Agnieszka Traczewska

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Agnieszka Traczewska |Shai Secunda |Joshua Barton |Dara Horn

There are hardly any women in A Vanished World, Roman Vishniac’s classic postwar album of the ill-fated European Jews he photographed in the 1930s. With their nostalgic and elegiac quality, those pictures—more black than white, more religious than secular, and more masculine than feminine—established a way of seeing and photographing Orthodox Jews, especially Hasidim, as a pious, almost premodern, cadre of men and boys.

Jan 22, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Shai Secunda |Agnieszka Traczewska

Nearly every morning since October 7, I open my phone and look at the faces of the war’s most recent victims. I gaze at these portraits fearfully, searching for a familiar face. This mourning ritual must be a feature of life in war zones around the world, in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza too.

Jul 9, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | David Engel |Elisha Russ-Fishbane |Agnieszka Traczewska |Shai Secunda

Visitors to Warsaw’s splendid POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews pass through a section of the core exhibition titled On the Jewish Street. Devoted to the years between 1918 and 1939, a brief interval of Polish independence between two eras of foreign rule, it depicts, according to an accompanying catalog essay, “a modern Jewish world . . .

Apr 17, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Agnieszka Traczewska |Shai Secunda |Kate Elinsky |Myriam Tangi

Since the fall of communism in 1989, Jews have been traveling to Poland in increasing numbers to pray in its famous synagogues, to visit its historic burial grounds, and to search for and daven at the graves of great rabbis. Over the last decade, the presence of Hasidim in some of the country’s cities, towns, fields, and forests has become a not uncommon sight. The homecoming of Hasidim to Poland is a spectacular development, one that is best captured by meticulous documentary photography.