European Jewish Life before World War II

About This Lesson

In previous lessons, students learned about the effect of World War I on Germany and how its aftermath created conditions that helped give rise to the Nazis in the years that followed. In this lesson, students will continue this unit’s historical case study by learning more about Jewish life across Europe at the time of the Nazis’ ascension to power. This lesson serves two crucial and related purposes:

1. It provides a counterbalance to the historical antisemitic and racist ideas and actions students learn about throughout this unit. Despite the efforts of the Nazis to reduce the lives and experiences of Jews to a “single story,” Jewish life throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was marked by great diversity, as it is today. Reality did not conform to the myths and stereotypes.
2. It will help students better appreciate the lives and cultures that were lost when they later learn about the devastation of European Jewry during the Holocaust. Students will also consider in this lesson the ways in which Jews were interwoven in the societies in which they lived and the ways in which they lived apart (by force or by choice). Students will think about how separation affected the beliefs and attitudes that non-Jewish Europeans developed about their Jewish neighbors.

Essential Question

How can learning about the choices people made during past episodes of injustice, mass violence, or genocide help guide our choices today?

Guiding Questions

• How can we describe Jewish life in Europe between the two twentieth-century world wars?
• How can isolation and unfamiliarity between groups influence the beliefs that members of one group form about members of another? How can this lead to the creation or reinforcement of “in” groups and “out” groups?

Learning Objectives

• Through an analysis of images and film, students will recognize that Jewish life in the 1920s was characterized by great variety in religious practice, culture, national affiliation, occupation, wealth, and status.
• Students will explore the idea that when groups in a society live separately and are unfamiliar with one another, they might develop myths and stereotypes about each other that can cause harm, especially to the less powerful group.

Lesson Plan

Activity 1: Analyze Photos of Pre-War Jewish Life in Eastern Europe

Students will begin to learn about pre-war Jewish life in eastern Europe by examining a series of photographs from the period. Students will need to see the entire Pre-War Jewish Life in Eastern Europe gallery of nine photographs, from which they will choose one to examine more closely.

Tell students that they are about to look at photographs depicting scenes from “everyday” Jewish life in eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Before introducing the photographs, ask students to think for a moment about what they expect they might see.

Then give students a few minutes to browse through all of the photographs in the collection. As they browse, instruct them to choose one photo that resonates with them for some reason. For instance, the photograph might remind them of a moment or experience in their own lives, or there might be something about the photograph that surprises or captivates them.

Pass out the handout Photo Analysis of Pre-War Jewish Life. This handout includes a version of the Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World strategy modified for use with photographs.

Ask at least one student per image to share with the class his or her response to one of the questions on the Photo Analysis of Pre-War Jewish Life handout.

Then ask students to think for a moment about the entire set of images. Have them respond to the following question in their journals:

• What do these pictures tell you about the lives of eastern European Jews during the period before World War II? What stories might be missing from this collection of pictures? What questions do the images leave unanswered?

After students have completed their journal writing, ask them to volunteer some of the conclusions they drew from the photo gallery activity while you record their ideas on the board.

Activity 2: Analyze Film Representations of Pre-War Life in Warsaw

Now that students have drawn some preliminary conclusions from their investigation of European Jewish life before World War II, share the following background information with them:

• Before World War II, Jews lived in varied communities, spanning eastern and western Europe, with diverse cultures and ways of life. Jews in Europe came from small towns as well as cities, and they were active in music, theater, politics, the military, business, and education. While for many, being Jewish was central to their identity, for others it was just one part of who they were.
• In the latter half of the nineteenth century, many European Jews lived in small villages called shtetls, where they were often isolated from many aspects of modern life, especially if the shtetl was not near a city or railway line, while many other Jews moved to cities. Some in the cities chose to live more secular and modern lives than shtetl Jews lived and worked to integrate themselves within a broader European society. Others strongly valued Jewish religious and cultural tradition. Still others lived somewhere in between tradition and modernity, and between the religious and the secular.

Introduce the documentary film A Day in Warsaw (10:18). Explain that this film was produced in 1938 and 1939, and its purpose was to encourage American Jews to visit Poland. (The filmmakers did not know, of course, that six years later, 90% of Polish Jewry would have been killed in the Holocaust.) Given this purpose, have students brainstorm what parts of life in Warsaw the filmmakers may have intentionally left out of the final version shown to Americans.

After showing the film, have students respond in their journals to the following questions:

• Looking at the film, what is your overall impression of life in eastern European cities such as Warsaw at the time this film was made?
• Based on what you've seen in this film, what opportunities do you think were available for Polish Jews in cities during this time period?
• Which of the photographs from the opening activity seem to connect most closely to this film clip? What answers does this film provide to questions raised from the photograph activity? What new questions does it raise?

Then ask students to return to the conclusions, written on the board, that they made about the lives of eastern European Jews before World War II. Discuss the following three questions as a class:

• How might you revise your conclusions based on the new information you encountered in the film?
• What new conclusions might you add?
• What questions remain unanswered?

Activity 3: Connect Separation and Stereotypes

Now share with students the following statement from sociologist David Schoem:

• The effort it takes for us to know so little about one another across racial and ethnic groups is truly remarkable. That we can live so closely together, that our lives can be so intertwined socially, economically and politically, and...yet still manage to be ignorant of one another is clear testimony to the deep-seated roots of this human and national tragedy. What we do learn along the way is to place heavy reliance on stereotypes, gossip, rumor, and fear to shape our lack of knowledge. ¹

Have students think about Schoem’s statement and respond to the following questions in their journals:

• To what extent does Schoem’s statement describe Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s?
• To what extent does it describe your community or country today?
• How might the type of separation Schoem describes affect how individuals, communities, and countries define their universe of obligation? How can people break the isolation he describes?

Depending on time, ask students to share one line from their journals in a Wraparound activity, paired discussion, or class discussion.

• 1David Louis Schoem, Inside Separate Worlds: Life Stories of Young Blacks, Jews, and Latinos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 3.