The Heart of the City That Once Was

One of the most interesting categories of post-war albums preserved in the JHI collection are those concerning youth groups. Some were commissioned by the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, while others were produced for the purposes of individual organisations, serving as a visual report from their activities. 

The first years after the war saw a proliferation of youth movements of all sorts of sizes and political inclinations, although dominated by various factions of Zionism. The Zionists invited young people to join communities or kibbutzim, they organised educational activities and summer camps. These latter offerings, in particular, were extensively documented in photos, mostly amateur and anonymous. Most likely taken by the members of the organisations themselves, they were later put into albums to create visual narratives of the life of chalutzim. These narratives were crafted by the authors by deliberately selecting particular photos, arranging them in a particular order, and giving them particular captions. As a result, the albums offer us an insight into the meaning which the youth organisations saw in their activities. 

A recurring motif in the photos is a strong expression of community: young people spending time together, be it on learning Hebrew, exercising, working, or having fun outside and dancing the hora – even in water, as exemplified by the present photo. 

This particular photo comes from an album documenting the revival of the Gordonia-Maccabi HaTzair movement after the war. Named after Aaron David Gordon, this Zionist youth organisation prepared its members for their future migration to Palestine. In both the visual and the textual content of the album, we can find numerous symbols and slogans promoting the values held by the movement, which derived from the culture of kibbutzim and Zionist ideology. 

The album of the Gordonia movement was assembled with great care. Most photos are accompanied by captions in Yiddish, the basic language of Polish Jews. However, the title of the album and the subtitles introducing individual groups of photos are also written in Hebrew, which signals the ultimate intention of migrating to Palestine. Since the album consists of an impressive number of photos varying in style and composition, we may assume that it was a joint effort of several authors, most likely members of the organisation. 

You can browse the entire collection of albums in our digital repository at https://delet.jhi.pl/en/library/albumy.  

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