The article highlights the relationship between transformation of the gender contract and the evolving social perceptions of motherhood in contemporary Poland. As it is assumed in line with my paper’s empirical analysis, motherhood is one of social nodal points as well as a constitutive point for women’s experience. However, the change to the ways in which motherhood is socially constructed in contemporary public and private spheres reflects the on-going transformations of the public and the private realm. Within the former and the latter, new conceptions of gender contract are being constantly proposed and are negotiated. By the same token, motherhood gradually moves from within its nature-driven and strictly private conceptualisation to becoming a social construct re/formulated in contemporary Polish public sphere. Within that process, both proponents and, especially, opponents of women empowerment voice their concerns.

The article presents the biographies of representatives of the third post-war generation of Polish Jews. It attempts at reconstructing the experiences of becoming a religious Jew, choosing a Jewish path in adolescence where there is no or incomplete transmission of intergenerational cultural heritage in the family of origin. The two women’s biographies were analysed in terms of independent acquisition of cultural (religious) knowledge and the possibilities and limitations of Jewish education in our country. The research was carried out based on the biographical method and unstructured/ in-depth interviews (2018–2022). Exemplifications in the form of the two biographies serve to distinguish the stages of “becoming a religious Jew and mother” in the “found generation”, to show individual biographical events and common biographical sequences (mostly educational and parental).