Feature: Through the Eastern lense

Each week this summer, K. brings you a selection of six texts that have already appeared in our pages, and have been brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week, we invite you to (re)discover K. ‘s work about the realities of and stories to be told from life in Eastern Europe. With texts by Benny Ziffer, Gabriel Rom, Romano Bolkovic, Yeshaya Dalsace, Emmy Barouh and János Gadó.

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In search of Sabbatai Zevi, the self-proclaimed messiah who led a crypto-Jewish sect

By Benny Ziffer – Published October 29th, 2021

In search of Sabbataï Zevi, his tomb, and above all his heritage, Benny Ziffer, Israeli journalist and author, invites us on a strange journey to the heart of the Balkans where the presence of the false Jewish messiah and the traces of Judaism continue to imperceptibly infuse the minds. Another way to visit Albania.

>>> Read Benny Ziffer’s text

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Restore to forget: Poland and its Jewish cemeteries

By Gabriel Rom – Published May 2nd, 2024

Poland once had more than 1,500 Jewish cemeteries. Since Poland’s current Jewish population is estimated at 10,000, the math is stark: today in Poland there is about one Jewish cemetery for every 15 living Polish Jews. In the report — which we are publishing in two parts — American journalist Gabriel Rom tells us about both the virtuous initiatives to preserve these cemeteries and the vicious policies of exploitation to which they are subjected.

>>> Raed Gabriel Rom’s report

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Between Nazis and Ustachis: Croatia’s Holocaust Memorial

By Romano Bolkovic – Published May 27th, 2021

The monument dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust planned to be erected in Zagreb in the coming months has been completed, but is still kept in three different factories. It has to be said that the controversy, which reflects an ambiguous Croatian memory of the Ustasha past and its crimes during the war, is still ongoing. What should be inscribed on the monument? What message should it carry? The journalist Romano Bolković retraces for K. a story that seems to him as twisted as a Coen brothers’ script…

• >>> Read Romano Bolkovic’s article

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  A short trip to Ukraine: The Converts of Munkács.

• By Yeshaya Dalsace – Published March 29th, 2023
  

  Rabbi of the Massorti community in France, Yeshaya Dalsace went to Ukraine to Munkács – Moukatchevo in Ukrainian – where only a hundred Jews remain. A rabbinical conversion commission was recently organized there for about fifteen people. The process, which began years ago, had been suspended by the war. A travelogue.

  

  >>> Read Yeshaya Dalsace’s travelogue

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  Men in Black in Sofia’s Streets

• By Emmy Barouh – Published March 31st, 2021
  

  In Sofia, the “Lukov March” took place in February, an annual event organized for almost twenty years by the Bulgarian National Union – Edelweiss (BNUE). The march commemorates the memory of a pro-Nazi Defense Minister of the thirties, assassinated by Communist resistance fighters in 1943. Every year, the great and good of the European neo-Nazi movement like to gather there. The journalist Emmy Barouh, author of several books on the history of Bulgarian Jews and the memory of the Shoah in her country, was in 2021 in the streets of Sofia: She examined for K. the history and continued relevance of this event. In 2022, she increases her report with an update on the Bulgarian atmosphere of the moment… which has not gotten any better.

  

  >>> Read Emmy Barouh’s article

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  A New Deal for Hungary’s Jews

• By János Gadó – Published April 28th, 2021
  

  What kind of coexistence Viktor Orbán considers to be functional for Hungarian Jews and what is the reception of his politic on the Jewish side? János Gadó answers this question for K., providing an overview in which he discusses both the difficult issue of the memory of the Holocaust in Hungary, Orbán’s relationship with Israel, and the divisions that exist within Hungarian Jewry.

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• >>> Read János Gadó’s article