Students sit at their desks in a classroom at a Polish-language public elementary school in Lwów around 1930. In interwar Poland, Jewish children could attend public or private schools. The curriculum in these schools was based on a secular education, in contrast to the traditional heder where boys were schooled in Jewish texts and traditions. This particular school was located in the city’s predominantly Jewish neighborhood and almost all of the students were Jewish. Before attending this school, Tamara Raizel Abramowicz (lower left) had been tutored in traditional Jewish texts at home.
Tamara and her family left Poland before the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. Her father immigrated to London in 1933. Her brother, Yankel, joined him there in 1938. Tamara and her mother followed them in June 1939. The entire family survived the period of the Holocaust in Great Britain. Tamara immigrated to the United States in 1951, where she was married.
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