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The periodical Polska Sztuka Ludowa has been of great service both to Polish ethnography and to Polish ethnology. For many years under the direction of Aleksander Jackowski it has published special issues devoted to selected problems (for example, in recent. years, death, kitsch, or the art produced by mentally disturbed persons). The changes in our country have increased interest in the problems of the culture of national minorities. The special issue concerned with the culture of the Lemki (a Ukrainian ethnic group in the western part of the Carpathian Mountains) was a real success and sold out immediately after it appeared. In this volume the director and his staff have offered readers an issue concerned with some specific aspects of the Jewish religion, culture, and customs, especially in small, provincial communities.
By way of an overture, we are offered some fragments of Abraham Joshua Heschel's famous book The Earth is the Lord's. Hasidic mysticism, religious thought, and customs have always been particularly interesting for ethnologists, and there are thus a number of articles dealing with this religious movement, which arose two and a half centuries ago in the eastern part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Ukraine. The article of Zbigniew Targielski deals with dance and music as the expression of Hasidic belief. Jacek Olędzki's essay about the kvitlech from Lefajsk (southern Poland) reveals some interesting new discoveries. Kvitlech are short prayers (requests or thanksgivings, similar to Christian volume votive and ex voto offerings) written on scraps of paper and placed on or beside the tomb of a revered person. In Lefajsk there exists one of the most popular Catholic sanctuaries devoted to the Virgin Mary, and in a small town not far from this place there lived quite a large Jewish population before the Holocaust, mostly Hasidim who revered a highly blessed man, the ‘tsadik miracleworker’ Noam Elimelekh (1717-87). It is a matter of some surprise that the petitions addressed to him were not only Jewish; many Catholic peasants also brought their requests to his tomb. Certainly in many of the articles in this issue of Polska Sztuka Ludowa we find reflections of the coexistence of Polish Jews and Polish peasants.
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