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parliamentary democracy, and introduce what has come to be seen as a more tolerant approach to the

country’s large non-Polish populations. In Volhynia, the coup certainly brought about significant

changes in the upper echelons of the provincial administration, with Piłsudski appointing two

governors—the first, Władysław Mech (1926-1928); the second, Henryk Józewski (1928-1938)—

who helped to develop a new approach to the region’s national minorities.

After the May 1926 coup, Józef Piłsudski and his supporters in Volhynia, most notably the

governor, vice-governor, and county heads who rose to prominence in the new administration, went

about creating two sets of policies that would have important implications for the province’s Jewish-

majority towns. For one, they pushed back against the language of anti-Semitism that was so central

to the National Democratic vision. The new government condemned infringements on the rights of

citizens who did not identify as ethnically Polish and it openly criticized the narrow vision of the

Polak-Katolik, by which Roman Catholics alone could be considered true Poles. Governor Józewski,

in particular, emphasized the ostensibly more inclusionary concept of state rather than national

assimilation, actively encouraged the creation of a Ukrainian national identity among Volhynia’s

Orthodox peasant population, and looked somewhat nostalgically upon the province’s Jews as a

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“community out of time.” Official proclamations issued by town authorities during state occasions

in Volhynia similarly stressed cooperation between representatives of different national and religious

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groups, all of whom claimed that they were united in their support of the Polish state. In turn, many

Jews in Volhynia supported the pro-government Non-party Bloc for Cooperation with the

Government (known by its Polish acronym, BBWR) as a more palatable alternative to the radical

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right’s anti-Semitism.

28 Timothy Snyder, “The Life and Death of Western Volhynian Jewry, 1921-1945,” in The Shoah in Ukraine:
History, Testimony, Memorialization, edited by Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington, 2010), 77.
29 See, for instance, the proclamation issued in the summer of 1929 by the town council in Równe for the visit of
President Ignacy Mościcki. “Protokół z odbytego w dniu 18 czerwca 1929 roku nadzwyczajnego posiedzenia Rady
Miejskiej w Równem,” DARO 31/1/968/254-254od.
30 Snyder, Sketches, 66.

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