Historical Background and Interviews
I. Ludvipol: A Modem Shtetl Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
Hatefutsoth, votes for the Sixteenth Zionist Congress (1929) from Ludvipol were discounted for an unknown reason, but in 1933, Ludvipol voters cast 153 votes for the slate of the Eretz Yisrael Labor Party and fifty-four for the Mizrahi Party. Meanwhile, Poland’s government after the First World War was working “to accord the new state a distinctly Polish national char- acter, while consolidating its economic and cultural standing.” 4 While Ukrainians and Byelorussians lived in clearly defined areas, Jews were scattered throughout the country in thousands of small settlements, as well as a handful of cities. In 1931, Poland’s econ- omy was based on agriculture, but only a small minority of Jews (4 percent) were farmers. Far more were involved in commerce, management, trade, and crafts, and about 42 percent in industries such as lumber, textiles, clothing, and food. Jews were also heavily represented in the professions open to them, especially law, medi- cine, social welfare, journalism, and publishing. They were rarely able to obtain government jobs, however, because the authorities were strict about maintaining the state’s Polish national character. 6 Between 1934 and 1939, as relationships in the country between Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians deteriorated, new taxes on Jews and Jewish businesses, as well as other restrictive economic policies, caused more Jewish businesses to close. Jewish merchants, man- agers of estates and businesses, and craftsmen were targeted by Poles and Ukrainians as unwanted and “nonproductive” — and, even worse, the cause of Polish and Ukrainian poverty. This was the culmination of generations of church-sanctioned propaganda blaming the Jews for the rest of the population’s trou- bles. Besides the large number of traders, merchants, leaseholders and managers of mills, taverns, and estates, the major dealers in grains, cattle, horses, and other domestic animals, and the money lenders were Jews. It was easy to blame unpleasant business trans- actions on them as a group, and anti-Semitism spread from Germa- ny in the east and the Ukraine in the west. In 1935, the most powerful figure in Polish politics since 1918, Josef Pilsudski, died. Pilsudski had championed a relatively liberal Jóseph 5
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