond.

16:00–17:30 Opening

Panel 1. Experiences of Violence

Moderator: Vladyslava Moskalets (Center for Urban History, Lviv)

Levente Olosz (Holocaust Memorial Center, Budapest) Hunting the “Galician Profiteers”: Anti-Jewish Raids and the War Economy in Northeastern Hungary, 1918

Artur Szyndler (The Jewish Museum in Oświęcim) Anti-Jewish Violence in Oświęcim and the Galician-Silesian Borderland (1918–1921)

Janina Naskalska (Jagiellonian University) Recording the Costs of War: Jewish Deaths in Podgórze, 1914–1924

17:30–18:00 Coffee Break

18:00–19:30 Keynote lecture

Polly Zavadivker (University of Delaware) Heritage in Flames: How Jewish Sacred Objects Survived the Great War

10:00–11:30 Panel 2. Jewish Responses to Violence

Moderator: Jan Rybak (Central European University)

Agnieszka Wierzcholska (Sciences Po, France) The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and Yiddish Intellectuals

Aviv Luban (Bar Ilan University) “A Great Concealment Has Taken Hold:” Bratslav Hasidim and the Unending War

Netta Ehrlich (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Self-defense during and after World War I

11:30–12:00 Coffee Break

12:00–13:30 Panel 3. Refugees and displacement

Moderator: Kamil Ruszała (Jagiellonian University)

Ines Koeltzsch (University of Vienna) Beyond Refugee Camps: Voices of Jewish Refugees in the Bohemian and Moravian Countryside during World War I

Yaron Jean (Oranim Academic College, Israel) A System Without Order: Passports and Jewish Statelessness after World War I

Julijana Andriejauskienė (Lithuanian Institute of History) From the Russian Empire to the Lithuanian State: Jewish Return and Belonging in Kaunas

13:30–14:30 Lunch

14:30–16:00 Panel 4. Relief

Moderator: Aleksandra Jakubczak (POLIN Museum/TU Berlin)

Edyta Gawron (Jagiellonian University) Between Refuge and Service. Jewish Community in Kraków during World War I

Jaclyn Granick (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau) Jewish Women’s Activism and the Impact of War

Marek Tuszewicki (Jagiellonian University) Microhistory of the Great War: The Case of Jewish Old-Age Homes in Warsaw

16:00–16:30 Coffee Break

16:30–18:00 Panel 5. Postwar order

Moderator: Elissa Bemporad (CUNY)

Rok Stergar (University of Ljubljana) From Prejudice to Policy: The Postwar Attempt to Make Antisemitism Official Policy in the Slovene Part of Yugoslavia

Eva Reder (University of Vienna), Konrad Matyjaszek (Polish Academy of Sciences) Constructing the Jewish Traitor: Aggression and the Legitimation of Pogrom Violence in Poland after World War I

Anastasiia Ivanova (University of Vienna/National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) The Territorial Basis of Non-Territorial Autonomy: Jewish Communities in Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917–1921 in Law and in Figures

18:00–18:30 Coffee Break

18:30–19:30 Debate “How do we remember the Great War? Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian and German Perspectives”

Moderators: Kamil Ruszała (Jagiellonian University); Aleksandra Jakubczak (POLIN Museum/TU Berlin)

Christhard Henschel (German Historical Institute, Warsaw)

Maciej Górny (Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Vladyslava Moskalets (Center for Urban History, Lviv)

Joshua Zimmerman (Yeshiva University)

9:00–10:30 Panel 6. Jews and the military

Moderator: Christhard Henschel (German Historical Institute, Warsaw)

Julie Dawson (University of Vienna) The Wife of the Jewish Gendarme: Reflections on Female Fates in Rural Bukovina during World War I

Justyna Lisak (University of Wrocław) Mapping the Modern Wandering Jew: Military Service and Wartime Displacement in Hermann Abraham’s Wartime Diaries (1915–1918)

Gabriel Wolfson (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) Military Chaplains as Cultural Diplomats: German Field Rabbis on the Eastern Front in World War I

10:30–11:00 Coffee Break

11:00–12:30 Panel 7. Writing Memory after War: Narratives, Trauma, and Commemoration

Moderator: Marcos Silber (University of Haifa)

Eliza Ablovatski (Kenyon College, USA) Lessons from the Last War: Transgenerational East European Jewish Narratives of the Two World Wars

Sarunas Liekis (Kaunas University) Non-Jewish memoirs documenting the condition of Lithuanian Jewry during World War I

Joshua Zimmerman (Yeshiva University) In War and in Postwar Memory: Jews in the Polish Legions during World War I