March 1968:
 Fifty Years After the Last Jewish Exodus from Poland

Conference & Film screening in Tel Aviv

March 1968:
 Fifty Years After the Last Jewish Exodus from Poland  

14:00 Introductions, with Prof. Raanan Rein, Vice President, Tel Aviv University, and Dr. Anna C. Zielinska (AEMJP / University of Lorraine, France)  

14:30-16:30  – 1968 in History, moderated by Prof. Havi Dreifuss (TAU)


Prof. Dariusz Stola (POLIN Museum, Warsaw)


Dr. Anat Plocker (Stockton University, US)


Prof. Jan Wolenski (Krakow)   


17:00-18:15  – Personal Recollections, moderated by Dr. Scott Ury (TAU)

Prof. Marek Karliner (Tel Aviv University)
 


Prof. Stanislaw Krajewski (University of Warsaw)  

18:30-20:00 – 1968 in Art and Film:  Screening of “Happy Jews” by Jonathan Rozenbaum, “Lake ’68” by Irit Shamgar, and Discussion 


Irit Shamgar (film director)

Dr. 
Ela Bauer (Seminar Ha-Kibbutzim College) 


Marek Rozenbaum (film director and producer)
  

Venue: BEIT HATFUTSOT Museum at the Tel Aviv University Campus, 17 Klausner Street, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Bnai Zion Auditorium  

contact email: [email protected]  

Context

In March 2018, the POLIN Museum in Warsaw will open a new exhibition on the events of March 1968 in Poland, the anti-Zionist campaign of the Polish Communist government that led to the forced emigration of some 13,000 Polish Jews, half of the Polish Jewish community at the time.   Many of those who had to leave Poland in wake of 1968 came to Israel. This was the third large wave of Polish-Jewish immigration to the state after those of 1945-1949 and 1956-1960. For many, the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 and the Polish Jewish exodus that it caused seemed to be the end of the history of Jews in Poland. The community was reduced to a few thousand people and its cultural institutions were reduced to their shadows.  

The events of 1968 were also a shock as the campaign, barely covered by the fig leaf of anti-Zionism, took place less than twenty-five years after the war in the country most affected by the Shoah, under a regime that had promised to eradicate and combat all forms of ethnic hatred.  

We would like to invite you to a unique international event dedicated to both the fiftieth anniversary of these events and the exhibition recently opened in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The exhibition is supported by the European Association of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (AEMPJ), and the conference at Tel Aviv University is co-sponsored by the AEMPJ in cooperation with Tel Aviv University’s Institute for Polish Jewish History and Israel-Poland Relations and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at TAU. 

The conference will include academic, personal and artistic presentations and discussions that will shed light on this chapter in the history of Polish Jews, its impact on Israeli society, and its legacy in contemporary Polish society.