“Right After the Holocaust”. The Church vis-`a-vis Jewish Issues (July 1944–July 1946)
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 5 (2009), pages: 128-148
Publication date: 2009-11-09
Abstract
The attitude of the Catholic Church toward the Jews after World War II is a difficult issue in Polish–Jewish history, largely dominated by emotions and stereotypes. This text shows a fragment of the relations between the Church and the Jews since the end of military operations in eastern postwar Poland in the spring of 1944 until the Kielce Jewish pogrom in July 1946. The proposed chronology allows us to answer the question whether and to what extent the shadow of the Holocaust change theattitude of the Catholic Church toward the Jews. An examination of immediate postwar period is important because what had been worked in the early days influenced the Church’s position at such a dramatic moment as the Kielce pogrom as well as later. The paper presents the situation of the Church and the Jewish community the moment the war ended, and describes the mutual perceptions of the Church and the Jews in postwar realities. The text discussed how Jewish issue was presented by the hierarchs, the clergy, the Catholic press and the faithful.
Keywords
Jews in Poland after 1944, the Church and the Jews, relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews in Poland after 1944
License
Copyright (c) 2009 Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Other articles by the same auhtor(s)
- Bożena Szaynok, Retained in the Archives. Provincial Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performances in Poznań Towards the Jewish Subject Matter in the Catholic Press (1945–1950) , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 15 (2019)
- Bożena Szaynok, Remarks on a New Book about the Kielce Pogrom , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 14 (2018)
- Bożena Szaynok, Gross Jan Tomasz, Strach Fear. Anti-Semitism In Poland after Auschwitz, Random House, New York 2006 , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 2 (2006)
- Bożena Szaynok, Sine ira et studio...In memory of Krystyna Kersten , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 4 (2008)
- Bożena Szaynok, After the Holocaust. Before the Second Vatican Council. Image of Jews in letters to Tygodnik Powszechny after the publication of Jerzy Turowicz’s article Antisemitism (March 1957) , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 19 (2023)