Systemic Yiddish Teaching in the Lodz Ghetto: Successes and Failures

Thursday, May 15 | 1:00pm ET
On Zoom

Monika Polit considers the surviving documentation left by the Ghetto School Department and other texts produced by the administration of the Lodz Ghetto in order to elucidate the phenomenon of Yiddish as a language of instruction in the ghetto school system.

The educational system in the Łódź Ghetto has already been described and analyzed more than once. Relevant chapters in canonical monographs have been devoted to this issue by Wolf Jasny, Yeshaya Trunk, and Yitzhak Rubin. In a series of exhaustive articles, Danuta Dąbrowska wrote on this subject in the 1960s. Additionally, drawing both on the work of their illustrious predecessors and on new findings of their own, the functioning of this branch of the ghetto administration has been recounted by researchers of the younger generation such as Andrea Löw and Adam Sitarek. All of the above-mentioned publications considered the theme of the systematic teaching of Yiddish, which was implemented as a language of instruction in the ghetto in the autumn of 1940. However, the issue of Yiddish language instruction in the ghetto has not been discussed at any length anywhere and remains an important cultural. In this lecture, Monika Polit will consider the surviving documentation left by the Ghetto School Department and other texts produced by the administration of the Łódź Ghetto in order to elucidate the phenomenon of Yiddish as a language of instruction in the ghetto school system.

About the Speaker

Monika Polit is a professor and literary scholar who teaches Yiddish language and literature in the Department of Jewish History and Culture at the Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw. She is the author of numerous translations from Yiddish and studies of scholarly editions of sources. She has published, among others: Encyclopedia of the Ghetto. The Unfinished Project of the Lodz Ghetto Archivists (2014, compiled with Krystyna Radziszewska, Ewa Wiatr, Adam Sitarek, and Jacek Walicki); The Writings of Peretz Opoczynski (Ringelblum Archive, vol. 31, 2017); Jozef Zelkowicz, “The writer of these words is an employee of a ghetto institution…. “From the Diary” and Other Writings from the Lodz Ghetto (2019), The Ringelblum Archive: Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, vol. 7 (2022, compiled with Eleonora Bergman and Ewa Wiatr).