Self-Government between the Shtetl and the Village: Rural Leaders and Jewish-Polish Relations in the Lublin Countryside before World War II

Monday May 20, 2024 1:00pm

Portrait of a Jewish village head and his family in Sawin (near Chełm), 1925. The Yiddish caption reads: “Poland still has one Jewish 'soltis'..." (YIVO, Collection PO, Record ID 9032).

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in Polish Jewish Studies

The Aleksander and Alicja Hertz Memorial Fellowship and the Samuel and Flora Weiss Research Fellowship

Admission: Free

Registration is required.

The village head (in Polish: sołtys) was a familiar feature of life in the countryside of the Second Polish Republic and a leader who shaped the daily lives of rural inhabitants through wide ranging economic, social, and security responsibilities. This lecture will offer initial reflections on the role and significance of Christian and Jewish village heads in prewar village and town societies in the Lublin region, as well as introduce Miranda Brethour’s dissertation project on the collaboration of rural institutions with the German occupiers during the Holocaust in Poland. Considering an array of sources, including prewar memoirs, religious and secular self-government records, and court files, Brethour will describe how rural leadership—such as the village head—was an important site of interaction between Jews and Christians in the Lublin countryside leading up to German occupation.

About the Speaker

Miranda Brethour is a PhD Candidate at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center writing a dissertation on rural Polish self-government and the Holocaust in the Lublin region. She received her BA (2017) and MA (2019) in History from the University of Ottawa in Canada. Her dissertation, entitled “Faithful German Servants” or “Good Polish Citizens”? Violence, the Village Head, and Daily Life in Interwar and Occupied Poland, 1918 to 1956, has been supported by fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research, the Central European History Society, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is also the recipient of the 2023-2024 Fellowship in Polish Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.