The writer as the people's therapist: Der Nister's last decade, 1939–49

ABSTRACT

World War II and the Holocaust caused profound changes in the style and themes of Der Nister's writing. He reevaluated his symbolist legacy and emerged as one of the most powerful and tragic voices in Soviet Yiddish literature. His transformation from a respected but marginal literary figure into a self-styled national leader became complete with his adventurous journey to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Far East, which he envisioned as a site of new Jewish revival. His illusions were crushed by his arrest in 1949.     

A teacher and his students: child Holocaust testimonies from early postwar Polish Bytom

ABSTRACT

The document presented here was created in 1945 in Bytom, Poland. It contains testimonies by Holocaust survivor children collected and put down in a notebook by their survivor teacher, Shlomo Tsam, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The testimonies shed light on Jewish children's experience in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, describing oppression, flight, and survival in the words of the weakest segment of Jewish communities – children. The testimonies provide raw data on the encounters between Jews and non-Jews in the territories in which the “Final Solution” was carried out. It is thus an important source contributing to the burgeoning research on the involvement of local populations in the murder of the Jews, on one hand, and in saving Jews, on the other. The creation of this document, one of several collections of Jewish survivor children's testimonies produced in the immediate postwar years, is also indicative of post-Holocaust Jewish sensibilities and concerns regarding surviving children.     

The Representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet Press, 1941–1945

Abstract

The article presents the first in-depth examination of the representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet press during the period of its perpetration, 1941–1945. The article illustrates that alongside growing anti-Semitism, both among the population and the regime, Soviet journalists, primarily Il'ya Ehrenburg and Vasilii Grossman, reported on the suffering and murder of European Jewry. The article examines the Soviet presentation of Nazi racial theory and compares it to the representation of Nazi racial theory in the American and British press during the war. The article looks at the reasons behind Soviet press coverage of the Holocaust, such as the use of atrocities to motivate the people to fight. It also examines the way in which the Soviet press used the Nazi persecution of the Jewish population as a means of distinguishing the fascist and socialist systems and highlighting the equality of all peoples, which it claimed existed in the Soviet Union. The article examines the Soviet representation of the behaviour of the Jews under occupation, focusing on the three main attributes — resistance, dignity and the brotherhood of the peoples. In general, the article strives to illustrate that the Soviet press reported on the Holocaust during the war and recognized the racial nature of the Nazi persecution and extermination of European Jewry.     

Conflicting Holocaust narratives in Moldovan nationalist historical discourse

The effort to build a patriotic, usable past for Moldova has led important Moldovan post‐Soviet historians of the pan‐Romanian school to de‐emphasize and rationalize the Holocaust for fear of it staining a national myth grounded in Romanian victimization narratives. Much of this strategy has been focused on the Jewish connection to Soviet communism in interwar greater Romania, which supposedly undermined the Romanian state and thereby warranted a public outcry against the Jews. The construction and use of this interwar “mismemory” has been mimicked by post‐Soviet historians in recent years, whereby greater social, political and economic problems are glossed over in preference for a specifically threatening Jewish anti‐Romanianism. One’s position on this historical debate is seemingly important enough to influence one’s national credentials in the public forum.     

Staging Traumatic Memory: Competing Narratives of State Violence in Post-Communist Hungarian Museums

The article examines the way three contemporary Hungarian museums–the House of Terror Museum, the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center–represent the history of the Holocaust and the history of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. Reflecting different political agendas, each of the three museums offers a different interpretation of how the Holocaust fits into the larger narrative of Hungary's 20th century history. The article argues that post-communist public memory has been constructed through debates about these histories. By analyzing the three museums' displays, narratives and the debates surrounding them, the article argues that Hungarian public discourse has yet to come to terms with the meaning and place of “Jewishness” (and the way it has informed “Hungarianness”) in modern Hungarian history. Despite the centrality of Jews and Jewish-non-Jewish relations to the museums' narratives, none are able to offer a clear definition of what “Jewishness” means and how it functioned at different times throughout the 20th century.     

Holocaust Child Survivors and Child Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

This study utilized a qualitative analysis of child survivors of the Holocaust who were sexually abused during World War II. The research study aimed to give this specific group of survivors a voice and to explore the impact of multiple extreme traumas, the Holocaust and childhood sexual abuse, on the survivors. Twenty-two child survivors of the Holocaust who were sexually abused during the war completed open-ended interviews. The data was qualitatively analyzed according to Tutty, Rothery, and Grinnell's (1996) guidelines. Three major themes were found: issues relating to the sexual abuse trauma, survivors' perceptions of the abuse, and survivors' general perspectives towards life. The identity of the offenders, Jewish or non-Jewish, determined the survivors' feelings towards themselves, the perpetrators, and about the worth of life.     

Deciphering a Mystery: Digital Technology and the Revelation of Handwritten Texts by Marcel Nadjari and Other Members of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau

ABSTRACT

Jewish Sonderkommando's handwritten notes – found among the earth and ashes – are key documents of Holocaust history. But their degree of preservation is poor. Digital technology comes to the rescue to restore the legibility of these documents potentially lost to history. This article provides some examples of the successful application of image processing, which considerably increases the sharpness of the text. Special filters and approaches managed to increase by fourfold the number of pages from Marcel Nadjari's notes that could be read before. The deciphered fragments of Nadjari's notes not only allow us to better understand the meaning of the entire document, but also make a connection to another Nadjari text, thus yielding a new, much deeper, understanding of both the author himself, the particular fate of Greek Jews in the Holocaust, and also their role in the life and death of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz–Birkenau.     

Skin lighteners, Black consumers and Jewish entrepreneurs in South Africa

This article considers the rise and decline of South Africa's lucrative and controversial skin-lighteners market through examination of the business history of the largest manufacturers, Abraham and Solomon Krok, and their evolving personas as millionaires and philanthropists. Such examination reveals how the country's skin-lighteners trade emerged as part of the broader growth of a black consumer market after the Second World War and how elements of that market became the target of anti-apartheid protests in subsequent decades. It also demonstrates how the Kroks' experiences as second-generation Jewish immigrants shaped their involvement in the trade and how, later, their self-identification as Jewish philanthropists informed their efforts to rehabilitate their reputations following South Africa's 1990 ban on all skin lighteners. Such efforts include the building of Johannesburg's highly acclaimed Apartheid Museum, modelled after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This article explores the profound ironies that some South Africans see in the fact that a museum dedicated to commemorating those who suffered under and, ultimately, triumphed against state racism was financed by a family fortune generated through the sale of skin lighteners to black consumers.     

The Politics of Recognition: Jewish Refugees in Relief Policies and Human Rights Debates, 1945-1950

This essay analyses the place of Jewish survivors in the refugee system established by the West in the aftermath of the Second World War. Departing from the literature of trauma and mourning, this article addresses Holocaust survivors as migrant refugees subjected to international categorisations, relief policies and human rights debates. Between 1945 and 1950, Jewish refugees were recognised as an ideal-type community of victims by western humanitarianism. Recognition entailed symbolic and material entitlements, and eventually rewarded Holocaust survivors with historical, political and territorial vindication. As opposed to other refugee groups who entered the market of international compassion in the 1940s, Jewish refugees were granted full status of political victims.     

The Politics of Recognition: Jewish Refugees in Relief Policies and Human Rights Debates, 1945–1950

This essay analyses the place of Jewish survivors in the refugee system established by the West in the aftermath of the Second World War. Departing from the literature of trauma and mourning, this article addresses Holocaust survivors as migrant refugees subjected to international categorisations, relief policies and human rights debates. Between 1945 and 1950, Jewish refugees were recognised as an ideal-type community of victims by western humanitarianism. Recognition entailed symbolic and material entitlements, and eventually rewarded Holocaust survivors with historical, political and territorial vindication. As opposed to other refugee groups who entered the market of international compassion in the 1940s, Jewish refugees were granted full status of political victims.     

Obstacles to the Integration of the Holocaust into Post-Communist East European Historical Narratives

Factors that have made it difficult for post-communist East European societies to integrate the Holocaust into their historical cultures include the communist heritage, which downplayed the specifically Jewish Holocaust; sensitivity to charges that a nation was complicit in the murder of the Jews; the framing of East European histories as national narratives into which it is difficult to incorporate the experience of other nations; the feeling that Jewish suffering is recognized, while that of other East Europeans is not; the positive re-evaluation of the interwar and wartime politics and culture after the collapse of communism; the survival and revival of anti-Semitism, with new inputs from the Middle East and from Western Holocaust deniers; the construction in the West of the Holocaust as a centrepiece of twentieth-century history; the influence of East European diasporas; the embedment of the discourse on the Holocaust in the political divide between nativists and Westernizers; the deployment of accusations of Holocaust collaboration as an instrument of foreign policy; and debate over the restitution of confiscated Jewish property. Often these factors come together into a reinforcing discursive structure. The essay’s conclusion suggests how to overcome these obstacles to the integration of the Holocaust into East European histories.     

International conference on Jewish civilization in eastern and central Europe,Minsk, 24–26 January 2000

A Symposium on Soviet Jewry

The Jews in Soviet Russia, Since 1917, Lionel Kochan (ed.). London, Oxford University Press for Institute of Jewish Affairs. 1970. ix + 357 pp. Index. £2.50.

Wanted: a history of Soviet Jewry

The Silent Millions: A History of the Jews in the Soviet Union by Joel Cang. London, Rapp and Whiting. 1969. 246 pp. £2.10.

Red Rose

Rosa Luxemburg, Ich War — Ich Bin — Ich Werede Sein, by Harry Wilde. Wien‐Muenchen‐Zurich, Verlag Fritz Molden. 1970. 264 pp.

A Book on Georgian Jewry

Yehudey Gruzia: Ma'avak Al Ha'shiva Le‐tsion (The Jews of Eorgia: A Struggle for the Return to Zion), by Mordecai Neishtat. Tel‐Aviv, Am Oved Publishers, Ltd. 1970. 148 pp. (in Hebrew).

Menshevism and the Jewish question

Russian Social Democracy; the Menshevik Movement. A Bibliography, by Anna M. Bourgina. Hoover Institution Bibliographical Series: XXXVI, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, California. 1968. 392 pp. (no price listed), (in Russian; English introduction).

Jewish writers of Byelorussia

Pismienniki Savieckaj Bielarusi: Karotki Bijabiblijahraficny Davednik (Writers of Soviet Byelorussia: a short Biobibliography), A. Harodzicki et al (comp.). Minsk, Vydavectva ‘Bielarus’. 1970. 440 pp. 82 kopeks.     

The Symbolic Type Revisited: Semiotics in Practice and the Reformation of the Israeli Commemorative Context

Revisiting Grathoff's theory of symbolic type (ST), we examine the personal evolution and commemorative work of Tsipi Kichler, a cultural entrepreneur and founder of an alternative Israeli Holocaust museum/geriatric center. As hybrid product of Israeli social cleavages, Kichler exteriorizes her paradoxical vision in the museum aiming to reform Holocaust‐related discourse and practice. Early biographical positioning and resultant contradictions become translated into resistant commemorative performance where serious humor deconstructs the binaries of life/death and past/present. We consider the implications of the ST's self‐referential closure to interaction, and the transformative potential of the alignment of cultural entrepreneurs' personal memory with collective memory.     

Materials relating to East European Jewish history and culture in the archives of the former Soviet Union

The Kiev Institute of Jewish (from the early 1930s “Proletarian”) Culture (Institut Evreiskoi Proletarskoi Kul'tury, IEPK), based at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAS), was one of two such organisations in the inter-war period. This article discusses the fate of its archive, a rich source that included material from Leningrad and elsewhere, in the wake of two interventions; firstly, its sudden closure in 1936 by the Soviet authorities and, secondly, the Nazi occupation of Kiev in the Second World War. As a consequence, the archive was scattered to the winds, ending up in two continents.     

Debating,obfuscating and disciplining the Holocaust: post-Soviet historical discourses on the OUN–UPA and other nationalist movements

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the archives of the former republics and satellite states of this multiethnic empire were opened. This allowed historians to investigate the history of nationalist and radical right organisations and armies that, during the Second World War, had been involved in the Holocaust and other atrocities. Among them was the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. For a long time the history of these movements was unknown or distorted by Soviet propaganda and propagandist publications written during the Cold War by veterans of these movements living in the West and cooperating with Western intelligence services. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was simultaneously accompanied by the “rebirth” of nationalism that was not free from antisemitism and racism, and which triggered different types of nationalist distortions of history and obfuscations of the Holocaust. Post-Soviet historical discourses were shaped not only by journalists or political activists, but also by radical right historians. These discourses impacted as well on historians who in general were critical of the post-Soviet rehabilitation of nationalism, war criminality or East Central European fascism. Concentrating on Ukrainian and Polish history, this article explores how the radical right historical discourses appeared in the post-Soviet space, what types of historians were involved in them and what kinds of distortions and obfuscations have predominated.     

The refusenik community in Moscow: social networks and models of identification

Since the late nineteenth century the history of Russian Jewry has been one of contradictory trends: on the one hand, large-scale migration and resettlement (both abroad and in the major industrial and cultural centres of Russia/the USSR/the former Soviet Union [FSU]); and, on the other hand, attempts to (re-)establish a full Jewish life and adapt it to changing conditions. The refuseniks – a small but notable group of Soviet Jewish activists who were prevented by the Soviet authorities from leaving the country for Israel – melded both trends. Despite extensive literature on this subject, we are still lacking satisfactory answers to a few important questions, dealing with the factors in the creation of the Zionist refusenik community, its organisational frameworks, and the social and political legacy of the refuseniks for Jewish communities of the post-Soviet space and the “new Russian Jewish diaspora.” This article addresses refusenik associations in Moscow and in some other places as a “community in the making,” which between the early 1970s and mid 1980s, a period of Jewish national awakening in the USSR, experienced a process of gradual transformation from an amorphous semi-structured entity to a more institutionalised structure.     

Jewish tradition faces the Soviet economy: moral dilemma of ‘shadow’ entrepreneurship in the former Pale of Settlement,Ukraine

Soviet life in the former Pale of Settlement appears in the memories of its residents as a world of living Jewish tradition existing within the professional and business activities of artisans and merchants at a time when the ideology and political structure of the Soviet Union prohibited private enterprise. That is why it occupied the shady parts of the socialist economy. Today, after collapse of the Soviet Union, it still poses moral dilemmas for those associated with its illegal activities. However, recollections about Soviet illegal enterprise also provide a space for critique of the Soviet system and a base for construction of contemporary local identity; in this way people reconcile the economic ethics of the recent Soviet past with modern capitalist reality. Narratives about illegal economic activities in the Soviet period are about the relationship between the people and the state. They are seen as a cosmological system; the Soviet state acted as an economically ineffective external force. Within its matrix was integrated a local world of human relationships with their customs and rules created the own local world of consumption and welfare. At the centre of this space is the socially and economically experienced Jewish entrepreneur whose competence is based on local Jewish tradition. Stories about illegal Soviet economic activity have become the heritage of local communities that approve of local business continuity.     

THE HOLOCAUST AS RECURRING REALITY: VICTIMIZATION THEMES AND JEWISH AMERICAN ETHNIC IDENTITY FORMATION

Drawing on sociological studies that document the regularity through which marginalized ethnic groups construct an ethnic identity, this article examines identity formation in the Jewish American context. A content analysis of 100 short stories written between 1946 and 1995 demonstrates how victim-oriented identities are created out of the more mundane experiences of everyday life. These stories, which were intended for consumption by Jewish American readers, describe daily life within the Jewish American community and, with surprising regularity, bring issues of victimization into the imagined experience for their readers. In addition, the analysis shows how Jewish American short story writers present the Holocaust, victimization, and anti-Semitism as contributing heavily to the processes of identity formation within the community. The discussion of the data concludes by arguing that, as the Jewish American community becomes further removed from the events of World War II, the Holocaust is becoming a more salient recurrent reality in the formation of a Jewish American identity that is increasingly tied to issues of victimization.     

The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin

This article considers the representation of the shtetl in two museum narratives devoted to Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The first, the state-funded 1939 exhibit “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR” was organized by the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad and remained on display to the Soviet public until the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The second is the privately funded Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Though conceived under radically different ideological and political circumstances, each exhibition conveys a significant message about the place of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively, and each positions the shtetl as a formative arena for Jewish civic identity vis-à-vis the Russian homeland. Across the chasm of over seventy years, these two museum projects raise strikingly similar questions about how and why cultural institutions are mobilized to define the relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and the state. In both cases, the shtetl plays a significant role in narrating this unequal relationship.     

Holding on to history and each other: The unexpected LGBTQ legacy of a Czech Holocaust survivor and a Torah scroll from her hometown

Abstract

A Czech Holocaust survivor rescued by a Kindertransport in 1939; a long-lost Torah scroll, rediscovered in 1964, from a Jewish community wiped out in World War II; a German American lesbian who converted to Judaism in 2001. Three disparate stories, unfolding decades apart, converge in one memorable encounter, a Kristallnacht commemoration in Los Angeles organized by Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC), the world’s first LGBTQ synagogue, which leads to an enduring friendship and fresh insight into contemporary queer Jewish life. In this personal essay, longtime BCC member Sylvia Sukop interweaves history and autobiography to explore the beauty and power of ritual, the resonance of the “Choose life” passage in Deuteronomy that her congregation reads from its rescued Czech scroll every Yom Kippur, and the many forms that good deeds and survival can take. Progressive faith communities, the author suggests, and the traditions in which they are rooted make space to witness and affirm the fullness of one another’s humanity, bridging differences and fostering unexpected kinship in a brutally divisive world.