This volume offers a comprehensive account of how the Nazis conducted the Holocaust throughout the scattered towns and villages of Poland and the Soviet Union. It covers more than 1,150 sites, including both open and closed ghettos. Regional essays outline the patterns of ghettoization in 19 German...
“I am ready to make the journey,” wrote Henryk Z. in 1948 in a letter to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Having left Poland after the Kielce pogrom, Henryk Z. was in the process of rebuilding his life as a DP in Stuttgart and awaiting further emigration approval. Nevertheless, he was volu...
Throughout the first decade of the State of Israel, the national institution and the Left Zionist movements for the commemoration of the Holocaust produced diaries and journals, and primary research papers which shed light on the various aspects of Jewish resistance during the period of the Holocaus...
The study provides an historical overview of the role played by the Jewish Councils of Hungary in general and that of the Central Jewish Council of Budapest in particular. It focuses on the organization, structure, and functions of the Central Jewish Council, highlighting the perceptions and policie...
From 1945 until today, there has been no scientific research done on the filed of Polish-Jewish municipality relationships during the German occupation, 1939-1945. This was caused from one side by the predominate opinion there was no relationships between Polish City Boards and so-called Judenräte,...
On November 28, 1939, after a collapse of Poland, the Governor General, Hans Frank, issued a decree on setting up Jewish Councils (Judenräte) in the General Government. Their task was to be to represent local Jewish communities in relations with the occupation authorities. In fact, despite a facade...
The article analyzes the evolution of historiography on Jewish leadership during the Holocaust. It shows that the beginnings of research were anchored in the immediate post-war disputes in the Jewish community regarding the behaviour of the Jewish leaders, and that it was coloured by moral evaluatio...
This article does not describe the structures and functioning of the Judenräte in occupied Europe, nor does it present the fates of the Council of Elders’ leaders ; and it does not describe the activity of the Jewish bureaucracy within a situation of organized illegality into which the Germans force...
Two days after the German offensive on June 22, 1941, in Soviet Union, Vilnius was occupied. The Jewish community which amounted to 80 000 people was immediately to know a regime of terror. From mid July till the end of December, 35 000 Jews were exterminated. In the Ghetto, at the head of the Juden...
Despite certain weaknesses in terms of sources, Isaiah Trunk’s analysis of the Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe remains the most effective treatment of the subject. However, since it was written, the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s has expanded the regional scope of our knowledge to inc...
None of the head of Judenrat and Altestenrat created by Germans during the Second World War caused so many contradictions as Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, the Eldest of the Jews in Litzmannstadt Ghetto.Joanna Podolska presents Rumkowski’s complicated personality using documents, testimonies, diaries an...
This article deals with the Viennese Jewish community administration under the Nazis and discusses its reaction to the national-socialist persecution and extermination. In Vienna Adolf Eichmann developed a new national-socialist policy against the Jews. This policy was afterwards copied in other cit...
A travers le procès d’Eichmann, auquel l’auteur a consacré un film, est interrogé le défi conceptuel que représente le crime bureaucratique. Eichmann n’était pas un forcené raciste, mais un travailleur modèle. Cependant, la thèse du travailleur zélé au service de la « banalité du mal » demeure aujou...