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.

2018 amendment of the act on the Polish Institute of National Remembrance that was passed by the Polish Sejm in January 2018 raised a vibrant public debate about Polish-Jewish relations. In this article, we try to trace the dynamics of this debate and assess its consequences for contemporary Polish-Jewish relations and present-day representations of the relations between Poles and Jews during the German occupation in 1939–1945. To this end, we present the analysis of social media content, data from search engines, as well as the results of two nationwide polls conducted at the beginning of 2018. These studies indicate that the debate on amendment of the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance has increased the expression of antisemitic prejudice in the media and on the internet, increased the presence of defective codes of memory, and at the same time polarized the Polish debate about the behavior of Poles during the Holocaust. The results of these analyzes are discussed in the context of earlier debates on the Polish-Jewish relations during Nazi occupation, referring to the category of “secondary antisemitism” that receives growing support in current social sciences.

This article attempts to create a multivariant story about a community of women in the Polish-Jewish contact zone based on the text of Rakhel Feygenberg’s Di kinder-yorn [Polish title: A Girl’s Years: Childhood in a Polesie Shtetl], an autobiography of a Jewish young woman who grew up in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th century. Using personal insights and documentary evidence she portrays a community of women read-ers who are engaged in never-ending rounds of watching and sounding each other.