History Of Jews In Vilna

Author : Israel Cohen
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 600 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vilna written by Israel Cohen and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," was the vibrant core of Eastern European Jewish life. Distinguished British historian, Israel Cohen, opens with the legend of the origin of Vilna in 1322 and traces the history of its Jewish community through vivid portraits of scholars, heroes, and leaders. The result is a book based on scholarship, yet full, too, of wonderful unforgettable stories.

Author : Eliyahu Stern
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300179308
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Genius written by Eliyahu Stern and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elijah ben Solomon, the "Genius of Vilna,” was perhaps the best-known and most understudied figure in modern Jewish history. This book offers a new narrative of Jewish modernity based on Elijah's life and influence. While the experience of Jews in modernity has often been described as a process of Western European secularization—with Jews becoming citizens of Western nation-states, congregants of reformed synagogues, and assimilated members of society—Stern uses Elijah’s story to highlight a different theory of modernization for European life. Religious movements such as Hasidism and anti-secular institutions such as the yeshiva emerged from the same democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion that gave rise to secular and universal movements and institutions. Claimed by traditionalists, enlighteners, Zionists, and the Orthodox, Elijah’s genius and its afterlife capture an all-embracing interpretation of the modern Jewish experience. Through the story of the “Vilna Gaon,” Stern presents a new model for understanding modern Jewish history and more generally the place of traditionalism and religious radicalism in modern Western life and thought.

Author : Vladas Sirutavičius
Publisher : Brill Schoningh
ISBN 13 : 9783657705757
Total Pages : 524 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The History of Jews in Lithuania written by Vladas Sirutavičius and published by Brill Schoningh. This book was released on 2019-10 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to create an integral picture of the social, economic and cultural history of the Jews in Lithuania during the course of more than six hundred years - from the Middle Ages to the 1990s. It is a translation of the study "Lietuvos žydai. Istorinė studija" (Engl. "Lithuanian Jews. Historical study"), published in Lithuanian in 2012. The Book was written by an interna-tional group of scholars from Lithuania, Israel, the United States of America and Germany. The world of Lithuanian Jewry is reconstructed through different aspects of the development of community and society: demography, social and economic activity, self-government institutions of the community, cultural and religious movements, literature and the press, education, discriminative policy of the authorities and relations with the dominant church, segregation, assimilation and changes of identity, anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.

Author : David E. Fishman
Publisher : University Press of New England
ISBN 13 : 1512601268
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Book Smugglers written by David E. Fishman and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts-first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets-by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life-to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi "expert" on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city's great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed "the Paper Brigade," and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group's worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto's secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet "liberation" of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved-only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto-a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach-The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.

Author : Ruta Vanagaite
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1538133040
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Our People written by Ruta Vanagaite and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A famous Nazi hunter and a descendent of Nazi collaborators team up on a journey to uncover Lithuania’s Holocaust secrets. This remarkable book traces the quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania by two ostensible enemies: Rūta a descendant of the perpetrators, Efraim a descendant of the victims. Rūta Vanagaitė, a successful Lithuanian writer, was motivated by her recent discoveries that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews and that Lithuanian officials had tried to hide the complicity of local collaborators. Efraim Zuroff, a noted Israeli Nazi hunter, had both professional and personal motivations. He had worked for years to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice and to compel local authorities to tell the truth about the Holocaust in their country. The facts that his maternal grandparents were born in Lithuania and that he was named for a great-uncle who was murdered with his family in Vilnius with the active help of Lithuanians made his search personal as well. Our People exposes the significant role in implementing the Final Solution played by local political leaders and the prewar Lithuanian administration that remained in place during the Nazi occupation. It also tackles the sensitive issue of the motivation of thousands of ordinary Lithuanians who were complicit in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. At the heart of the book, these are the issues that Rūta and Efraim discuss, debate, and analyze as they crisscross the country to visit dozens of Holocaust mass murder sites in Lithuania and neighboring Belarus. This book follows them on their remarkable journey as they search for neglected graves, interview eyewitnesses, and uncover hints of the rich life that had existed in hundreds of Jewish communities throughout Lithuania.

Author : David Nasaw
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143110993
Total Pages : 673 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Million written by David Nasaw and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII In May 1945, after German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, millions of concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators were left behind in Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers attempted to repatriate the refugees, but more than a million displaced persons remained in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. Most would eventually be resettled in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages, but no nation, including the United States, was willing to accept more than a handful of the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. When in June, 1948, the United States Congress passed legislation permitting the immigration of displaced persons, visas were granted to sizable numbers of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, but denied to 90% of the Jewish displaced persons. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping but until now hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness and of the Last Million, as they crossed from a broken past into an unknowable future, carrying with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and shows us how it is our history as well.

Author : Lucy S. Dawidowicz
Publisher : Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

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Download or read book From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947 written by Lucy S. Dawidowicz and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-17 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this memoir, Lucy S. Dawidowicz recounts her time in Vilna where she went to study in 1938-39. She also reconstructs the history of Vilna Jews through the centuries and gives a first-hand account of Vilna’s Jewish community right before its destruction by the Nazis. Dawidowicz fled days before the German invasion of Poland, and returned to the American zone in Germany in 1946-47 to help Jews in Displaced Persons camps with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. It was in that role that Dawidowicz helped salvage remnants of YIVO’s Vilna archives that were shipped to New York. “Dawidowicz, a well-known historian of the Jews, has presented us... a memoir on Vilna, a city she left on Aug. 24, 1939, just before World War II began. It is a tremendous collection of facts and names. There are sketches depicting the everyday life of a thriving community and reflections upon its unique culture. But the book is more than that: it is a monument to the community destroyed, not by forces of nature, but by the evil human hand.” — Tomas Venclova, The New York Times “In this deeply moving personal reminiscence, eminent historian Dawidowicz recounts the year she spent in Vilna, Poland [in 1938-39]... [a] poignant memoir... Her piercingly eloquent narrative gives us a sharp first-hand impression of a world in ruins and of the irreparable losses suffered by European Jewry.” — Publishers Weekly “The story of Dawidowicz’s early years and a tribute to the Jewish community and culture of Vilna... Crammed with descriptive details of a people and culture now destroyed and of WW II's chaotic aftermath: chastening, compelling, powerful.” —Kirkus Reviews “A leading historian of the Holocaust, Dawidowicz transports the reader from 1938, when she studied in Vilna, Poland, through 1946, when she returned to Europe to assist Jewish survivors. This is a powerful and absorbing memoir” — Library Journal “Lucy Dawidowicz's memoir comprises several books for the price of one: it portrays Jewish Vilna as the plucky American student encountered it in 1938, describes the fate of Jewish cultural treasures as she helped recover them after the War, and exposes the mind and spirit of an intrepid historian-in-the making.” — Ruth R. Wisse, Harvard University “Lucy Dawidowicz was an historian of monumental importance, best known for her classic The War Against the Jews. But she was also a vital chronicler of the world of European Jewry before its destruction... [A] compelling memoir of Vilna on the brink of destruction.” — Jonathan Rosen, author of The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds

Author : Herman Kruk
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300044941
Total Pages : 806 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania written by Herman Kruk and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widely scattered pages of the diaries, collected here for the first time, have been meticulously deciphered, translated, and annotated for this volume.".

Author : Dov Levin
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1571812644
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Litvaks written by Dov Levin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses some aspects of antisemitism in Lithuania, especially in socioeconomic terms, in the Middle Ages and under the Russian tsars. The 20th-century interwar period saw the introduction of anti-Jewish laws that negatively impacted on Jewish political involvement, economic activity, and physical security, and the situation worsened with a right-wing coup, at which time Nazi influence grew among the German minority. The peak of antisemitism is treated in pt. 4 (pp. 187-247), "World War II, the Holocaust, and the Jewish Survivors". Although Soviet rule in 1940-41 ended many restrictions, it harmed Jews culturally and economically; many were arrested or exiled. The Nazi occupation which followed led to the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. Even before the arrival of the German army, ca. 10,000 Jews were murdered by Lithuanians. German troops brought the Final Solution, in which Lithuanian collaboration was massive. Discusses ghettos, forced labor, and concentration camps, as well as Jewish partisan resistance. 96% of Lithuanian Jews were killed. Popular antisemitism was revived in postwar Lithuania. The issues of Lithuanian-Nazi collaboration and the Lithuanian association of Jews with communists to justify the massacre of Jews during World War II remained problems in the postwar and even post-communist periods.

Author : Abraham Sutzkever
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0228010438
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg written by Abraham Sutzkever and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-10-06 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1944, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow from the forest where he had spent the winter among partisan fighters. There he was encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg, the most famous Soviet Jewish writer of his day, to write a memoir of his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. Now, seventy-five years after it appeared in Yiddish in 1946, Justin Cammy provides a full English translation of one of the earliest published memoirs of the destruction of the city known throughout the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Based on his own experiences, his conversations with survivors, and his consultation with materials hidden in the ghetto and recovered after the liberation of his hometown, Sutzkever’s memoir rests at the intersection of postwar Holocaust literature and history. He grappled with the responsibility to produce a document that would indict the perpetrators and provide an account of both the horrors and the resilience of Jewish life under Nazi rule. Cammy bases his translation on the two extant versions of the full text of the memoir and includes Sutzkever’s diary notes and full testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Fascinating reminiscences of leading Soviet Yiddish cultural figures Sutzkever encountered during his time in Moscow – Ehrenburg, Yiddish modernist poet Peretz Markish, and director of the State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels – reveal the constraints of the political environment in which the memoir was composed. Both shocking and moving in its intensity, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg returns readers to a moment when the scale of the Holocaust was first coming into focus, through the eyes of one survivor who attempted to make sense of daily life, resistance, and death in the ghetto. A Yiddish Book Center Translation