We note with great sadness the death of Olga Goldberg- Mulkiewicz who died in Jerusalem on 24 January 2025.
Born in 1933, Mulkiewicz trained as an ethnographer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. After a stint in the Department of Folk Art at the Institute of Polish Art at the Polish Academy of Sciences, she joined the Department of Ethnography at the University of Łódź in 1961 where she met her future husband Jakub Goldberg (1924-2011), lecturer in the Department of History. Jakub and Olga Goldberg left Poland in 1967 in the context of antisemitic mobilization and emigrated to Israel. From 1970 onwards, Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz taught at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, appointed to Associate Professor in 1987. Allowed to visit Poland after 1981, she contributed to the academic life at the Department of Ethnography of the University of Łódź as a visiting faculty member. One of the few ethnographers among the postwar pioneers of Polish-Jewish Studies, Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz contributed to such investigations from the historic conference in Oxford in 1984 onwards and joined the Advisory Board of Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry from its first volume (1986) onwards. Beyond numerous articles dedicated to Jewish folk art and the perception of Jews in Polish folk art, she published the short survey Ethnographic Topics Relating to Jews in Polish Studies (1989). Together with her husband, an eminent scholar of Early Modern Polish and Polish-Jewish history, Goldberg-Mulkiewicz created an island of the most generous Polish hospitality in Jerusalem.