Polish Jews by Roman Vishniac 1972

Polish Jews by Roman Vishniac 1972
Paperback

Pages 16+31

Good Condition

IN POLAND and Lithuania, in Galicia and Carpathian Ruthenia, a highly indigenous Jewish culture was developed over the space of seven centuries. Resisting influences of the outer world, these inbred Jewish com- munities adhered to traditional Jewish cus- toms and values. The photographs in this book constitute the last pictorial record of this culture and an accompanying essay by Professor Abraham J. Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary pays tribute to its spirit.

These pictures are largely concerned with what was the major aspect of East-European Jewish life: its intense religious quality. Laboring under the burden of harsh poverty, the Jews yet succeeded in achieving a high degree of spiritual unity. They saw in the study of the Bible and the Talmud the cen- tral purpose of their existence. Knowledge and piety, religion and literature, the Torah and the people were thus bound together. Most desirable of occupations was the re- ligious scholar's, whom the community so much honored that his wife considered it a good deed to work that he might be free to study.

Although in more recent decades there were disintegrative forces at work within the Jewish community, the old ways persisted with much of their ancient vigor - until this epoch of Jewish existence came to an end at Maidanek and Auschwitz.

"THESE PICTURES, " writes their pho- tographer, Roman Vishniac, "were made without letting the subjects know of the presence of a camera. They represent real

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life completely unposed. And so today they have become documents of a lost epoch of a lost people."

The 31 pictures included in this book have been selected from the two thousand which Vishniac took in 1938. Their major theme is the religious absorption of Jewish life in Poland. That two age groups, old men and children, predominate, is not accidental. They were the two groups most involved in religious study. Old men were highly re- spected because their time was wholly devoted to the study of the Torah. Children were looked to with hope, for they would continue to uphold the tradition in their maturity.

At all ages these people are seen with their books. Little children in heder, young Yeshiva students, men in disputation, old scholars all live with the holy books. Even their gravestones, as we see in the last of these pictures, were decorated with carv- ings of books.

A number of pictures show the economic life of the Polish Jews, of which the one entitled "Storekeeper with Nothing to Sell" epitomizes the extremity of a usual economic condition.

Roman Vishniae was born near St. Petersburg in 1897. Following the Russian Revolution he lived first in Latvia and then primarily in Berlin until the Second World War. He became an American citizen in 1946. The contributions that Vishniac has made to the art and to the science of photog- raphy in our time have gained him the eminence of a worldwide reputation.

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