The Eye of the Tzaddik

Abstract

Panas’s essay is an example of the practice of semiotic reading in the urban space. In the location, shape and details of one of the squares within the Old Town in Lublin, where in the past the home of the famous tzaddik Jakub Icchak Horowic („The Seeing One of Lublin”) was, the author notices peculiar relations. The square seen from the perspective of the Castle hill becomes a sort of an icon of The Seeing One’s tomb located in the old Jewish cemetery in Lublin. Detail after detail Panas compares the two „images” (tombstones, town square) and reaches surprising interpretative conclusions. In a strange way, the square that after World War II was changed in a socialist way, quite involuntarily tells the story of „The Seeing One”, and even the story of the final struggle against evil, one so longed for by Horowic the Messiah.