Profanation and Dirt

Despite the scattered new media and initiatives for documenting and commemorating Poland’s remaining and lost Jewish spaces, the fate of the country’s surviving Jewish communal sites was becoming dire in the aftermath of the 1956 events in the country. As local municipalities became more successful in gaining state backing to repurpose or remove these sites, the ongoing practice of misuse and plundering of Jewish property was strengthened by an added factor. Since the mid-1950s, a rather new phenomenon of deliberate vandalization and devastation of religious spaces, for the sake of destruction alone, became a considerable threat. Throughout the country, a