American Jews Extending Their Hand to Brethren in Poland: The JDC in Poland, 1914–1950
POLIN Museum, in collaboration with the JDC Archives, invites you to participate in a four-part online mini-course to accompany the new temporary exhibition "1945. Not the End, Not the Beginning," which is devoted to the experience of Jews in Poland in 1945. This course explores the JDC's activities in Polish territories from 1914 to 1950.
- 4, 11, 18, 25 May 2025
- 12PM–1PM US Eastern Time, 6PM–7PM Central European Time
- Registration →
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American Jews established the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1914, upon hearing about the precarious situation of Jews in war-torn Europe. From the outset, the JDC focused its relief efforts in Polish territories, home to the largest Jewish population in Europe. The JDC surveyed the social, economic, and sanitary situation of Jews on the Eastern front and provided relief to needy Jews who had lost their homes and livelihoods. The JDC continued to provide vital services in Poland throughout the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and early postwar years. In 1950, Poland’s communist government forced the JDC to cease its activities in Poland.
The course, by exploring the JDC’s activities in each of these periods, will provide a comprehensive picture of the organization’s role in supporting Jewish life in Poland during these difficult years.
4 May
- Zachary Mazur – War, Hunger and Pogroms: The JDC Serving Jews in Eastern Europe, 1917–1921
Zachary Mazur is Senior Historian at POLIN Museum, Research Fellow at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IH PAN) and Instructor at the Anthropos Doctoral School of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He obtained his PhD at Yale University, where he wrote a dissertation on interwar Poland under the direction of Prof. Timothy Snyder. He has published numerous articles in, among others, "Contemporary European History, East European Politics and Societies."
11 May
- Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska – Teaching Hygiene, Child Welfare and Modern Motherhood: The JDC in Interwar Poland
Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska is Associate Professor at the American Studies Center of the University of Warsaw, and in 2024/25 academic year a Fulbright scholar at the University of Maryland. She specializes in twentieth century social and cultural history of the United States and Poland and in transnational history. Her areas of research include women’s and gender history, history of humanitarianism, and history of immigration.
18 May
- Kamil Kijek – The activity of the JDC and new research perspectives on Jewish life in Poland in the first years after the Holocaust
Kamil Kijek is Assistant Professor at the Jewish Studies Department, University of Wrocław, Poland. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York and at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, as well as at the Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and at the Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich. In 2018 he has received an international prize for an outstanding publication granted by The Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East-European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for the book "Dzieci modernizmu." In 2025 he had coauthored historical exhibition of POLIN Museum "1945. Not the End, Not the Beginning."
25 May
- Maria Ferenc – The JDC in German-occupied Poland
Maria Ferenc is a sociologist and cultural historian writing about Polish Jews during the Holocaust. She works at the Taube Jewish Studies Department of the University of Wroclaw. She coordinated the research project "Encyclopedia of the Warsaw Ghetto" at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. She is the author of, among others, "Każdy pyta, co z nami będzie. Mieszkańcy getta warszawskiego wobec wiadomości o wojnie i Zagładzie" [Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us. Inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto in the face of news of the war and the Holocaust, 2021].
The mini-course is organized within the Global Education Outreach Program.
This program was made possible thanks to Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, Libitzky Family Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.
