The article addresses sources for understanding the complexion of the Shoah in Poland, through a focus on the Lublin District and Jewish forced labor there. From the opening story of the wedding of ...Shamai Grajer and Mina Fiszman in Lublin on April 17, 1942, the article extrapolates several central themes: two constants in Nazi policies and Jewish experience—forced population movements and forced labor, the behavior of the various actors involved in the story, and sources. The main individuals involved in the opening story highlight these subjects. Fiszman was a refugee deported in February 1940 from Stettin. Grajer, Fiszman, and Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Talmud, who performed the wedding, had all been selected as forced laborers when the majority of the Jewish community was murdered during the previous month, and they hoped that their labor would help them survive. The behavior of the main German actors in the story, Harry Sturm and Hermann Worthoff, was not uniformly evil, and the behavior of the Jewish actors was not uniformly “heroic.” The Bełżec forced labor complex in 1940 highlights the brutality and murderousness of much of the early forced labor in Poland. Yet, during the deportations to death in 1942 the Jews needed to “unlearn” the lessons of avoiding such labor if they were now to have a hope of surviving. Among the varied sources for this and the subsequent subjects addressed in the article, the Jewish sources provide a sense of what actually happened in these camps and situations.
Yehuda Bauer has been the world's teacher of the Holocaust and has influenced the study of the Holocaust perhaps more than anyone else in the last 50 years. Bauer has significantly affected the ...author's own professional work, probably more than any other teacher. In addition to Bauer being a scholarly and teaching role model, the author was exposed to and learned much about the world of journal editing from him while serving as the assistant editor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies under Bauer's editorship, which subsequently helped open a long career as the editor of Yad Vashem Studies. This article reflects on two aspects of Yehuda Bauer's work and their influence on the author as scholar and teacher: looking at the Holocaust at eye level, without tinted lenses, mystification, or ideological prejudice as much as that is possible; taking the Jewish eyewitnesses to events seriously. Finally, the article discusses Bauer's clear-eyed and objective approach to the Holocaust through the subject of the Allies' responses to the Holocaust, a topic the author first encountered academically in one of Bauer's seminars more than 40 years ago. Bauer has addressed questions regarding what Allied leaders knew about the Holocaust, what they did to try to stop it, the role of American Jewry, why the Allies did not bomb Auschwitz, and more in what is arguably the most balanced, ideology-free analysis by any scholar. We should all learn from this approach to the subject.
Silberklang recalls his first meeting with Franklin Littell at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He tells that while he had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish home and was doing graduate work on the ...history of the Shoah, Littell was a believing Christian, an ordained Methodist minister, a professor of theology with a penetrating analytical mind, who had turned his incisive critique inward on his worlds--Christianity and academia--with a challenge to confront the recent past. His passion for his subject was infectious, his knowledge of theology and history encyclopedic, and his speaking style engaging. For those who entered his classes or lectures with firm beliefs on a subject, his approach was challenging, for his students needed to think critically and openly. Moreover, he observes that listening to him and discussing a subject with him were invigorating experiences. Whoever spent just a bit of time in his company came away a changed person.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The article examines the fate of the Jews in Poland in the Soviet and German occupation zones. Nazi and Soviet policies affected all Jews, both as Jews and as part of the general population. But ...particularly under the Nazis, the Jews suffered a special fate, as reflected in the different, if connected, timetables of World War II and the Holocaust. By the end of 1942 most Polish Jews were already dead; by the time the Allies arrived or the Poles were ready for their national uprising, almost no Jews remained. The salient features of Soviet treatment of the Jews were suspicion and dissolution – suspicion of all political and religious activity; suspicion and dissolution of all private enterprise; dissolution of Jewish educational and communal frameworks. Still, most Polish Jews generally preferred the Soviets – the lesser of two evils – to the Nazis.The salient features of Nazi treatment of the Jews were totality and relentlessness, from the early wanton violence, forced labor, mass expulsions, death marches, and mass murder, to the later more systematic policies. The Jews became increasingly isolated and faced their persecutors alone. Between October 1939 and spring 1941, tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from western Poland to the Generalgouvernement. The Nazi sought not only to Germanize these territories, but also to drive all the Jews out of German territory. The Jews were outside Nazi population policies, meant in the long run to disappear. Economically, Jews were completely impoverished, which in turn affected their health profile. Starvation and disease became rampant in the large ghettos, resulting in mass death well before the “Final Solution” began. When the Nazis embarked on the murder of the Jews, devoting the full force and resources of a powerful, ideologically motivated, modern state to this national project, this was a seek-and-destroy mission that meant to leave no Jew alive. Here, too, the Jews were largely alone. The salient features in the Jews’ responses to the Nazis were helplessness and a sense of living in a hostile environment. They struggled to understand Nazi racial antisemitism. Seeing that following Nazi rules could spell death, the Jews needed to learn to become outlaws in order to hope to survive. Jews generally did not understand the Nazi intentions for them, and even if some did, this realization came only after most of the Jews in a community were already dead. Being a Jew in Poland during the Holocaust meant being constantly hunted, harassed, isolated, and threatened with death, not only from the Germans, but also from neighbors or others from among the local population, even if some local people were willing to lend them a helping hand.
Following the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in Germany in September 1935, Jewish leaders in Britain sought a far-reaching and unprecedented solution to the plight of German Jewry. Zionists and ...non-Zionists there bridged their ideological differences to formulate a plan, in dose consultation with German Jewish leaders, for the emigration of most of German Jewry in four years. The collaboration of American Jewry and of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, essential for the plan's success, was solicited. Months of negotiations resulted in the creation of the Council for German Jewry, with the task of coordinating implementation of a modified version of the British plan.
The Holocaust and the Israeli Teacher Auron, Yair; Katzenell, Jack; Silberklang, David
Holocaust and genocide studies,
1994, Letnik:
8, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article presents the conclusions of a comprehensive study of Israeli Jewish identity among student-teachers of all sectors of the Israeli educational system. Through this group, the article ...attempts to examine the attitudes of Isreali society to the Holocaust. A number of factors in Israeli attitudes to the Holocaust were examined: The “lessons” of the Holocaust as perceived by the future teachers; their attitudes to Jewish behavior during the Holocaust; the place of the Holocaust in the historical consciousness of young Israelis; study and evaluation of knowledge of the Holocaust; and a discussion of attitudes to antisemitism and its role in determining Jewish identity. The study found that young Israelis' conclusions regarding the Holocaust lean much more to a Zionist “lesson” than to Jewish ones, and even less to universal ones. A further finding was a stronger sense of pride and identification with the victims of the Holocaust today than in the past. Moreover, a large majority of the student-teachers maintained that all Jews should view themselves as Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust has become a central factor and, in many cases, the central factor in Jewish identity in Israel; no differences were found among the respondents' countries of origin, or among secular, traditional, national-religious, and ultra-orthodox Jews.
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