Rediscovering Traces of Memory: The Jewish Heritage of Polish Galicia

by Jonathan Webber, Chris Schwarz (Photographer)

Since the Holocaust, traces of memory are virtually all that remain of more than 800 years of Jewish life in Poland. Yet some of that past can still be found if one knows how and where to look. In this remarkable album, 74 stunning color photographs bear witness to the great Jewish civilization that once flourished here. The images record the sites of Jewish life and death, and the ways in which Jewish culture is being remembered today. Captions and detailed notes explain and contextualize the photographs. An invaluable sourcebook on the Jewish heritage of Polish Galicia, this album also illustrates how photographs can help us understand the past and discover its relevance for the present.

Genres: Nonfiction, Jewish, History

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2009

About the author

Jonathan Webber is a philosophy professor working at the intersection of moral philosophy and the philosophy of psychology. He is especially interested in what contemporary social psychology can offer to current debates in moral philosophy, and in how philosophy and psychology can be informed by twentieth-century French existentialism.

Reviews

[Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever I go to Poland I'm aware of the fact that it is completely different to the Poland my parents knew - half of it is missing. The destruction of the Polish Jews was a great crime but it was also another nail in the Polish cross since it made a very good job of wiping out upto 700 years of an important aspect of Polish history: at the times of the Partitions over 70% of the world's Jews lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and just before the start of World War 2 over 90% of Europe's Jews lived in Poland. The ghosts remain - not just in the slaughterhouses set up by the Germans in the most convenient place for extermination of the Jews but also in the cities. Buildings, town halls, synagogues, cemeteries survived. This book is a wonderful record of those surviving fragments whose existence was once an everyday part of Polish society and now... just fade away into memory.

[David Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent!