The memory of ordinary, everyday intercultural or interreligious relationships, in brief
In a number of towns in the northeast of present-day Poland, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together for centuries. Holly Robertson Huffnagle (2015) has underlined the ways in which, before the Holocaust, the interactions of the three parts of the population were once normal. Out of the needs of poor townsfolk of the three religions, solidarities and friendships were born, meaning friends and neighbours shared what they had in the public marketplaces, and in their homes; children grew up together; families shared in each others’ rituals, festivals and life cycle events.
The context in which these relationships made a difference at the time
Across the modern period, poverty, scarcity, and the need for material resources through the more marginalised sectors of the population together in towns throughout this region. Huffnagle records in particular the solidarities between Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews and Tatar Muslims, living alongside Catholics and Orthodox Belorussians in a region in which cultural and religious difference was an obvious feature of many towns where trade was done. This meant there were Yiddish-speaking Tatars, and communities which in their poverty shared charitable endeavours, weddings, funerals, dances. For men, there was in many cases a self-conscious interreligious sharing: Jews would do circumcisions in the Tatar communities in Slonim and Iwje.In Mir, Tatars would buy kosher meat for kurban bayram. Among shared holy sites, the most significant local site was Łowczyce, near Nowogródek, a cemetery that contained the grave of St Kontuś (Ewlija Kontuś). Tatars believed that the grave held healing powers and during the interwar period they would travel there with Jews and Christians who shared a similar belief.
For women, from youth onwards, the relationships built across religious and linguistic divides were fostered by common education in schools where they were taught, by nuns, in Polish. This created an important opening between Jewish and Muslim families where Jewish men studied separately, in religious colleges (yeshivot) where classes were taught in Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish.
What has happened since, which makes the memory valuable
We hope the Memory Bank will be a means by which families with personal memories may share how meaningful they are, while national conflicts and enmities are very quickly turned to as resources for explaining the region’s past, present and future. The Holocaust decimated the Jewish population in this region. After 1945, acculturation to a common Polish culture replaced the earlier diversity of towns and villages here, and at times the lack of exchange across national borders has deepened the cultural divides that are associated with the mainstream cultures of the four neighbouring states here, Poland, Belarus, Russia (Kaliningrad) and Lithuania. The region remains economically marginal, and its colourful multicultural past may remind residents and emigrants that there were real strengths in the vibrant and diverse local society which developed here over some centuries. Huffnagle points out that the afterlife of Jewish-Muslim interaction was evident in the Holocaust, when some Jews were able to save their lives by pretending to be Tatar.
How might the memory be used in bringing people together in practice now?
These memories are very personal to families and members of the communities in which they were forged, but they also show how residents looked to each other for support and friendship beyond politicised differences. These stories of solidarity may be used in education about the wider region, as they unsettle stereotypes about the causes of division between the neighbouring states, Poland, Russia, Belarus and Lithuania. Although multiculturalism has been less firmly entrenched in the towns of the northeast since 1945, its small towns and villages continue to play an important part in the culture of Polish, Jewish and Tatar communities. One of the main motivations of the Memory Bank project has been to suggest the ways in which very real solidarities between ordinary people reveal the strengths needed for new local enterprise and for new social developments which also rely on collaborations between ordinary women and men. Huffnagle’s article also shows how Jews, Muslims and Christians drew educational lessons from the ability to compare religions and cultures: they saw the similarities, and were used to thinking about the social value associated with their identity and religious tradition in new lights.
Additional context/Some additional reading
Holly Robertson Huffnagle (2015) “Peaceful coexistence?” Jewish and Muslim neighbors on the eve of the Holocaust, East European Jewish Affairs, 45:1, 42-64, DOI:
10.1080/13501674.2015.961879For background on the region, there is a wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kresy