Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Contents
- Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
- Polin
- Statement From the Editors
- SYMPOSIUM: JEWS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDEPENDENT POLISH STATE
- ARTICLES
- DOCUMENTS
- COMMENTARY
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Nahum Gross (ed.) Yehudim ba-Kalkalah
- Jonathan I. Israel European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550-1750
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz The Golden Tradition. Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe
- Joseph Weiss Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (edited by David Goldstein)
- Mathias Bersohn Kilka słów o dawniejszych bozjnicach drewnianych w Polsce
- Magdalena Opalski The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and his Tavern in Nineteenth Century Polish Literature
- Steven J. Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History
- Stephen M. Berk Year of CrisisYear of Hope. Russian Jewry and The Pogroms of 1881-1882
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Heide W. Whelan Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia
- Mary Antin The Promised Land
- John Bodnar The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
- Michael R. Weisser A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World
- Henryk Piasecki Secja Żydowsfca PPSD i Żydowska Partia Socjal-Demokratyczna 1892-1919/20
- Ber Borochov Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation. Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism
- Ehud Luz Makbilim Nifgashim
- Shmuel Nitzan (ed.) Tnu'at Dror be'Galicia
- Ritchie Robertson Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature
- Sander L. Gilman Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
- Edward D. Wynot Warsaw Between the World Wars: Profile of the Capital City in a Developing Land
- Aleksander Biberstein Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie
- Shmuel Krakowski The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944
- Nechama Tec When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- W Czerdziestzą, Rocznicp Agonia, walka i śmierć warszawskiego getta; Janina Jaworska Henryka Becka
- Hanna Krall Sublokatorka
- Randolph L. Braham and Bélo Vágó (eds) The Holocaust in Hungary: Forty Years Later
- Les Limes du Souvenir: Mémoriaux juifs de Pologne (presente par Annette Wieviorka et Yitzhok Niborski)
- Leiter to the Editors
- Contributors
- Obituaries
Mathias Bersohn Kilka słów o dawniejszych bozjnicach drewnianych w Polsce
from BOOK REVIEWS
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Contents
- Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
- Polin
- Statement From the Editors
- SYMPOSIUM: JEWS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDEPENDENT POLISH STATE
- ARTICLES
- DOCUMENTS
- COMMENTARY
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Nahum Gross (ed.) Yehudim ba-Kalkalah
- Jonathan I. Israel European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550-1750
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz The Golden Tradition. Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe
- Joseph Weiss Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (edited by David Goldstein)
- Mathias Bersohn Kilka słów o dawniejszych bozjnicach drewnianych w Polsce
- Magdalena Opalski The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and his Tavern in Nineteenth Century Polish Literature
- Steven J. Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History
- Stephen M. Berk Year of CrisisYear of Hope. Russian Jewry and The Pogroms of 1881-1882
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Heide W. Whelan Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia
- Mary Antin The Promised Land
- John Bodnar The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
- Michael R. Weisser A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World
- Henryk Piasecki Secja Żydowsfca PPSD i Żydowska Partia Socjal-Demokratyczna 1892-1919/20
- Ber Borochov Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation. Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism
- Ehud Luz Makbilim Nifgashim
- Shmuel Nitzan (ed.) Tnu'at Dror be'Galicia
- Ritchie Robertson Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature
- Sander L. Gilman Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
- Edward D. Wynot Warsaw Between the World Wars: Profile of the Capital City in a Developing Land
- Aleksander Biberstein Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie
- Shmuel Krakowski The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944
- Nechama Tec When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- W Czerdziestzą, Rocznicp Agonia, walka i śmierć warszawskiego getta; Janina Jaworska Henryka Becka
- Hanna Krall Sublokatorka
- Randolph L. Braham and Bélo Vágó (eds) The Holocaust in Hungary: Forty Years Later
- Les Limes du Souvenir: Mémoriaux juifs de Pologne (presente par Annette Wieviorka et Yitzhok Niborski)
- Leiter to the Editors
- Contributors
- Obituaries
Summary
Scholars and art experts, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have shown an interest in the wooden synagogues of Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine that is unparalleled with regard to any other branch of the artistic-religious creative tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe, rich and varied though it is.
The researchers and art experts who drew attention to these small synagogues around the turn of the century and highlighted their originality and Jewishness as well as their beauty and charm are most certainly worthy of recognition. The value of their contribution has, tragically, been further enhanced since the Holocaust and the German war of annihilation against the Jews, and every expression of their cultural and material creativity, completely destroyed the surviving examples of such religious art in Eastern Europe and particularly Poland.
Some three years ago, the National Library in Warsaw made a splendid gesture of tribute to the memory of one of the pioneers of research into the art of Polish synagogues, Mathias Bersohn, by publishing a new, illustrated edition of one of his most important works on Polish-Jewish art, Kitka słów …. Warsaw-born Bersohn, historian of Polish Jewry and founder of the Jewish Antiquities Museum of the Warsaw community, was one of the first to appreciate the beauty of these synagogues and to realize their importance in the history of Jewish folk architecture.
Bersohn's prodigious activity in researching the history of Polish Jewry resulted in a succession of studies written between 1861 and 1906, of which the best known is a collection of historical documents on Polish Jewry between 1388 and 1782 drawn from the state archives and a biographical dictionary of Jewish scholars in Poland in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Bersohn's most important publication, however, in some ways, the seminal work in the field of the religious art of Polish Jewry, was his Kitka słów …, published between 1895 and 1903 as a special publication of the Committee for Research into the History of Art of the Krakow Academy of Sciences. He wrote in the Introduction:
In several Polish towns inhabited mostly by Jews there are old, wooden synagogues frequently of unusual shape and of a style that seems to defy description.
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- Jews and the Emerging Polish State (Polin Volume Two) , pp. 417 - 418Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2008