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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores issues of belonging and authentication in a Jewish community in post-socialist Poland, where the collective legacy of the past is confronted with the transnational condition of the present.

Paper long abstract:

The Jewish Connection. Negotiation of belonging and politics of recognition in a globalized Polish Jewish community.

The paper explores issues of belonging and authentication in a Jewish community in post-socialist Poland, where the collective legacy of the past is confronted with the global condition of the present.

The majority of newcomers to post-socialist Polish Jewish institutions comes from mixed Jewish and non-Jewish families. Some can substantiate their sense of Jewish belonging by documents and embedding in the Jewish social network, while others have at their disposal only the sense of affinity and familial narratives of commonality and connectedness. Eventually, individuals that engage in the institutional Polish Jewish sociality encounter categorizations and ontologies of Jewishness forged in a transnational, multi-scalar space of Polish Jewish resurgence. The paper explicates how Polish Jewish people legitimate and negotiate Jewish belonging in the setting of minority institutions and how 'authenticity' of claims to Jewishness confronts transnational identity politics with the everyday life of the Wroclaw Jewish Congregation. I will consider how the idiom of kinship is mobilized in the negotiation of social boundaries and reflect on how 'traditional' ontologies of Jewishness are challenged and re-conceptualized to foster a more inclusive sense of community, informed by the haunting legacy of post-War Jewish life in Poland.