The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

Katarzyna Czerwonogora's Oral History

Katarzyna (Kasia) Czerwonogóra, Jewish women studies scholar and translator at Yad Vashem, was interviewed by Agnieszka Ilwicka on February 25, 2015 in Jerusalem, Israel. She was born in a small village in Poland in a Catholic but not very religious family. Her father was a leftist and as far as she knew his lack of interest in Catholicism related to his anti-clerical views. Kasia did not learn until later that her paternal grandfather was a Jew and a Holocaust survivor. She got involved with the Jewish community and Jewish youth programs in Wroclaw, where her family had moved during her teen years. She wonders whether typical teenage rebellion was part of the reason for her attraction to these activities. Kasia studied Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and completed a master's degree studying Jewish and Zionist women. She became involved with a group in Krakow who were exploring their Jewish backgrounds together. They celebrated Jewish holidays, organized lectures and movie screenings, and set up a library of Jewish books. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Warsaw exploring the emancipation of Jewish women in the early Zionist movement. Money for gender studies is scarce in Poland but Kasia has gotten support for her research from institutions in Berlin, Jerusalem, and London. Both her master's and doctoral research aims to fill a gap in knowledge about Jewish women in Poland, written in Polish. Hers was a challenging topic because she believes that nationalist movements including Zionism tend to marginalize and instrumentalize women. Kasia, who identifies as a diasporic Jew, prioritized learning Yiddish rather than Hebrew for her research. She began her studies at the Jewish Culture Festival and then continued with the same teacher at her university; she improved her skills doing coursework in Krakow and Warsaw. Today, living in Israel, Hebrew is her day-to-day language. Kasia talks about how she ended up in Israel and became a citizen after meeting an Israeli man and starting a family. Although it is difficult living amid conflict, she prefers to be in Jerusalem where it must be faced rather than in Tel Aviv where one can try to ignore the situation. Kasia has organized a seminar called "Yiddish Froy, Dervek" [Yiddish Women, Wake Up] for scholars in Poland who focus on Jewish women's studies; the aim is to reduce isolation and encourage collaboration. Kasia is currently working in the Righteous among the Nations Department at Vad Yashem, focusing on Polish gentiles who rescued Jews during World War II. She gets to use her Yiddish because many of the testimonial materials are in that language. Toward the end of the interview, she discusses the history of the "ideological persecution" of Yiddish in Israel; on the other hand, Yiddish is a living language here, both among the Haredi and among young secular Jews who are rediscovering Yiddish.

This interview was conducted in English.

Katarzyna Czerwonogora was born in Siecieborowice, Poland in 1985.