Powerful European countries in late 18th and early 19th centuries supported religious minorities and expanded missionaries’ activities, thus paving the way for social changes and evolutions. Having understood international circumstances and internal situations, Iranian Jews took influential and useful steps in changing social system. The Qajar Dynasty, in line with the demands of international Jew institutions, agreed with the establishment of new Jew institutions. The present paper tries to find an answer to this question: How did the Jews change their social system during the mentioned period? The paper hypothesis is that with the support of their international institutions as well as powerful European countries, the Jews urged Qajar Dynasty to provide a suitable background for the evolution of their social system.

In the article there are presented the most popular Jewish names selected from the municipal books of Grabowiec and fi les of city Grabowiec XVII and XVIII century. As a result of gathered materials it has been found that Jews adapted their names to the patterns existing on the area of residence. The formant –ko was especially popular. That formant was the most popular in Ukrainian antroponymy: Heszko, Icko, Judko, Lewko. To the most popular names used by Jews as Icko (17), Lewko (11), Marko (5), Moszko (4) the names of the origin of the Bible: Dawid (6), Juda (5), Aron (4), Boruch (3), Hebraic: Jakub (9), Chaim (5), Maier (4), Yiddish: Leyba (6), Zusman (3). can be added. Frequencies complement the variants of the specifi c names.

This article discusses the problem of orphan manuscripts and writings in the collection of documents deposited with the Jagiellonian University. The author mentions the difficulties in the access to this heritage, due to the unclear status of these works. In this context she analyzes and presents biographies and views of all Jewish philosophers who received Ph.D. degree at the Jagiellonian University in the years 1918 through 1939, many of whom probably did not survive World War II.

The study focuses on the reflection of Jewish‑Slavic relations in the work of Alexander Pavlovіch (Oleksandr Pavlovych, 1819‑1900). The author in question was a Greek Catholic priest – a representative of the Eastern Religious Rite (Byzantine) during the 19th century. In the context of his poems, the figures of Jewish innkeepers appear to be overly burdened with stereotypes. We briefly present the history of the Jews in Eastern Slovakia, where Pavlovich lived. The aim of such poems, which were written mostly by the clergy during the mentioned period, was not to stir up passion. The task of didactic works was to educate people and warn them against the harmful effects of alcohol. Pavlovich belonged to the group of writers that raised awareness of alcoholism. Despite being canonized, it is necessary to critically revise the approach of the poet’s treatment of the Jewish theme over a longer period.

The article presents Lublin through the analysis of two literary texts that show the existence of the Jewish population of the city and the destruction and absence of Jews from Lublin. Döblin describes in his travelogue Journey to Poland (1925) the parallel existence of the Jewish and Polish city of Lublin in the 1920’s. Krall documents in her literary reportage Exceptionally long line the extermination of the Jewish community and the suppression of the memory of it in Polish collective memory.

The present overview of current Christian-Jewish dialogue shape firstly specifes the dialogue and its partners concept meaning applied to the relations between religious societies. It draws our attention to the polarisations within the Christianity and Judaism as well as to the differencies in dialogue advancement between bodies keeping the dialogue and the general public. It points out the different motivation prompting Jews and Christians to keep the dialogue and the infuence of this on understanding the sense, the choice of its representatives and the theme of the dialogue.

The deepening mutual cognition along with the growing awareness of both; chances and limits of consensus in the dialogue, are indicated among the previous achievements. From the side of the catholic church, irreversible will of the dialogue along with the appropriate directions of doctrinal clarifcations of the Church Teaching are strongly emphasized.

The theological questions are raised that on the Christian side develop from the acknowledgment of irremovability of the covenant between God and Israel. The questions refer to the contemporary situation and the eschatological perspective of existence of two communities considering themselves as continuation of the covenant between God and Abraham, as well as their relation towards Israel Land. The article at its conclusion stipulates the deepening of the awareness of the mystery whenever resuming the religious topics in the dialogue.

The article presents the roots of contemporary Jewish-Polish relations in Poland. The Author analyses various phenomena and processes, leading to initiation of the Polish-Jewish dialogue in the years 1979- -1997, as well as evaluates the mutual relations between the two social groups in the turn of 1980s to 1990s.

Exegesis of Matthew 16:13-20, made in the light of historical and doctrinal terms occurred after 70 years in Judea, in which the evangelist Matthew was presented with its Judeo-Christian Church, indicates clearly existing in the text emphasis and related them to universalist objectives . They primarily guided him to define the saving message of Jesus the Risen of being Christological and Ecclesiological, in the final version edited by himself, in the Gospel of the Kingdom at the turning point for the fate of the Palestinian Church. The scene from Caesarea Philippi is edited in a manner which allows Peter to run his church in the Hellenistic world in order to gain complete doctrinal confidence that the same power of binding and resolving in heaven and on earth which he received from Jesus Simon Barjon to exercise it in the land of Israel, is also possessed by Simon Peter to celebrate it with the same saving efficiency in the lands of the heathen. Without this doctrinal certainty, it would probably be impossible to guarantee its further Judeo-Christian existence in the world of ethnochristians and gentiles.

We are currently witnessing the demise of Arab-Jewish identity and culture - a tradition that started more than 1,500 years ago is vanishing before our very own eyes. Until the twentieth century, the great majority of the Jews under the rule of Islam used Arabic as their language but after the establishment of the State of Israel, Arabic has been gradually disappearing as a language mastered by Jews. The Arabized Jews have been deliberately excluded from Arabism to the point that we can now assume an unspoken agreement between Zionism and Arab nationalism to carry out a total cleansing of Arab-Jewish identity and culture. The present article focuses on the changes in the concept of identity and belonging among the Arabized Jews, especially the Iraqi-Baghdadi intellectuals among them. As I previously argued, due to some processes that those Jews had experienced during the twentieth century and because of some global developments, they gradually developed a negative sensitivity toward the notion of stable identity, whatever identity. Instead of that, they started to assert, explicitly and implicitly, their particular singularities and to search for alternative forms of identification, mostly various kinds of inessential solidarity and belonging. The article refers as well to the scholarship on Arab-Jewish identity and culture that has frequently been moving into non-academic spaces, neglecting the necessary unbiased scholarly discourse.

The Author presents in this paper a concept of research on the Jewish ethos internalized in the groups representing main political trends that were popular among the Polish Jewry in the interwar Poland (1918-1939). These trends are: Zionism, Socialism, Folkizm and a policy of Assimilation. Analysis of above group's ethos covers research on the following issues: values and attitudes constituting the ethos of a specific group, sources and function of the ethos and instruments of communication used in transmission of the ethos.

The motto of Zofia Nałkowska’s short-story collection Medaliony [Medalions] – “People doomed people to this fate” [Polish, “Ludzie ludziom zgotowali ten los”] – as obvious as it may apparently seem, has aroused various controversies. Henryk Grynberg believed that the only right formula, the one that would do justice to those persecuted, would have been “People doomed Jews to this fate”. Recently, the discussion was resumed in a book on the portrayal of the Holocaust in Medaliony – Zagłada w „Medalionach” Zofii Nałkowskiej, edited by Tomasz Żukowski: one of its essays (by Żukowski and Aránzazu Calderón Puerta) notices that endeavours to universalise the Holocaust is at least premature for the Poles tending to avoid facing the truth about their own contribution to annihilation of the Jews. While the threads addressed in these debates are important, they disregard the beliefs and the system of values Nałkowska adhered to. The Polish novelist adopted the view that man and the pleasure he takes in inflicting pain is the actual cause of evil. This inclination revealed itself not only during the war. This more general observation was rooted in her knowledge of life, relations between people, and daily cruelty. Supported by an ideology and furnished with technical resources, the war added a historical dimension to this bent. Moreover, Nałkowska was definitely not one among those who stayed silent in respect of the Jewish victims. Conversely, a few of the stories in Medaliony speak exactly about this problem, never trying to conceal anti-Semitic attitudes among Poles.

This article discusses the theatre section in Gazeta Żydowska published under the control of the occupation authorities in the Generalgouvernement in 1940–1942. The paper focused first of all on theatres in the Warsaw ghetto. The news and reviews were to create the impression that Jewish culture was flourishing and the situation in ghetto was normalizing as the residents were adapting to the new conditions.

This article examines the coverage of German themes in Polish local press by focusing on a number of newspapers and periodicals published at Siedlce in the 1930s, i.e. Gazeta Podlaska, Nowa Gazeta Podlaska, Głos Podlaski, Ziemia Siedlecka, Wiadomości Diecezjalne Podlaskie and Życie Podlasia.