Objects

The group photograph of graduates and teachers of the Jewish Coeducational Gymnasium in the school year 1928/1929. Secondary (colour) print - made by re-photographing a monochromatic photograph. Also included in the photograph is the (paper?) border of the original with the inscription: "Matura | in Żyd. Gimn. Koed. w Krakowie roku szk.1928/29" (Matura Exam | in Jew. Coed Gymnasium. in Kraków in 1928/29). The state of preservation of the print at the moment of its coming into the collection indicated that it was framed.

Emilia Grossbart (later Leibel) is standing in the third row, third from the right. The school was not state-run, so examinations were accompanied by an inspector. Emilia Leibel told the following dictum: "And I get a question and I answered something completely out of line. So the inspector says, "Where's Rome? Where's Crimea? And I was so nervous [...] that I went up to the map [...] and showed it [...]. And I passed the exam" (Maria Kłańska's interview Wspomnienia Żydówki krakowskiej (Memories of a Jewish Woman from Kraków), Kraków 2010, p. 70).

In order to take the state exam, Emilia Grossbart had to pass the Hebrew exam first. Then she had lessons with Benzion Katz (1907-1968), a Jagiellonian University graduate and Hebrew teacher at the Jagiellonian University (from 1937 a lecturer at the Institute of Judaic Studies in Warsaw, see: http://mbc.cyfrowemazowsze.pl/dlibra/plain-content?id=39456, accessed on 17 November 2021). Katz escaped from Poland and in 1940 he got to Israel, where he took the name Benshalom and continued his academic career in the field of history of literature and translated ancient Greek and Persian works, among others.