TORONTO – World-renowned historian and Holocaust educator Shalmi Barmore spoke at Beth Habonim Congregation recently about the impact of modernity on 19th century European Jewish society; most notably, the events that led to the rise of the Zionist movement.

Balmore’s address, presented by the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, also highlighted the lives of Polish artists Leopold Gottlieb and Bruno Schulz, who were both from Drohobycz, Eastern Galicia.

Barmore, a native of Israel, founded Yad Vashem’s Holocaust Education Department and served as its director from 1972-1996. He left Yad Vashem to shift his focus from the way Jews died during the Holocaust to the myriad ways and places in which they lived.

“For me, the question was how to remember the Holocaust but not allowing it at the same time to become the sum total of what Judaism is all about,” Barmore told the Jewish Tribune. “So I went into other subjects in Jewish history.”

As director of the Israeli NGO Education Culture Heritage Organization (ECHO), Barmore creates and leads educational excursions to different countries, where participants immerse themselves in local culture (past and present) by meeting people, visiting archives and reading literature, all with the aim of exploring a particular aspect of the 1,000-year history of European Jewry. A group might visit Prague as part of an in-depth study of Hebrew literature or follow the lives of the Conversos from Portugal to Bordeaux and on to Amsterdam; two Christian groups have focused on building a better understanding of Chasidism. Participants come from various countries, religions and walks of life. As well as Barmore, trip leaders sometimes include professionals such as musicians and artists.

In his wide-ranging presentation at Beth Habonim Congregation, Barmore said the high rate of literacy among Eastern European Jews in the 19th century made them more receptive to the dramatic changes in the world around them.

“Galicia was always considered to be the farther, most impoverished end of the Habsburg Empire.” But bookshelves were found in the poorest of homes, containing “all this collection of books, of knowledge. And when these shtetls exploded, when they spread, just realize the impact they had on the history of the world. Not the Jewish world: the world.

“They exploded when they really met modernity.... In Drohobycz...they struck oil and with this new situation everything began to change.... As this world changed, these peoples’ ideologies changed and with ideologies came identities.... With all the change, what came was an inner change. Jews were hit with enlightenment.”

Modernity swept through Jewish communities as a result of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, Polish nationalism and Russian pogroms, and that combination of factors created what Barmore called “the recipe for how Zionism was made.”

“By the end of the 19th century, there were 23 Jewish daily newspapers in Poland alone. The so-called Jewish nation, it’s boundaries are set by Jewish journalism...and they’re all dealing with the same issues. They become a very literary people. Enlightenment in Eastern Europe, unlike in Germany, turns inwards.”

The development of Yiddish-language newspapers and literature provided the final ingredient needed for the propagation of Zionism.

“Once they’re presented with literature in a language that they can read it becomes immensely popular, and from literature you have theatre and pretty soon you have a whole culture.... When this situation was combined with antisemitism, it very soon became Jewish nationalism.”