2nd Annual Conference
The World Crisis of 1914-1920 and the Fate of the East European Jewry.

On November 7-9, 2004, the International Center for Russian & East European Jewish Studies hosted in St. Petersburg the 2nd annual conference of the series The History and Culture of East European Jewry: New Sources, New Approaches. The first conference took place in Moscow in December of 2003. The theme of the 2004 conference was The World Crisis of 1914-1920 and the Fate of the East European Jewry. The conference was organized by the Center in cooperation with the St. Petersburg Judaica center of the European University in St. Petersburg, the Vilnius Center for the Study of East European Jewry and the Nevzlin Center for the Study of Russian and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The conference was timed to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the breaking out of World War I, which became a turning point in the history of Europe in general, and East European Jewry in particular. The war led to collapse of the Russian, Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires, revolutionary upheavals, birth of new states, and radical revision of borderlines. The world crisis entailed a horrible ordeal and a test of courage for East European Jewry: mobilizations en masse into the armies of the warring states, deportations, pogroms, destruction of the traditional way of life, forced migrations. At the same time, this period was also marked by a peculiar sociological phenomenon: unprecedented intensity of Jewish involvement in the political life.

The Organization Committee, consisting of the members of the Academic Board of the Center, received a large number of proposals from scholars all over the world. Rigorous selection process yielded over 30 participating academics from Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, Poland, Great Britain, the United States, Sweden. The number of participants was not limited to the speakers, panel participants and chairs. Many specialists in the fields discussed at the conference, and the Petersburg intellectuals, came to hear the papers presented, and to participate in the discussions.

The program of the conference included 22 papers, which covered a broad range of problems. Participants in the closing discussion have noted that the theme of the conference was well chosen and formulated, and that the papers often built upon one another. The principle of multidisciplinarity - one of the foundation principles of the Center - was also maintained: along with papers focused on political and social history, there were those that advocated a cultural approach. Analysis of the reaction of the Jewish philosophers, writers and historians to the world catastrophe was no less interesting, and often even more “provocative”, than purely historical studies based upon new archival findings or proposing new interpretations of the past events.

Materials of the conference will be published as a collection of articles in Russian, and will be available to the academe and all those interested in the history and culture of the East European Jewry.

Conference Program
Photos

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