JERUSALEM (EJP)--- A four-day international conference exploring Polish attitudes toward Jews and the events of the Holocaust will take place at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem next week.

Researchers from Poland, the United States and Israel will present new findings on various aspects of the Polish population grappling with the post-Holocaust era.  How did Polish society and people deal with the fact that the Holocaust, to a great extent took place in their midst? How did Jewish survivors rebuild lives in Poland?

They will look at the Polish society through the anti-Semitic pogroms in the immediate aftermath of the war, the communist era, and the fall of communism until today,

The conference, “The Aftermath of the Holocaust: Poland 1944-2010” is being held by the Diana Zborowski Center for the Study of the Aftermath of the Shoah of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem from October 3-6, 2010.  

For decades the destruction of Polish Jewry has dominated the study of the Shoah but it was only recently that the unprecedented challenges of the return to life of the surviving Jews has begun to attract sustained scholarly attention.

Presented at the conference will be research on the first encounters of survivors with post-war Polish society, reverberations of the Kielce pogrom, rebuilding Jewish life in Poland, post-war emigration of Jews from Poland, the origins and results of the communist regime's anti-Semitic campaign.

Jan Tomasz Gross, author of the groundbreaking books Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland and Fear Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz: An Essay in historical Interpretation, will present the keynote address at the opening session on October 3 at 16:00, on the interaction between Jews and the local population during the war, particularly plunder and killings. 

The full program is available at: http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/institute/pdf/program_conference_the_aftermath_of_the_holocaust.pdf