Although conventionally marked as a four-year conflict (1914–1918), World War I in Central and Eastern Europe unfolded as a prolonged period of violence, instability, and shifting borders that blurred the line between wartime and postwar. For the region’s Jewish populations, the war was not a discrete episode but an extended experience of military occupation, displacement, and uncertainty. Building on this understanding, we adopt the term "the war that never ended" to frame World War I as an ongoing process rather than a clearly bounded event. Within this context, the war drastically reshaped Eastern Europe, redrawing geopolitical borders and transforming social, economic, and political structures across the region, with profound consequences for millions of Jews living in these territories.

Date and venue of the conference

• 23-25 November 2026
• POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

The Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe experienced widespread displacement during the war, as many fled advancing armies or were forcibly expelled from their homes. At the same time, as Jewish soldiers faced each other on the battlefield, the collapse of economic sectors that had traditionally employed large numbers of Jews left many people unemployed and unable to support their families, amid skyrocketing prices and widespread hunger. War-related violence and pogroms produced unprecedented numbers of widows, agunot (deserted wives), and orphans who depended on communal and charitable support. Together, economic collapse, displacement, and the growing reliance on welfare profoundly shaped Jewish life in the decades that followed.

Contemporaries recognized World War I as a formative rupture in Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. Jewish experiences of the Great War featured prominently in interwar autobiographies submitted to YIVO contests and later in post–World War II memorial books (Izkor bikher). Yet over time, the catastrophe of the Holocaust overshadowed this earlier period in Eastern European Jewish history. Recent scholarship has only begun to reexamine the First World War as a critical moment in Jewish history whose long-term effects shaped Jewish society and economic life in the interwar period and beyond.

This conference seeks to bring together scholars working on the Jewish experience of World War I in Eastern Europe, with particular attention to social, economic, gendered, and local perspectives. While some scholars have focused on political or cultural transformations and others on anti-Jewish violence, this conference aims to foster dialogue across these approaches and encourage new methodological and thematic interventions.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Jewish mobility, including displacement, refugees, internment, and postwar resettlement
• War experiences mediated by gender, age, and class
• Economic destruction and reconstruction of Jewish livelihoods
• Daily life during wartime
• Violence broadly understood, but including pogroms, sexual violence, and non-physical violence
• Transformation of communal and religious Jewish life under wartime conditions
• Jewish communal responses and relief efforts
• Memory and commemoration, testimony, and representations of World War I in Jewish sources
• World War I in visual representations and art
• Regional and local case studies across Eastern Europe
• Jewish literature reckoning with the Great War
• Jewish soldiers’ experiences
• Jews and the state in wartime and postwar realities

Papers that explore the consequences of the Great War during the interwar period are also welcome.

Submissions

We invite proposals from scholars at all career stages (starting with advanced PhD students) and from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including history, gender studies, Jewish studies, literary studies, sociology, and anthropology.

Apply

Deadline for submissions: 22 June 2026

For questions, contact: [email protected]

Conference language: English

Organization

The organizers will provide meals and accommodation during the conference. Speakers may apply for partial reimbursement of travel expenses (for speakers travelling form Europe up to 200 USD; within Poland up to 75 USD; from Israel up to 300 USD;  from elsewhere up to 750 USD) if no other funding is available. Preference for funding will be given to early-career and independent researchers. The organizers reserve the right to record and publish conference proceedings.

Conference committee:

• Elissa Bemporad (Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center)
• Aleksandra Jakubczak (POLIN/Technical University of Berlin)
• Vladyslava Moskalets (Center for Urban History, Lviv)
• Kamil Ruszala (Jagiellonian University)
• Jan Rybak (Central European University)
• Marcos Silber (University of Haifa)

Partners:

The conference is organized within the Global Education Outreach Program.

The conference is made possible with support from Taube Philanthropies, William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, Libitzky Family Foundation and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.