After interviewing a Holocaust survivor who took clandestine photographs of the Kovno Ghetto at great risk, a graduate student stumbles over a diary chronicling the same time and place during Nazi occupation. She soon discovers that photographer, George Kaddish is one of only two known Jewish photographers who recorded ghetto life, but most importantly she learns that hope and humanity still exist.
In Kaddish for Kovno (the Kaddish is a prayer for the dead) William W Mishell documents in passionate detail the creation and then the obliteration of ghetto Kovno in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation of World War II. It is a troy of ingenuity and heroism as well as of horror and destruction. It illuminates the indomitable human spirit as the Jews of Kovno secured food, smuggled children to safety, set up hospitals, and even organised a ghetto orchestra in the face of numbing deprivations and brutality. A gripping account of four years no human could forget.
A National Jewish Book Award-winning autobiography that's "an astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile" (The New York Times Book Review). Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Beside his father’s grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourner’s kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltier’s National Jewish Book Award–winning autobiography, Kaddish, the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by ardor of inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one man’s urgent exploration of Jewish liturgy and law, from the 10th-century legend of a wayward ghost to the speculations of medieval scholars on the grief of God to the perplexities of a modern rabbi in the Kovno ghetto. Here too is a mourner’s unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death’s wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltier’s Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a son’s embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar’s savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer’s revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader.
“Remarkable . . . provides a graphic and unparalleled description of the conditions under which the Jews of Kaunas tried to live and survive.” —The Forward As a force that had to serve two masters, both the Jewish population of the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania and its German occupiers, the Kovno Jewish ghetto police walked a fine line between helping Jews survive and meeting Nazi orders. In 1942 and 1943 some of its members secretly composed this history and buried it in tin boxes. This book details the creation and organization of the ghetto, the violent German attacks on the population in the summer of 1941, the periodic selections of Jews to be deported and killed, the labor required of the surviving Jewish population, and the efforts of the police to provide a semblance of stability. A substantial introduction by distinguished historian Samuel D. Kassow places this powerful work within the context of the history of the Kovno Jewish community and its experience and fate at the hands of the Nazis. “No book I've read in recent time about the Holocaust has so moved me, evoking the utter helplessness of the Jew, the plight of the Jewish police and the cunning cruelty of the German. This is a gripping story, page by page, and it reminds us again that there but for the grace of God go we all.” —Marvin Kalb, Senior Advisor to the Pulitzer Center and Edward R. Murrow Professor, Emeritus, Harvard Kennedy School “A landmark of Holocaust historiography.” —Slavic Review
On July 21, 1941, Tikva Cholomovitch was born in Kovno, Lithuania, to Yosef and Asya Cholomovitch, her birth against the direct orders of the Nazis, who had occupied Kovno just one month prior, forbidding the birth of Jewish children. Rescued by her parents and relatives from Hitlers action against children, during which all children under twelve years of age were taken away from their parents and murdered, Tikva began an odyssey that saw her hidden in a bunker for weeks to avoid detection by Nazi soldiers, her health so deteriorated that death, for the not-yet-three-year-old Tikva, was imminent; rescued by a Catholic Lithuanian family, who risked their lives and the lives of their two young daughters to save Tikva in a late-night exchange at the barbed wire fence, bribing a Nazi guard to secure her safety; uniting with an aunt and uncle who would take her to Palestine (which, eventually, becomes Israel) and to life on a kibbutz; making a voyage across the sea to America to be adopted by Izz and Edna Polsky of Philadelphia. Told in a straightforward narrative, unadorned and plainly conceived, Tikva Means Hope connects in a fundamental manner, hitting emotional chords straight on, with no manipulation or preconception. Meant as a tribute, it is far more a story that strikes a universal chord of survival, community, and love.
This expanded edition of the guide to major books in English on the Holocaust is organized into ten subject areas: reference materials, European antisemitism, background materials, the Holocaust years, Jewish resistance
The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews is a readable text for undergraduate students containing sufficient but manageable detail. The author provides a broad set of perspectives, while emphasizing the Holocaust as a catastrophe emerging from an international Jewish question. This text conveys a sense of the Holocaust's many moving parts. It is arranged chronologically and geographically to reflect how persecution, experience, and choices varied over different periods and places. Instructors may also take a thematic approach, as the chapters have distinct sections on such topics as German decisions, Jewish responses, bystander reactions, and other themes.
The image of author Sara Ginaite-Rubinson at the start of her memoir is iconic in terms of the Jewish Resistance movement during WWII, and is featured prominently in the Holocaust Museum. First published in Lithuania in 1999, this book received very wide critical acclaim and is now considered one of the seminal works on Lithuanian Jewry during the Holocaust period. It is co-published with the Holocaust Centre of Toronto, UJA Federation
Irena Veisaitė is held in deep esteem throughout her country. This volume is an attempt to relate the difficult journey of her remarkable life against the backdrop of the complex history of Lithuania and its Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews). After being rescued by Christian Lithuanian families and having survived the Holocaust Irena Veisaitė devoted herself to study and creative work. She was a memorable lecturer, respected theatre critic, associate film director, and also founder and chairman of the Open Society Fund (Soros Foundation) which made an invaluable contribution to the process of democratisation in Lithuania. Irena Veisaitė made it her life’s work to speak up for dialogue and mutual understanding and believes that even in the most difficult circumstances it is possible to preserve one’s humanity. Having lived through some of the major atrocities of the twentieth century, her insistence on the need for tolerance has inspired many.
Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe explains how ordinary people become involved in resistance and rebellion against powerful regimes. The book shows how a sequence of casual forces - social norms, focal points, rational calculation - operate to drive individuals into roles of passive resistance and, at a second stage, into participation in community-based rebellion organization. By linking the operation of these mechanisms to observable social structures, the work generates predictions about which types of community and society are most likely to form and sustain resistance and rebellion. The empirical material centres around Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance in both the 1940s and the 1987–91 period. Using the Lithuanian experience as a baseline, comparisons with several other Eastern European countries demonstrate the breadth and depth of the theory. The book contributes to both the general literature on political violence and protest, as well as the theoretical literature on collective action.
