"And Here Stood a Famous Bakery": Visiting Former Jewish Hometowns in Poland and Ukraine after 1989

• In Event: Jewish Travel and Tourism in the Modern Era

Abstract

“And here stood a famous bakery” explained Hesio Heilig to his son Arik. He then pointed to a wooden structure across the street and continued: “This is also where that dog Azor, I told you about, bit me”. Arik Heilig recorded his father’s humorous musings as part of an hour-long film reportage from a trip to his parents’ ancestral town - Borysław (today Borislav, Ukraine). He captured this once vibrant industrial center with a sizeable Jewish community in the midst of a historical turmoil. Heiligs were part of a small group of Holocaust survivors who travelled from Israel to Ukraine only a week into the country’s newly regained independence. Arik’s amateur film, captured a number of individual testimonies and conversations at the sites of familial and communal history before and during the Holocaust. More surprisingly, the film included also numerous interactions with their Borysław’s current inhabitants. This was the first of many such heritage tours organized by a group of friends and acquaintances with roots in the same area of Eastern Galicia.

This paper will analyze family films recorded during the first decade of heritage trips to small Jewish home towns in Poland and Ukraine. It focuses on the encounters with these towns and their inhabitants at the time of political transformation and striking economic difficulties. It seeks to analyze the emergence of a script which gradually came to include a given set of sites and ceremonies. I argue that the amateur, messy accounts helped shape a new model of Jewish tourism to Eastern Europe.

Author

• Natalia Aleksiun, Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies