Prisma Ukraïna
2020/ 2021

Magdalena Semczyszyn

The So-called Illegal Jewish Immigration from Poland and East-Central Europe after the Second World War (1945–1948)

Magdalena Semczyszyn is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of National Remembrance, Szczecin Branch, Poland. She received her PhD in History from University in Szczecin with a dissertation entitled “National Minorities and the Elections to the National Parliament in Eastern Galicia, 1867-1906 (The Activities of the Central Voting Committee)”. She is particularly interested in the history of national minorities, including Polish-Jewish and Polish-Ukrainian relations in 19th and 20th centuries, as well as Jewish and Ukrainian heritage in Poland. Her articles have appeared in edited books and in academic journals. She has worked at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, where she wrote about the pre-war Jewish community on the website Virtual Shtetl. She also participated in the scientific project subsidized by the National Scientific Centre in Poland. She was a resident scholar at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv and a resident fellow of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI, 2018) at the Wiener Library, London.

 

The So-called Illegal Jewish Immigration from Poland and East-Central Europe after the Second World War (1945–1948)

Her project focuses on the situation of Jewish survivors in Poland after the Shoah. Only 240,000 from 3.3 million Polish Jews survived the Holocaust and, soon after, most of them had to answer the question: “Stay or leave?” Semczyszyn’s main concern is the so-called illegal emigration of Jews from Poland to the West and to Palestine under the British Mandate. Between 1944 and 1948, about 140,000 Jews left Poland illegally. It was one of the effects of the Holocaust and the symbolic end of the centuries-long Jewish presence in Polish lands. Semczyszyn’s approach to the topic is interdisciplinary, which makes it possible to analyse the complex social relations during the first period after the war. She strives to answer the question of what illegal Jewish immigration in the Polish context was and describes the external and internal factors which determined its course. So far, she has conducted archival research in Israeli, British, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Russian archives for the project.