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| Young Poles seek to retrieve the past
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Piotr Pazinski, Editor-in-Chief of Midrasz, a Jewish Magazine published in Warsaw
Photo: Ryszard Bankowicz
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Midrasz is a Jewish social and cultural monthly magazine, dealing with the life of Jews in Poland and abroad. Published on a monthly basis in Polish in Warsaw since 1997, Midrasz brings 56 pages of essays, book reviews, short stories, foreign news, mostly from Israel and religious commentaries.
No similar publication has existed in Poland since the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 crushed Jewish initiatives in the country.
To date four issues have appeared in English; the latest one in December 2005 featured a selection of articles from regular Polish editions.
Under its first editor-in-chief, Konstanty Gebert, who today limits himself to the role of the chairman of the Midrasz Association, which is the magazine’s publisher, Midrasz tried also to cover the current news about the Jewish community in Poland, only to realize that this is not compatible with the format of a monthly publication. Today every issue opens with the cover story on several pages. Subjects range from survey of cities with a large Jewish community to studies of women in Judaism, essays on Franz Kafka or commentaries on the artistic production of Bruno Schultz.
The Midrasz bookshop stocks recent Judaic books that readers of the magazine can buy at competitive prices.
The circulation of Midrasz is 2,500 copies of which half is sold through subscription, both in Poland and abroad, while the newsstand sale is limited to selected chains and bookshops. Unsold copies are often ordered by at a later date by readers with a specific interest in topics covered in a certain issue.
Because of the relatively small circulation number, sales alone would not allow the magazine, that employs five persons, to make ends meet. As there are almost no ads, the magazine is totally dependant on grants and donors, such as the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation.
The editorial office is located next to the Jewish Theatre, in the Warsaw Jewish Centre, where most of the city’s Jewish institutions are housed.
EJP spoke to Midrasz’s editor-in-chief, Piotr Pazinski
EJP: Who are the Midrasz readers?
Piotr Pazinski: As we see them, also with the help of the readership analysis, about half of them are non-Jewish. A significant group abroad is made up of Jews who had to leave Poland after March 1968. They are interested in reading about Jewish issues, but in Polish. They live in Israel, the US, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, but also as far as in Australia, where we have a few subscribers. And there is, obviously, a strong group of loyal readers in Poland, with many of them subscribing to or buying Midrasz since it first appeared. This shows that the magazine definitely meets an existing need.
EJP: And who are the Polish readers, with no trace of Jewish origin in their roots?
PP: They are mostly young people with an interest in Poland’s Jewish past. Just this month, our cover story, “The Rescuers of Memory”, is devoted to these kinds of people. This is, I would say, a new phenomenon, something that is developing right now.
They are grandsons and granddaughters of Poles who witnessed the Holocaust, and who for various reasons chose not to talk about it to their children. And all of a sudden many young representatives of the third generation begin to ask themselves questions on the Jewish inhabitants of their towns who were their grandfathers’ contemporaries, who contributed so much to everyday life and to the whole neighbourhood, and who disappeared both from human memory and from the official history of places they lived.
The young people, university and college students, work on their own websites where they dig out details of their hometowns’ Jewish history. They care for what was left of the local Jewish cemeteries, try to decipher inscriptions on grave stones, reach for anything they can read on what they feel was also a part of the history of Poland. All these leads them to becoming the Midrasz readers.
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