The Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH) is inviting participants to submit applications for the Maria and Łukasz Hirszowicz Award 2021. The award is granted in recognition of scientific, artistic or educational achievements in research or popularization of the history of Jewish presence in Poland and Polish-Jewish relations. The deadline for submitting applications is March 10.
A candidate, a person or a team, can be nominated by any interested person by e-mail to the following address: hirszowiczowie@jhi.pl. The laureate of the award in the category Commemoration will additionally receive the title of “Guardian of Remembrance”. The award ceremony will take place in May.
The award was founded in 2001 by Maria Hirszowicz, a professor of sociology who had lived in exile in Great Britain since 1969. The award was to be named after her deceased husband, Łukasz Hirszowicz.
Born in Grodno in 1920, Łukasz (“Gidon”) Hirszowicz went to Jerusalem to study at the Hebrew University just before the war. In 1948 he returned to Poland and worked at the Polish Institute of International Affairs, the Main School of Foreign Service, and from 1954 at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He specialized in the recent history of Iran and Arab countries. Being an erudite and polyglot, Łukasz Hirszowicz was famous for his knowledge, wit, helpfulness and good character that gained him a group of devoted friends.
In 1969, a year after the anti-Semitic campaign of March 1968, Hirszowicz and his wife left Poland. He received a research scholarship at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, later undertook research work at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1972, he became the editor-in-chief of the London quarterly “Soviet Jewish Affairs” and held this position for 20 years, making this journal (in 1991 renamed “East European Jewish Affairs”) a valued source of information and opinion in the scientific and political world. He died in London in 1993.
Maria Bielińska-Hirszowicz, Łukasz’s wife, Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Warsaw, was removed from the university in 1968 along with Leszek Kołakowski, Bronisław Baczko, Zygmunt Bauman and other opposition scientists. In Great Britain, she became a lecturer in sociology at the University of Reading. She died in Paris in 2007.
The Hirszowicz House in London was in the 1980s and 1990s a haven for visiting friends from Poland connected with the democratic opposition. They used their hospitality for many weeks including Jan Józef Lipski, Alina Brodzka, Jerzy Jedlicki.
Arkadiusz Słomczyński