Prof. Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences:

The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto – Academic Work in Non-Academic Circumstances

The lecture will take place at the Institute of History, on 24 May at 6 pm, in English (questions might be asked also in Polish)

The underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto, known also as the Ringelblum’s Archive or ‘Oneg Shabbat’, was founded in 1940 by historian Emanuel Ringelblum with the goal to collect all kinds of testimonies relating to the Jewish experience under the Nazi occupation. A group including Jewish writers, teachers, rabbis and social activists collected several thousand documents, including personal testimonies, private letters, scholarly monographs on various aspects of the ghetto life, official German announcements, photographs, posters etc. In my lecture I will try to show how this network of private acquaintances worked academically (or quasi-academically) in non-academic circumstances. The focus will be on the way the work was organized, conducted and registered.

Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov is Associate Professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, and editor-in-chief of “Acta Poloniae Historica”. Her research focuses on the history of East European Jews in the 19th & 20th centuries, history of Yiddish culture (especially Yiddish press) and Polish-Jewish relations. She published three monographs, the recent one being A Citizen of Yiddishland. Dovid Sfard and the Jewish Communist Milieu in Poland (2020)  and edited several volumes of studies as well as several source editions, including the Polish translation of Ilya Ehrenburg’s and Vassily Grossman’s The Black Book of Soviet Jewry (2020). Her current book-length project deals with Yiddish press in interwar Poland.

This event will be held in a hybrid format. You can participate online via Zoom here:

https://univienna.zoom.us/j/64864166392?pwd=OFRYVS93aXpLWGxpdGtUMVgyKzVBdz09

Meeting-ID: 648 6416 6392

Password: 527832

When: 24 May, 6pm

Location: Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Rynek Starego Miasta 29/31, 00-272 Warszawa