Metadata: County Command of the State Police, Lwów (Lwów Voivodeship)
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- State Archive of the Lviv Region
- Holding institution (official language):
- Державний Архів Львівської області
- Postal address:
- ul. Pidvalna 13, 79008, L’viv
- Phone number:
- +38 (032) 235-47-22
- Email:
- archive_lviv@arch.gov.ua
- Reference number:
- F. 108
- Title:
- County Command of the State Police, Lwów (Lwów Voivodeship)
- Title (official language):
- Повітова команда державної поліції у м. Львові Львівського воєводства
- Creator/accumulator:
- County Command of the State Police, Lwów
- Date(s):
- 1920/1939
- Language:
- Polish
- Extent:
- 1,028 files
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
-
Documents that pertain to the history of Jews in Galicia include directives and regulations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Viceroyalty of Galicia, the Lwów voivodeship, municipal starostwo administrations of the Lwów voivodeship, and voivodeship and county police commandants, and correspondence of these entities with subordinate agencies regarding the “subversive activity” and “pro-Bolshevik” agitation of the Bund, Fareynikte (the United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party), and Po’ale Tsiyon, which are described as “hostile to Polish statehood” (1920-21) (no. 1); on suspending the activities of such Jewish paramilitary organisations as the scouts organisation Ha-Shomer ha-tsair (1920) (no. 1); on confiscating an appeal (translated into Polish from German) by the Vienna youth group Aguda Organisazion that included denunciation of pogroms against Jews in Russia and Poland and called for the establishment of refuges for Orthodox Jewry in Palestine (no. 1; 1921); on the creation of a committee in Berlin to collect materials and evidence of pogroms in Russia and in the so-called kresy (western borderlands of Belorussia and Ukraine), and police instructions that “agents” of this committee not be allowed to become active in Poland (1922) (no. 1); directives that the activities of the Joint Distribution Committee in Lwów county be surveilled so as to marshal evidence that this organisation was involved in illegal activities in Poland, insofar as, in the opinion of the Polish authorities, its financial support for Jewish enterprises put Polish entrepreneurs at a competitive disadvantage (1920-23) (no. 1); that secret surveillance be organised of activities of local branches of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the Society for Handicraft and Agricultural Work among the Jews (ORT), and the Joint Distribution Committee, which were involved in receiving and organising accommodations for Jewish refugees from Soviet Russia (1923) (no. 1); directives stipulating that representatives of the authorities (police officials or forensic experts) with knowledge of Yiddish or Hebrew were to be in attendance at public events held in these languages, which a special ruling of the Council of Ministers of Poland had declared could be freely used at public events (1926-27) (no. 1); etc.
Several such orders and communiques pertain to various Jewish parties and political organisations and, in particular, to collecting information on preparations by Zionist organisations of Lwów county to take part in a regional Zionist conference in Lwów (1930) (no. 1); the establishment, by left-radical members of the Bund and Po’ale Tsiyon (Left), of the pro-communist General Jewish Labour Party as the legal structure of the illegal Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU) (1931), and directives that local General Jewish Labour Party organisations and their activities be “closely surveilled”; information on anti-religious demonstrations planned by the General Jewish Labour Party to protest the “fascist Jewish clergy” during the Yom Kippur holiday (it was thought that such activities could lead to rioting), and directives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that General Jewish Labour Party activities be banned (1931-34) (no. 1).
Information on the activities of Jewish parties and political organisations in the interwar period is found in surveillance files, in particular, in reports of police precincts to the Lwów county commandant. These pertain to the activity of local cells of the “pro-communist” parties Bund and Po’ale Tsiyon (Left) (1920-21, 1923, 1925, 1928) (no. 1); the resumption of activities of the organisation Ha-shahar [Dawn] in the town of Szczerzec (1920) (no. 1]; Jewish parties taking part in elections to the boards of religious communities in Lwów county (1925) (no. 1); etc.
The same local-level police reports contain information about Jewish communities, including reports on the activities of a club of Jewish community councillors in the village of Zamarstynów near Lwów (1930) (no. 1); etc.
The fonds also contains documents that pertain to antisemitic incidents in Galicia and their perpetrators. These include orders of the Lwów county commandant of the state police that the November 1931 disturbances related to a boycott of Jewish merchants not be allowed to recur, and that information regarding an alleged decline in the Jewish population and Jewish commercial activity due to the efforts of Ukrainian radicals to oust Jews from Ukrainian villages be checked (1932) (no. 1); instructions of the Mościska County Starostwo to a local police commandant that preventive measures be taken to keep members of the Młodzież Wszechpolska organisation from distributing antisemitic and anti-government leaflets during the Easter holidays (1934) (no. 1); a report of the police precinct in the village of Gaje to the county commandant of the state police to the effect that members of the extreme right-wing nationalist party Stronnictwo Narodowe were distributing leaflets in that village that accused “Judeo-Bolsheviks” of having incited workers in the April 1936 events in Lwów (this refers to the rioting and police shootings in Lwów that accompanied the funeral of the unemployed worker Vladislav Kozak, who had been killed by the police), and antisemitic leaflets distributed by this party (1936) (no.1; 1936); an order of the Lwów voivodeship police commandant that reports be compiled of antisemitic disturbances and acts of terror against Jews, as well as on the part played in these incidents by Ukrainian nationalists and their supporters (1937) (no. 1).
The fonds also contains lists of Jewish charitable, sports, and agricultural societies and professional associations of Lwów county (1924-25) (no. 1); statistical tables containing data on the party affiliation of members of the boards of the Jewish religious communities of Nawaria, Szczerzec, and Jaryczów Nowy (1928) (no. 1); informational surveys about the activities of Jewish political, cultural, educational, public, charitable, and business organisations registered in Poland (1929-30) (no. 1); etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- County commands of the state police were established by decree (24 July 1919) of the Council of Ministers of Poland and order (4 December 1919) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs; they were based on territorial agencies of the gendarmerie and military police. Headed by commandants, the county commands answered to the local civil administration (county starostwa), as well as to the respective voivodeship commandants of the state police. The most important structural unit of the county commands of the state police were their investigative departments, which conducted inquiries in both criminal and political matters. They were abolished in September 1939.
- Subject terms:
- Agriculture
- Aid and relief
- Aid and relief--Philanthropy and charity
- American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
- Antisemitism
- Antisemitism--Antisemitic boycotts
- Bund movement
- Correspondence
- Jewish holidays
- Jewish languages
- Jewish languages--Hebrew
- Jewish languages--Yiddish
- Jewish political activity
- Law enforcement
- Law enforcement--Police
- Nationalism
- ORT (Organisation for Rehabilitation through training)
- Pogroms
- Socialism
- Socialism--Socialist parties and organisations
- Sports
- Sports--Sports clubs
- Statistics
- Zionism
- Zionism--Zionist organisations and parties
- System of arrangement:
- The files in this fonds are arranged (although not always consistently) according to the thematic-chronological principle.
- Finding aids:
- An inventory is available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
