Jewish life in Pomerania

Contains a brief history of the Jews of Pomerania. Among the antisemitic events noted are the 1350 burning of Jews as "well poisoners" and the resulting absence of Jews for the next 130 years, the Swedish ban on Jews in their (western) part of Pomerania from the 17th-mid-19th centuries, anti-Jewish riots in 1881, and a 1990 ritual murder charge in Konitz. Over the centuries Jews sought, and sometimes gained, rights to residence, property, and movement, occasionally finding sanctuary betweeen Poland and Germany. Jews fought as patriots against enemies such as France and were sometimes welcomed as brothers. In 1880 the Jewish population peaked at 13,886, and from then until World War I Pomeranian Jews experienced a kind of golden age. The 1920s saw both coexistence and rising antisemitism. Hitler's rise to power brought the Holocaust, including in the form of deportations, to Pomerania. Contains several brief accounts of the fate of the Jews under the Nazis. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)