Decomposing Identities: Shifting Perceptions of Death and Burial among Jews in Interwar Poland

This study focuses on how the Jews living within the Second Polish Republic (1918-1939) transformed their perceptions and treatment of death and the burial of corpses to suit the modern post-war era and new ideas about the meaning of Jewish identity and selfhood. Following the World War, new relationships between the Jews and the state, along with new forms of personal and collective identity, transformed Jewish rituals for marking the end of life. The changes to Jewish funerary practice were particularly reflected in the construction and functioning of burial institutions in urban centers where the most contentious and innovative modifications were typically found. The rise in Jewish suicide in Poland shortly after the end of the World War was also primarily concentrated in cities. This disturbing trend, a key factor in the way that Jews reevaluated their conceptions of death at this time, was spurred on by financial calamity and changes in Jewish selfhood. Interwar Poland was the scene of a re-imagining of Jewish death rites and the way individuals wanted themselves and their loved ones to be remembered in perpetuity, a major change for a population that had overwhelmingly been traditional and insular even through the beginning of the twentieth century. Additionally, the themes of end-of-life care and burial also indicate how the surrounding majority culture came to influence even the most well-established religious rites. Urban burial practices in the Jewish cemeteries of the Second Polish Republic thus represented the spectrum of belief and practices that mirrored the diversity of the population itself and the wide array of Jewish identities common in the period before the Nazi invasion of Poland.%%%%2018-06-13 00:00:00