Unsettled Heritage

In Unsettled Heritage, 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 sacral 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.

Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.

Yechiel Weizman is a lecturer at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

Unsettled Heritage explores the unquiet remnants of vanished societies. The story Weizman tells—about the fate of the Jewish material legacy in Poland after the Holocaust—is, at times, dark, yet he recounts it with a genuine desire to understand, rather than to condemn.

Jonathan Webber, author of Rediscovering Traces of Memory:

Yechiel Weizman illuminates the complexities of how local people dealt with the absence of their former Jewish neighbors after the Holocaust. Drawing on provincial archives across Poland and wide-ranging fieldwork, his insightful, engaging, and balanced book is essential reading.

Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Polish Academy of Sciences, author of Pogrom Cries:

In this groundbreaking work, Yechiel Weizman skillfully and perceptively analyzes a diverse array of sources, adding an important voice to the debate on the aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland.