Fotograficzne judaika w zbiorach Muzeum Etnograficznego im. Seweryna Udzieli w Krakowie

Abstrakt

JEWISH PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE COLLECTION OF THE SEWERYN UDZIELA ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM IN KRAKÓW

Photographs presenting Jewish subjects constitute the largest collection of Judaica within the archive of the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków. Among the oldest, and the most priceless of them, are those from the album of Prof. Izydor Kopernicki (1825–1891) titled Types et costumes de la Pologne. The set contains 104 photographs from the period spanning from the 1860s until the 1880s representing the Jewish population, mostly that of Kraków, Lwów, and Warsaw, but also the odd examples from a_numer of smaller towns of the former Eastern Galicia. Over a half of all the photographs portraying Jewish types were produced by two Kraków-based photographers of Jewish descent: Szymon Balicer (ca. 1824–1885), and Ignacy Krieger (1817–1889). Eleven photographs from the 1870s and the 1880s were produced by Michał Greim (1828–1911); in these images the author immortalized the figures of the Jews of Podolia. Photographs by Władysław Postawka (1883–1932) dating from the beginning of the 20th century show the Jewish inhabitants of the author’s family estates in the Swietokrzyskie region. The photographs from the times of WWI were produced as part of the documentary works of the Tourist Commission which had been established in 1916 in German-occu pied Warsaw. The territorial scope  of the places and figures immortalized in these photographs, many of which represent Jewish people, is primarily the area of Congress Poland: Warsaw, Łódz, Łeczyca, Kutno, Łuków, Sandomierz, Biała Podlaska and others, the only exception being the photographs taken in Kazimierz – the Jewish quarter of Kraków. Two larger groups of photographs date from the interwar period (early 1930s). The first set contains materials from the Swiatowid Photographic Agency: photographs by Wilhelm Ze’ev Aleksandowicz, showing views from Kraków’s Kazimierz district, as well as the wedding of the daughter of the second Bobover Rebbe, Ben Zion Halberstam. The second set contains a_series of outdoor portrait photographs by an unknown author, depicting the Jews of Myslenice. A_group of dramatic photographs from the Holocaust period, depicting the inhabitants of one of the smaller ghettoes in the General Government (1940–1942) also survive at the Ethnographic Museum. Moreover, the Museum’s Archive has preserved an assortment of individual photographs presenting a variety of Jewish subjects, such as cemeteries and synagogues, most of which no longer exist.