1928 Horowitz Map of Jewish Orphan Welfare Organizations, Poland

Pioneering Jewish Social Welfare in Interwar Poland.

This is a very scarce 1928 trilingual (Yiddish-Polish-English) map of the Second Polish Republic prepared by B. Horowitz for CENTOS, the largest Jewish charitable organization in Poland caring for orphans. It highlights the locations of Jewish social welfare organizations throughout the country, working with orphans. Despite harrowing difficulties, CENTOS pioneered modern social welfare in the tumultuous Interwar Period (1919 - 1939), when the Polish Jewish community faced not only an orphan crisis, the result of pogroms perpetrated during World War I, but also increased isolation and discrimination.

A Closer Look

Coverage includes the entire Second Polish Republic, with cities and large towns labeled throughout. Administrative boundaries are traced with lines emanating from Warsaw, the headquarters of CENTOS, to its regional offices. Symbols indicate the locations of CENTOS operations, ranging from trade schools to summer camps, boarding schools, and workshops, as noted in two legends at left. Interestingly, the hammer and sickle representing farms (פאַרמע) operated by CENTOS is only included in the Yiddish legend and not the Polish-English one. As is evident from the map, CENTOS operations were concentrated in the eastern provinces of Poland, where the orphan crisis was far more acute.

Historical Context

During the Interwar period (1918 - 1939), the Jewish community in the Second Polish Republic built a large and sophisticated social welfare network, focusing in particular on orphaned children. Following World War I (1914 - 1918), the Polish-Soviet War, and waves of pogroms, Poland was left with a staggering number of Jewish orphans - estimates in 1921 suggested that in some eastern regions, up 40 percent of surviving Jewish children were orphans or half-orphans. In response, hundreds of local and regional organizations were created to respond to the orphan crisis. In 1924, many of these coalesced to form CENTOS (Centralne Towarzystwo Opieki nad Sierotami, here as Związek Towarzystw Opieki Nad Sierotami Żydowskiemi), which became the largest organization helping Jewish orphans, caring for some 15,000 by the late 1930s, in more than 100 institutions, as well as placing orphans with foster families.

CENTOS experimented with new methods of social welfare, including the employment of social workers, but faced financial difficulties and political opposition due to rising Antisemitism in Poland during the Interwar period. Most of the organization's financing came from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee as well as individual Polish donors. Remarkably, CENTOS continued to operate through the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, caring for Jewish orphans even in the appalling conditions of the ghettos of Warsaw and other cities. Local CENTOS organs even aided in the resistance movement in the ghettos, but ultimately, the orphans and CENTOS staff were killed in the ghettos or in extermination camps.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by B. Horowitz in 1928 and was printed by Graficon, operated by graphic designer Haim Goldberg, in Marszałkowska (Warsaw). This map is very rare; we are only aware of it coming to market twice in recent years, and it is uncatalogued in institutional collections.

Cartographer

Haim Goldberg (חיים גאָלדבערג; c. 1888 - 1943), better known to contemporaries by his artistic name Haggai (חַגַּי), was a Polish-Jewish graphic designer, photographer, writer, poet, illustrator, and printer based in Warsaw. Goldberg was born to a Hasidic family in what is now Lublin Province in Poland and received a traditional Jewish education at the local yeshiva. However, he showed artistic talent and went to Germany to improve his artistic skills. Afterwards, he settled in Warsaw and opened a photographic studio before joining the Yuhudiya publishing house, affiliated with the daily newspaper Haynt (הײַנט), as a graphic designer, producing chromolithographed greeting cards and postcards incorporating Jewish themes, particularly greeting cards for the New Year (Shana Tova cards). Goldberg went on to illustrate Yiddish and Hebrew children's books and in the 1920s opened his own printing house called Graficon (sometimes as Grafikon), where he and his wife Esther designed new Hebrew fonts, among other innovations. This was a pet project for Goldberg, who even published articles in Jewish periodicals on the need to reform and modernize Hebrew typography. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Goldberg escaped to Bialystok in the Soviet-occupied zone, but after it was also occupied by the Nazis in 1941, he was confined to the city's ghetto, where he printed posters for the ghetto's Judenrat. Goldberg, his wife, and their only child, a son who had also studied art and graphic design, all died in the Holocaust   Further Details...

Condition

Fine.

References

Granick, J., International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 2021.