“Via Dolorosa” in the Shtetl: Reenactment of the Jews’ Last Journey in Olkusz, Poland

This article focuses on problems of remembering a painful and still contentious historical past and examines the interaction between remembrance and reconciliation initiatives undertaken by local communities, on the one hand, and state-sanctioned national commemorations on the other. Using the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre of Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne in northeast Poland during World War II as a case study, the article argues that interference from theoutside—in this case by groups holding political power, the media and intellectual elites— is detrimental to local remembering.

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of a public person’s speech with its language and translation, and the way they can be manipulated to create a public image. As a public person, Lech Wałęsa has been subject to public scrutiny politically and ideologically ever since he became involved in public affairs as a trade union member and activist. Later, as a presidential candidate in the first democratic presidential election in post-communist Poland which he won in 1990, his publicity soared. Consequently, with his popularity came a heavier price of fame; he was subjected to strong criticism, and the way he spoke became a source of jokes and mocking nationwide. Public image is what others receive and read us by. It is an amalgamation of several factors – language being one of the major ones in creating one’s identity.

The intention of Hitler and his regime was the destruction of the Jewish people: their social and familial structures. Jews were separated from their families and friends as the Nazis carried out their policies of murder. The Nazi ghetto was the “last place” in which the traditional family structure was maintained. This article discusses the gradual disintegration of the family unit through the separation, deportation, and death of its members. Yet despite this physical assault on family life in the ghetto, it becomes clear that the ghetto inhabitants still maintained an “emotional” family life and built new surrogate family structures. For many, belonging to a group was an emotional as well as physical requirement for attempting to “survive” in the ghetto. Often, the family structure reversed the Nazis’ policies of degradation and attempted dehumanization of their Jewish victims. It could not, however, reverse their murders.

REVIEWS 589 Kovalev leading a team of experienced negotiators who proved themselves to be invested in improved East-West relations. The major negotiators from the Western side often sent junior diplomats, mainly to signal that they ‘would be prepared to walk away if the Soviets refused to compromise’ (p. 113). By focusing on all the different actors involved, Cotey debunks the myth of the Helsinki Process being solely a bilateral, superpower project. Even if the process and the outcome of the Helsinki agreement greatly influenced the way the Cold War developed, giving the West an upper hand on pretty much ‘every significant point’ (p. 5), no actor was too small to have a voice in the process; no political culture was by default out of the loop. Of course there were dominant actors, but the detailed descriptions of the actual negotiations make it clear that this was a diplomatic project. Cotey also takes into account the parallel structure of established Cold War organizations, such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was not obvious to especially the Western leaders to leave disarmament off the agenda for Helsinki, but in the end, Nixon and Brezhnev reached a compromise which the other leaders accepted even if some felt like it had been a secretive process governed by the superpowers. Cotey has succeeded in creating an effortless narrative of a complicated international diplomatic process while highlighting its far-reaching importance. The Final Act is based on archival research in eight countries, a long list of published diplomatic documents, interviews and periodicals, and an excellent command of the existing historiography. It is hard to imagine a more balanced account. This book is sure to become the standard work of reference for research focusing on topics as varied as human rights, trade relations, activist groups and international diplomacy in the 1970s and 1980s. Department of History and Classical Studies Rósa Magnúsdóttir Aarhus University Szczerbiak, Aleks. Politicising the Communist Past: The Politics of Truth Revelation in Post-Communist Poland. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 121. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018. vii + 198 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Appendix. Index.£115.00. As as one would expect from this author, Politicising the Communist Past provides an authoritative and balanced analysis of the post-Communist political scene. Aleks Szczerbiak’s study of the convoluted politics of transitional justice and truth revelation in Poland will particularly interest students of Central and Eastern Europe, but also provides food for thought to readers interested in the dilemmas of enacting transitional justice in other SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 590 countries across the globe. The book investigates why — despite initial talk of drawing a line under the past — dilemmas around transitional justice refused to go away in Poland after 1989. They have frequently dominated the political agenda, and remain acutely painful and polarizing today. Poland is an interesting case study of a country which, having failed to deal energetically with matters of transitional justice in the early days of the post-Communist regime,foundthepoliticsofthepastintrudingagainandagainintothepolitics of the present. Moreover, Szczerbiak argues that the Polish case illustrates the impossibility, in post-Communist Europe, of disentangling the two strands of political debate concerning historical truth revelation procedures. The first strand concerns the extent and nature of access to Communist-era secret police files. The second concerns lustration policies, aimed at vetting and screening public office-holders to reveal who had been associated with the communist regime, particularly its security services. Szczerbiak considers in detail why such matters could not be swept under the carpet. He shows how a sequence of sensational revelations — some occurring almost by chance — helped keep the issues alive across the decades. However, the main focus of the book is on the role played by politicians: Szczerbiak weighs the evidence in support of competing interpretations as to why the arguments proved so difficult to resolve. On the one hand, ‘instrumentalstrategic ’ explanations focus on how politicians manipulate and even manufacture the debate for political purposes. On the other, ‘programmaticideological ’ explanations place more emphasis on political actors’ beliefs that genuine democracy can only be constructed on the basis of openness about the past, and their concerns that...

János Pelle. <i>Vérvád, hisztéria, népítélet: “Zsidókérdés” Magyarországon 1945-ben és 1946-ban</i>

In 1994 the Jewish-Polish Shalom Foundation announced a photographic contest, the intention of which was to reconstruct the social and cultural histories of Polish Jews who lived in the geographical region of Poland before, during and after the Second World War. For this purpose the Foundation invited contributions from the public. Its initiative emerged shortly after the 1989 collapse of the communist regime in Poland, and alongside other similar projects that reflected the desire of Poland’s ethnic minorities to salvage their sociocultural histories – histories the communist government had erased from the country’s formal historiography. In a short period of time the Foundation received more than 7000 annotated photographs in response to its public appeal, most of which emanated from domestic photographic collections. As scholars interrogating domestic photography do not often have access to empirical data about the practices it entails, in this article we consider the Foundation photographic collection as a resource preserving invaluable information about the diverse uses and perceptions of photography in the sociocultural sphere. Yet, whereas existing scholarly literature in the field of photography studies tends to frame domestic photography with reference to affectionate familial behaviors allegedly common in democratic states, we introduce the Foundation collection as a case study that sheds light on domestic photographs created and maintained in a sociocultural environment that did not see democracy before 1989. Analyzing and discussing the various ways in which the photographs’ owners saw the photographs’ relationships with the broader politically unstable reality that has enclosed their production and preservation, our study diversifies some of the meanings and functions current literature often associates with domestic photographic collections.

A case example of restorative family dialogue involving young Arab offenders who committed an armed robbery against a Jewish victim in Israel who experienced the crime as an act of terrorism was found to be highly effective in resolving the conflict and building stronger relations between the two communities. While on a microbasis this bodes well for future relations in this region, numerous obstacles exist to widespread use of restorative justice dialogue in Israel and the occupied territories.

Forestry is a dangerous work environment and collecting data on site to identify and warn about hazardous situations is challenging. In this paper, we discuss our attempts at creating continuous data-collection methods that are ethical, sustainable and effective. We explore the difficulties in collecting personal and environmental data from workers and their work domain. We also draw attention to the specific challenges in designing for sensor-based, wearable rugged IoT solutions. We present a case-study, comprising of a number of experiments, which exemplifies the work we have been undertaking in this domain. The case study is based on our approach to developing a robust, trusted Internet of Things (IoT) solution for dangerous work environments (specifically the forestry environment). We focus the results of this case- study on both the technical successes and challenges as well as the personal and ethical challenges that have been elicited.

The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland

This chapter explores the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-native software on the banking sector. It examines how AI enhances customer service, fraud detection, and risk management through technologies like virtual assistants and predictive analytics. However, these advancements introduce ethical challenges, including data privacy concerns, algorithmic bias, and the need for transparency in AI decision-making. The chapter reviews relevant regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and offers strategies for compliance and ethical AI integration. Through case studies, it highlights successful implementations of AI in banking, illustrating effective management of ethical and regulatory issues. The chapter concludes with a look at future trends and proactive strategies to address emerging ethical and regulatory challenges, aiming to guide stakeholders in balancing innovation with ethical practices in the evolving landscape of banking technology.

This review paper examines the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) and dynamic ensemble techniques in enhancing healthcare services. By systematically reviewing literature and case studies from the past decade, we explore how these advanced computational methods improve diagnostic accuracy, personalize treatment plans, and optimize patient monitoring. Dynamic ensemble techniques, which leverage multiple predictive models to improve outcome accuracy, offer significant promise in addressing the complexities of patient data and disease manifestations. This paper delves into applications spanning AI-driven diagnostics, personalized medicine, and remote patient monitoring, highlighting both the advancements and challenges faced in integrating these technologies into healthcare. We also address the ethical and computational challenges inherent in deploying dynamic ensemble methods and propose directions for future research. Our findings suggest that while significant progress has been made, multidisciplinary collaboration and continued innovation are crucial for overcoming current limitations and realizing the full potential of AI in healthcare.

&lt;p&gt;Research has shown that school leaders today face more numerous ethical challenges than before, however little is known about the ethical challenges school leaders in Africa, and more specifically Kenya, encounter. This single case study investigated the nature of the ethical challenges that secondary school leaders face in conforming to the demands for ethical leadership and professionalism. It explores the perspectives of school leaders using semi-structured individual interviews: five school principals, 16 heads of department, five school boards of governors, and five school bursars, in five categories of secondary schools. The views and perspectives of nine parents on the leaders' ethical decision-making were also sought through interviews, because as stakeholders they are recipients of decisions made by the leaders. Drawing on a social constructivist theoretical framework and Eurocentric and Afrocentric paradigms for analysis and interpretation, the study revealed that the school leaders' ethical problems emanated from dealing with the realities of the context which creates conflicting demands for ethical conduct. A critical analysis of these themes using Foucauldian concepts of subjectification, power and governmentality illustrated that school leaders' ethical challenges were intensified because of their forced accommodation to Euro-western global policies. These policies, in particular the Structural Adjustment Programmes policy, the Education For All policy and the Good Governance Agenda are geared towards attaining the utopian dream of development. In view of this goal, the Kenyan state and school leaders are exposed to global interventions propagated on terms of discourses of improvement. The thesis argues that ethical challenges are intensified and persist because school leaders and the State have failed to critically reflect on these external influences, and allowed international global bodies to define the nation's needs, values and destiny. This study recommends that the State and education policy makers need to take a lead in developing their own value systems and policies, taking into account local Kenyan contextual needs and giving greater valence to Afrocentric values.&lt;/p&gt;

This article explores the legal problem of representing disputed territories and borders in cartography and examines potential solutions to address this complex issue. The research employs a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative data from academic literature, case studies, cartographic standards, and international legal documents. The findings indicate that border disputes are a widespread and persistent global issue, and cartographers face numerous legal and ethical challenges when representing these disputed areas. Three main potential solutions were identified: the development of international cartographic standards, the implementation of legal frameworks to govern the depiction of borders, and the promotion of alternative mapping approaches. A comparative assessment of these solutions reveals that no single approach is sufficient in addressing the legal problem, and a multifaceted strategy is necessary to promote impartiality, accuracy, and fairness in cartographic practices. The most effective solution may involve a combination of these approaches, leveraging their respective strengths to address the complex legal, ethical, and practical challenges associated with the representation of disputed territories in cartography. Based on our analysis, we propose several policy recommendations and legal reforms to address the problem, as well as suggestions for future research and practical applications in the cartography and legal fields. By pursuing these avenues for future research and practical applications, we hope to contribute to the ongoing efforts to address the legal problem of representing disputed territories and borders in cartography and promote more equitable, transparent, and effective practices in this important field.

&lt;p&gt;Research has shown that school leaders today face more numerous ethical challenges than before, however little is known about the ethical challenges school leaders in Africa, and more specifically Kenya, encounter. This single case study investigated the nature of the ethical challenges that secondary school leaders face in conforming to the demands for ethical leadership and professionalism. It explores the perspectives of school leaders using semi-structured individual interviews: five school principals, 16 heads of department, five school boards of governors, and five school bursars, in five categories of secondary schools. The views and perspectives of nine parents on the leaders' ethical decision-making were also sought through interviews, because as stakeholders they are recipients of decisions made by the leaders. Drawing on a social constructivist theoretical framework and Eurocentric and Afrocentric paradigms for analysis and interpretation, the study revealed that the school leaders' ethical problems emanated from dealing with the realities of the context which creates conflicting demands for ethical conduct. A critical analysis of these themes using Foucauldian concepts of subjectification, power and governmentality illustrated that school leaders' ethical challenges were intensified because of their forced accommodation to Euro-western global policies. These policies, in particular the Structural Adjustment Programmes policy, the Education For All policy and the Good Governance Agenda are geared towards attaining the utopian dream of development. In view of this goal, the Kenyan state and school leaders are exposed to global interventions propagated on terms of discourses of improvement. The thesis argues that ethical challenges are intensified and persist because school leaders and the State have failed to critically reflect on these external influences, and allowed international global bodies to define the nation's needs, values and destiny. This study recommends that the State and education policy makers need to take a lead in developing their own value systems and policies, taking into account local Kenyan contextual needs and giving greater valence to Afrocentric values.&lt;/p&gt;

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and interventions to mitigate it are multisectoral, exhibiting super-wicked features that require intersectoral collaboration and synergy. Although AMR and mitigation strategies are pressing issues, their solutions are complex, ethically challenging, multilayered and often conflict at various levels and among diverse stakeholders. The main objective of this study was to identify the values and potential contributions of stakeholder analysis related to AMR and potential interventions from a case study that is being undertaken in Nepal using a 'One Health' approach. A total of 33 representatives from human, animal, agricultural and environmental sectors attended a stakeholder meeting in Kathmandu to discuss AMR, its ethical and practical challenges, opportunities and potential interventions. Using a five-pillar framework for stakeholder analysis, we demonstrate its relevance for addressing AMR and propose practical considerations for implementing effective interventions in Nepal. Beyond the practical discussions on AMR and its interventions at the policy, implementation and practice levels, this study underscores the critical value of its methodological reflections for informing ongoing interventions both within Nepal and in similar contexts globally.