Facing the Refugee Experience

This chapter examines how the refugee experience had a huge significance in the lives of those who survived it and had to be dealt with in one way or another. In particular, it explores how the Polish–Lithuanian Jewry came to terms with the terrible events in Ukraine. Looking at all the attempts to make sense of the tragedy together, it seems clear that the religious thinkers did not develop any kind of unified conceptual framework to allow the survivors—and the rest of Polish Jewry—to work through their traumatic experiences. That would be done not in the spiritual realm but in the public sphere. From mid-March to mid-April of 1650, the Council of Four Lands, Polish Jewry's lay leadership, met in special session with leading rabbis to address some of the most important issues facing Polish Jews at that time. Foremost among them were questions of identification; another issued to be faced was that of conversion. The chapter then recounts how the memories of the Khmelnytsky uprising were preserved by the prayers composed for 20 Sivan.