"Focuses on the history of the Jewish Order Service (known as the Jewish Police) in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940-1943 and its perception among ghetto inhabitants"--

'In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years' War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity. Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabrück, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space--a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938--today known as Kristallnacht--when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler's forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Osnabrück was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city's early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Hélène Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that "express the life lost, the life kept." Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family's history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, Well-Kept Ruins is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition.'--Publisher description.

"Jews and Germans is the only book in English to delve into the history and challenges of the German-Jewish relationship from before the Holocaust through today. Were the Weimar Republic years (1918 - 1933) truly reciprocal for Jews and Germans? Post- Holocaust, how has that complex relationship evolved?"--

Five hundred years ago Jews living in Spain were given a Stark choice: be baptized or leave the country. the expulsion of the Sephardim - the term for Spain's Jews - was a turning point in the history of the Iberian Peninsula and one o the greatest upheavals in jeFive hundred years ago Jews living in Spain were given a stark choice: be baptized or leave the country. The expulsion of the Sephardim--the term for Spain's Jews--was a turning point in the history of the Iberian Peninsula and one of the greatest upheavals in Jewish history since the Diaspora.The Middle Ages was a time of uneasy co-operation between Christians and Jews, but in the 14th century a rising tide of religious fanaticism and anti-Semitism gradually engulfed Spain, leading to horrific massacres in 1391. Then, in March 1492, came the edict of the Catholic Monarchs, giving the Jews three months to leave. The converts who stayed faced bitter prejudice--hounded by the Inquisition, their descendants penalized for centuries--as the Spanish Crown tried to impose Catholic uniformity.Those who fled the persecution had to struggle to re-establish their communities elsewhere in Europe, the Ottoman empire and Morocco. Outstanding individuals such as Baruch Spinoza--the most important philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age--and Joseph Nasi--the financier-favorite of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent--exemplify the achievements of the Sephardi exiles. Whether in Amsterdam, Istanbul or London, they seized the opportunities offered by a new world of empires and discovery.Published to mark the quincentenary of the Sephardi exodus, here at last is a complete and objective account of these traumatic events. Professor Elie Kedourie has gathered an international team of experts who piece together all aspects of the moving story: conditions in Spain leading up to 1492; the decree itself, and its consequences for Spanish Jewry; the experiences of the exiles and their contributions towards economic and intellectual life in their new countries. Professor Kedourie himself provides a stimulating and up-to-date assessment of the whole tragic episode--whose historic repercussions continue to this day.wish hostory since the diaspora. published to mark the quincentenary of the sephardi exodus, here is a complete and objective account of these traumatic events

The survival of Jewish identity and culture is one of the great enigmas of history. Faced with persecution, dispersal, pogroms and Hitler's "Final Solution", the future of the Jewish people was far from secure. "The Jewish Enigma" seeks to discover what made survival possible. In seven chapters, scholars trace the history of the Jewish people from the first Babylonian exile to the current state of Western and American Jewry. Topics covered include Jews in Islamic lands, the Emancipation, the history of anti-Semitism, the history of East European Jewry as well as the troubled history of Zionism and the Palestinians.

The first novel written and published in English by an American Jewish woman Published serially in the spiritualist journal Banner of Light in 1860, Cosella Wayne: Or, Will and Destiny is the first coming-of-age novel, written and published in English by an American Jewish woman, to depict Jews in the United States and transforms what we know about the history of early American Jewish literature. The novel never appeared in book form, went unmentioned in Jewish newspapers of the day, and studies of nineteenth-century American Jewish literature ignore it completely. Yet the novel anticipates many central themes of American Jewish writing: intermarriage, generational tension, family dysfunction, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, the place of women in Jewish life, the nature of romantic love, and the tension between destiny and free will. The narrative recounts a relationship between an abusive Jewish father and the rebellious daughter he molested as well as that daughter’s struggle to find a place in the complex social fabric of nineteenth-century America. It is also unique in portraying such themes as an unmarried Jewish woman’s descent into poverty, her forlorn years as a starving orphaned seamstress, her apostasy and return to Judaism, and her quest to be both Jewish and a spiritualist at one and the same time. Jonathan Sarna, who introduces the volume, discovered Cosella Wayne while pursuing research at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. This edition is supplemented with selections from Cora Wilburn’s recently rediscovered diary, which are reprinted in the appendix. Together, these materials help to situate Cosella Wayne within the life and times of one of nineteenth-century American Jewry’s least known and yet most prolific female authors.

Pp. 264-338 discuss the Holocaust period, beginning with anti-Jewish laws in Yugoslavia restricting Jewish economic activity, as well as a numerus clausus, in October 1940. Notes that these laws were passed under German pressure, that protests made by the Jewish leadership were to no avail, and that many Jews thereafter converted. With the German occupation and division of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Nazis took over control of Belgrade and instituted further anti-Jewish measures. During fall 1941 all Jewish men were arrested; they were sent to nearby labor camps, and many were killed. In December all of the remaining Jews, mostly women and children, were interned at Sajmište, and during spring 1942 they were killed in a gassing truck. Provides details concerning the Final Solution in Belgrade, which was carried out with the collaboration of local authorities and police. Estimates that 94% of the ca. 11,870 Jews living there in 1941 were killed. Only a few of the Nazi perpetrators were tried and sentenced in Yugoslavia after the war; the others either fled or returned to Germany, where some received light sentences.

Yemen was ruled in the 20th century by imams from the extremist Zaydi Muslim sect. The Jews suffered from legal restrictions and persecutions. In 1910 the victorious Imam Yahya reinstated the "sharia" as the legal code in place of the Turkish civil code, and promulgated the law which imposed on the Jews the status of dhimmi in its most rigid form. In 1922, the reintroduction of forced conversion of Jewish orphans to Islam initiated a Jewish campaign to smuggle many of them to Aden. In the same year, the Imam Yahya virtually banned Jewish emigration from Yemen. Popular hatred of Jews was intense. The UN decision on the partition of Palestine in 1947 engendered a blood libel in San'a and anti-Jewish riots (aggravated by a civil war in Yemen), as well as pogroms in neighboring Aden and Shaykh Othman in which ca. 100 Jews were murdered. In 1948-50 most of the Jews left Yemen.

The Agony of Greek Jews tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. Bowman focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. His book contains new archival material and interviews with survivors. It supersedes much of the general literature on the subject of Greek Jewry.

Memoirs of a Jew who was born in 1927 in Borisław, Poland. Pp. 31-132 deal with the Holocaust period, based on information found in a diary she kept at the time. Wolanski survived in hiding, at first with a Christian family and then in a bunker in the forest, until the liberation.

"Blowing the Whistle on Genocide tells the story of a young Treasury Department lawyer who helped alert the world about the Holocaust and force U.S. government action to rescue Jews from the Nazis." "Risking his career and ignoring threats that were made against him, Josiah E. DuBois, Jr., relentlessly investigated and then exposed the State Department's suppression of news about the Holocaust and obstruction of rescue attempts." "His report, "The Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews," helped force President Roosevelt to belatedly establish the War Refugee Board. With DuBois as one of its leaders, the board played a key role in the rescue of more than 200,000 refugees during the final months of the war." "At every turn, DuBois was confronted by officials who tried to stop him - from the powerful Assistant Secretary of State who sabotaged rescue attempts, to the War Department official who blocked DuBois's proposal to bomb Auschwitz and worked to pardon Nazi war criminals after the war." "But DuBois persevered. He overcame the obstacles and saved lives. He was America's Schindler."--BOOK JACKET.

The Jews of Modern France explores the endlessly complex encounter of France and its Jews from just before the Revolution to the eve of the twenty-first century. In the late eighteenth century, some forty thousand Jews lived in scattered communities on the peripheries of the French state, not considered French by others or by themselves. Two hundred years later, in 1989, France celebrated the anniversary of the Revolution with the largest, most vital Jewish population in western and central Europe. Paula Hyman looks closely at the period that began when France's Jews were offered citizenship during the Revolution. She shows how they and succeeding generations embraced the opportunities of integration and acculturation, redefined their identities, adapted their Judaism to the pragmatic and ideological demands of the time, and participated fully in French culture and politics. Within this same period, Jews in France fell victim to a secular political antisemitism that mocked the gains of emancipation, culminating first in the Dreyfus Affair and later in the murder of one-fourth of them in the Holocaust. Yet up to the present day, through successive waves of immigration, Jews have asserted the compatibility of their French identity with various versions of Jewish particularity, including Zionism. This remarkable view in microcosm of the modern Jewish experience will interest general readers and scholars alike.

Ch. 2 (pp. 11-29), "The Status of Jews in Alsace, " discusses the Jews' economic role as intermediaries (e.g. moneylenders, peddlers) and the hostility it aroused, from the eve of the French Revolution until 1870. The Infamous Decree (1808-18), although not strictly enforced, restricted Jewish rights (e.g. commercial activities) in an effort to reorient the Jews to crafts and agriculture. The occupational resentment compounded with the legacy of Christian antisemitism and the peasant resentment of capitalistic inroads in agriculture, which was associated with the Jews, led to violent antisemitic incidents in 1819-20s, in the early 1830s, and especially during the 1848 revolution. Discrimination was expressed by local government authorities, the courts, the press, etc. By the 1850s-60s, antisemitism declined.

"This book advances a new perspective on the birth of ancient Israel combining the archaeological data and biblical sources through the discovery of the metallurgical background of ancient Yahwism. It should concern archaeologists, biblical scholars, and readers with an interest in the development of the religions based on the biblical tradition"--

This is the first study of the Zionist movement in Germany, England and the United States that recognizes "Western Zionism" as a distinctive force. It focuses on images of Zionist leaders and Palestine, on tours of Palestine, youth and women's organizations, the First World War, and the rise of the Keren Hayesod (Palestine Foundation Fund).

A biography of the leading halakhic authority Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, born in Ciechanowiecz, Poland. He was the last rector of the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary. Ch. 5 (pp. 110-134), "Response to the New Nazi Government (1933-1934), " characterizes the early reaction of Weinberg to the Nazis as naive and apologetic. Weinberg helped the Orthodox Jews deal with problems of daily life under the Nazis (e.g. the ban on ritual slaughter). Ch. 6 (pp. 135-171), "The Nazi Era (1933-1945), " notes that Orthodox German Jews first adopted a policy of appeasement with the regime. With Jews excluded from general education and other aspects of German life, the role of the Seminary became more important. Weinberg had opposed Jewish emigration, and the "Kristallnacht" pogrom came as a tremendous shock to him; the Seminary was closed and most of the students and faculty emigrated. At the outbreak of the war he was in Warsaw, where he helped with communal affairs. As a Soviet citizen, Weinberg suffered less than others; in October 1941 he was transferred from the Warsaw ghetto to a detention camp in Wuelzburg, Germany, possibly in order to trade him for German citizens held captive in the USSR. He remained there until April 1945. Most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust. After the war he became head of a yeshiva in Montreux, Switzerland.

Notes from the Other Side of Night is a diary-memoir written upon Juliana Geran Pilon's return to her native Romania in 1975, which she had left along with her family when she was just fourteen. Poetically weaving together modern insight and realities with childhood perceptions, Pilon tells the haunting stories of her parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends. Although the scenery of her native home had remained essentially unchanged since her childhood, Pilon recalls streets that are no more, homes and churches that have been demolished. Yet, the hills and forests, the flowers and mountains, the heat of old Bucharest, remained the same. The scenes and characters described in this book are simply unforgettable. Despite the many tragedies it describes--anti-semitism, political imprisonment, and judicial execution were ruthless realities under communism--Notes from the Other Side of Night is not a depressing book. Pilon writes with a detached melancholy about events and characters that illustrate Hannah Arendt's terrifying "banality of evil." But she remembers, as well, those few who managed to remain human beings until the end. Ultimately, hope triumphs in this memoir. This edition includes a new foreword, which discusses the initial writing and publication of this and previous editions.

Beginning with the first Jewish settler, Moses David, the important role that Windsor Jews played in the development of Ontario's south is mirrored in this 200-year chronicle. the founding pioneer families transformed their Eastern European shtetl into a North American settlement; many individuals were involved in establishing synagogues, schools, and an organized communal structure in spite of divergent religious, political, and economic interests. Modernity and the growing influences of Zionism and Conservative/Reform Judaism challenged the traditional and leftist leanings of the community's founders. From the outset, Jews were represented in city council, actively involved in communal organizations, and appointed to judicial posts. While its Jewish population was small, Windsor boasted Canada's first Jewish Cabinet members, provincially and federally, in David Croll and Herb Gray. As the new millennium approached, jews faced shrinking numbers, forcing major consolidations in order to ensure their survival.

The reform era in Russia (1855-1881) witnessed the emancipation of the serfs, economic and social change, the reform of all imperial institutions, and the growth of national identity among Russians and the Empire's expanding Jewish population. Consequently, the 'Jewish Question' became one of most hotly debated topics in Russia. Attitudes toward the Jews which evolved during this period persisted up to the Revolution and beyond. This book, based on exhaustive archival research of materials published during the period, studies the interplay of public opinion and official policy. The author examines the attitudes of all sectors of Russian educated society towards the Jews. He also explores how a new group, the Russian Jewish intelligentsia, sought to define a modern Jewish identity in the midst of a multi-ethnic Empire.