JDC – The Global Archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee: Insights from the JDC Archives-Series (Web)

Time: Mo, 10.02.2025, 12:00 pm (Eastern) | 06:00 pm (CET)
Venue: virtual space – via New York
Registration (Web)

While the Second World War and the Holocaust overshadow the previous traumatic experiences of Eastern European Jewry, World War I also constituted a life-changing experience for millions of Eastern European Jews. The conflict created a vast number of Jewish refugees, ruined Jewish businesses, and brought mass Jewish emigration to a halt. The unprecedented precarious situation of Eastern European Jewish communities drew the attention of American Jewry which, for the first time, got involved directly in the region to support their fellow Jews in dire need. Drawing on material from the JDC Archives, memoirs, autobiographies, local press, and Jewish communal reports, this talk will explore how Jewish women experienced these challenging years of displacement, violence, and economic ruin. It will discuss the limited options, from peddling and sex work to applying for charity, that were available to Jewish women on the Eastern home front.

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. Since 2022, she has been working as a chief historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warszawa. She received her Ph.D. in Jewish History at Columbia Univ. in New York in 2023. Her doctoral dissertation, titled „(Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, 1870-1939,“ explored how Eastern European Jewish women experienced urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration by examining their involvement in selling and organizing sex. She is currently the Rothschild HaNadiv fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical Univ. of Berlin, where she is pursuing a new research project about the transformation of Jewish family life in Poland between 1914 and 1945. She is the recipient of the 2024 Sorrell and Lorraine Chesin/JDC Archives Fellowship.

This is the fifth program in the JDC Archives webinar series, Exploring the Jewish Experience in Poland from WWI to the Holocaust: Insights from the JDC Archives. This webinar is supported by Miriam „Mimi“ Pasternak Toubin (z“l) Public Educational Programming from the JDC Archives.

Source: H-Net Notifications