UNSETTLED HERITAGE by Yechiel Weizman

Author:Yechiel Weizman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published: 2021-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Residual Presence

An empty, grass-covered rectangle: this is what can be seen today after heading northeast from Olkusz’s main square, up Florianska street, and turning right on Bóżnicza (synagogue) street. The symmetrical emptiness is striking. The plot breaks the line of buildings and leaves an unexpected void, clearly delineating the existence, or rather absence, of something. Only the street name and a commemorative plastic plaque installed on a nearby wall disclose that here stood the town’s synagogue until 1957. Shortly before its demolition by Olkusz authorities and local volunteers, the synagogue had been described as a polluted space, swarming with pests and spreading infectious diseases.1 Today it is clean, inasmuch as nothingness can be so construed. Remarkably, although the cleared site has been at the town’s disposal since 1957, nothing permanent has been built there, despite the lack of legal and material impediments to construction.

Why has this site, in the center of town, remained empty, despite several urgent petitions, on behalf of local officials and organizations, to convert the synagogue—when it was still standing—for other public needs? In 2015, I met ninety-five-year-old Mieczysław Karwiński in Olkusz. Karwiński was a well-known public activist and a veteran of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), who remembered well the demolition of the synagogue.2 When I asked him about the vacant lot, he looked at me, puzzled, and answered, “You have to understand, the town couldn’t build anything there—it simply didn’t belong to them.”3 This enigmatic answer re-evokes the juridical, conceptual, or moral doubts over the question of Jewish ownership and implies that the town did not have an ultimate right to use this empty Jewish square. The fact that nothing was built on this piece of land and Karwiński’s explanation for this mystery might also testify to a sense of unease, a fear of building on a land of a religious space, or perhaps to some level of remorse about demolishing it.4 True, in most cases, after local Polish authorities were able to successfully clear away abandoned synagogues and cemeteries, the vacated lots were built on and used.5 In Olkusz, however, and in other towns, there appeared to be some restraint from using the cleared Jewish space for mundane purposes.

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