“Are there still Jews in Eastern Europe?” The Rediscovery of Central and Eastern European Jews, 1984-1997

Central and East European Jews began to be rediscovered by Western scholars, journalists, and Jewish agencies on the eve of the Communist implosion. Between the years 1984 and 1997, an exponential increase of bibliography and documentation aiming at exploring and attesting to the existence of Jews living on the eastern half of the European continent was taking place. The trend began cautiously, circumscribed to a circle of devoted specialists and observers. But, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the trickle became a flood. Without a doubt, this rediscovery signaled a shift in the way the Jews had been portrayed in previous years. If Jewish life in countries such as the German Democratic Republic, Hungary or Czechoslovakia was deemed to have entered in the limbo of history after 1945—if not directly extinguished, like in Poland—towards the mid-1980s observers began to detect a renovated interest in Jewish culture and traditions by Eastern Europeans of Jewish descent. Eventually they began to speak about “awakened Jewish identities,” “renaissance of Jewish culture,” and “Jewish revivalism.” For instance, oral histories, surveys, cultural studies, reports, journalistic accounts all scrutinized the life stories of Jewish individuals, their awakened Jewish identities, their relationship with Socialism, the impact of antisemitism as well as the past and present of Jewish communal life, just to name a few issues.

These newly crafted narratives ultimately served as a backdrop for the arrival of Jewish philanthropic agencies in Europe, eager to support these developments with the mission of renewing local Jewish communities.

Drawing on organizational reports, scholarly publications, journalistic accounts, as well as travel guides, commemorative books, and photographic essays, from a range of sources including the JDC Archives, this presentation will review the corpus of information produced by specialized observers and Jewish activists, scholars, journalists, writers, photographers and even tourists during the period that went from the immediate years before the fall of the Berlin the Wall to the mid-1990s. We will identify the central elements that started to emerge and circulate in what constituted a renovated vision of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe.

Marcelo Dimentstein, PhD is director of research and evaluation at JDC Europe. Trained as a social anthropologist, since 2009 he has directed the research unit on contemporary Judaism at JDC’s European office, the International Centre for Community Development (JDC-ICCD). In his position as director of the JDC-ICCD, he has coordinated numerous research projects on different phenomena of contemporary Jewish life in Europe. His doctoral dissertation analyzed the transnational history of the reconstruction of Jewish communities after the fall of communism. Marcelo teaches in different community leadership training seminars of Leatid’s European program and oversees the strategies for measuring and evaluating the impact of JDC’s programs in the region. He currently lives in Barcelona with his family.