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What can a temporal comparison of two pogroms in the same city in the wake of two vastly different military conflicts reveal about context and function of anti‐Jewish violence? What can it tell us about historical continuity and change? These questions frame the history below which focuses on two pogroms in the city of Kraków on April 16, 1918, and August 11, 1945. This article argues that in both cases perpetrators perceived the state as failing to meet their basic economic, national, and moral expectations after the wars which left political and social chaos, economic ruin, and dismal law and order. To address the state's failings and restore the "moral balance," the perpetrators targeted the Jews whom they perceived as the state's beneficiaries. After the Second World War, the violence only intensified when the medieval myth of ritual murder reemerged, and Jewish women and children became the targets of aggression. This change can only be explained by the specific context of WWII when redemptive antisemitism of Nazi propaganda and the daily practice of genocide stripped Jews of the remains of their humanity thus marking them as the ultimate threat to Polish survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Jewish leaders in post-war Slovakia negotiated the restitution of property with the legislative and executive powers in Bratislava and Prague. The Jewish leaders were affiliated with two Slovak Jewish organisations founded in 1945: the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Slovakia (Ústredny sväz zidovskych nábozenskych obci na Slovensku, ÚSZNO) and the Organisation of Victims of Racial Persecution at the Hands of the Fascist Regime in Bratislava (Sdruzenie fasistickym rezimom rasovo prenaslcdovanych v Bratislave, SRP). The Secretary General of the SRP, Dr Vojtech Winterstein, was the main voice negotiating and promoting the interests of the post-war Jewish community. His invaluable collection of documents - the Winterstein collection - provides the source base for this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]