Making the Past into History

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-147
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Birth Certificate ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Jewish

This chapter chronicles battles over the restitution of Nazi-looted archives from Worms and Hamburg, which were eventually transferred to the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, and also the contested possibility of establishing Jewish archives in 1950s Germany. It argues that restitution was really about the transfer of the German Jewish past into the realm of history. Israeli archivists and their restitution agency allies argued that Jewish life was at its end—and feared that establishing new archives in Germany would provide a kind of “birth certificate” for fledgling Jewish communities. The chapter traces this history to the 1980s and 1990s, when new Jewish archival efforts in Germany reflected the growth of Jewish communities in Germany.

Who Are to Be the Successors of European Jewry? The Restitution of German Jewish Communal and Cultural Property

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Cultural Property ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Proportional Allocation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Communal Property ◽  
The World ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Archival Practices

Who are to be the successors of European Jewry? This question faced Jewish leaders after the Holocaust, in terms both legal – inheriting heirless property – as well as spiritual – carrying forward Jewish culture. Looted Jewish property was never merely a matter of inheritance. Instead, disputes revolved around the future of Jewish life. While Jewish restitution organizations sought control of former communal property to use around the world, some German-Jewish émigrés and survivors in Germany sought to establish themselves as direct successors to former Jewish communities and institutions. Such debates set the stage and the stakes for mass archival transfer to Israel/Palestine in the 1950s. The fate of the German Jewish communal archives highlights the nature of postwar restitution debates as proxy for the issue of the continuation of Jewish culture and history, calling into question the nature of restitution itself. As opposed to policies of proportional allocation to meet the needs of radically diminished Jewish communities, wholesale transfer of archives reflected a belief in a radical rupture in German Jewish existence as well as Israel’s position as successor to European Jewry. The fate of the archives, which broke with archival practices of provenance, concretized and validated the historical rupture represented by the Holocaust.

A Time to Gather

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Birth Certificate ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
And Control

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture examines Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine and argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory, precisely because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another. Creating archives was one means for Jews to take control of their history, especially after the Holocaust, when efforts at archive restitution removed looted archives from the hands of perpetrators. Such efforts also raised complex questions of who could actually “own” this history. This book contends that twentieth-century Jewish archival efforts served as a proxy for wide-ranging struggles over the meaning and control of Jewish culture: whether in Israel’s claims to be a successor to European Jewry, the reality of American Jewry’s rising prominence, or the question of the continued vitality of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust, gathering archives was a means to assert dominance over Jewish culture by making claims of ties to the past and constituting a kind of “birth certificate” or legitimization of communal life. A Time to Gather presents archive making as a metaphor with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews’ long diasporic history. In the end, a rising urgency of archival memory in Jewish life and the importance of history’s traces meant archives were powerful but contested symbols of control of the past, present, and future.

Introduction

2010 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Family Formation ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Smooth Transition ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
European Jewish

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the author's collection of articles which all deal with aspects of east European Jewish life in the modern period. This was a time of transition from a society in which tradition was a key force to one in which models of the past no longer significantly determined behaviour and thought. This shift took place rapidly and under conditions that were not obviously conducive to a quick and smooth transition, and the consequences are still very evident today. The chapter explains thar divided into three sections, the book studies the workings of Jewish communities, particularly east European Jewish society. The first section deals with family formation, family reformation, and family maintenance. The second section deals with education. Finally, the last section deals with the rabbinate — not with specific rabbis but with the institution.

Rediscovering Traces of Memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Webber ◽  
Chris Schwarz ◽  
Jason Francisco
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Local People ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Bear Witness

The present-day traces of the Jewish past in Poland are complex. Jewish life lay in ruins after the Holocaust. Much evidence of ruin remains, but there are also widespread traces that bear witness to the elaborate Jewish culture that once flourished there, even in villages and small towns. One also sees places where Jews were murdered by the Germans in the war: not only in death camps and ghettos, but also in fields, forests, rivers, and cemeteries. After the war, forty years of communism suppressed even the memory of the destroyed Jewish heritage. Today, by contrast, the historic Jewish culture of Poland is increasingly being memorialized, by local Poles as well as by foreign Jews. Synagogues and cemeteries are being renovated, monuments and museums are being set up. There are festivals of Jewish culture, hasidic pilgrims, and Jewish tourists; and local people who rescued Jews during the war are being honoured. In rediscovering the traces of memory one also finds clear signs of a local Jewish revival. This extensively revised second edition includes forty-five new photographs and updated explanatory texts. Together they suggest how to make sense of the past and discover its relevance for the present. This book will appeal to everyone concerned with questions of history, memory, and identity.

They Sure Will Be of Minority Groups

2018 ◽  
pp. 112-135
Author(s):  
Samira K. Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Minority Groups ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
The Family ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
The One

Interfaith families that are also interracial are less able to seamlessly fit into “mainstream” American Jewish life, which is dominated by Ashkenazi culture and racially coded as white. On the one hand, this can make interactions in Jewish communities more challenging. On the other, these families are often given more freedom and flexibility for including traditions from the Christian side of the family than their white interfaith counterparts.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 261-266
Author(s):  
Philipp Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
German Government ◽  
German Jews ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Camp System ◽  
German Jewish

THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT might have intended to eliminate Jewish life in Germany, and it succeeded in depriving of their German lives the individuals who illustrated the (im)possibilities of Jews being engaged on and with the German Right in this book. Yet it did not succeed in ending their lives altogether. The majority of the German Jews appearing on these pages managed to survive the Holocaust, through emigration, hiding, or perseverance in the concentration camp system. After the Holocaust they gave testimony, archived their records, and collected those of others. Without their efforts this book on German Jewish conservatives would not exist; and though it ends with their emigration—all but one never returned to Germany for any lengthy period of time—their individual stories were not over. By briefly recounting their lives after 1938, I want to conclude by paying them my respects....

Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904–1991)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Furnish
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
York City ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Religious Study ◽  
Jewish Immigrant ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
German Jewish

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi. He grew up between 1908–1917 in Warsaw and from 1917–1921 in Bilgoray (Biłgoraj), which shaped his knowledge of small-town Jewish life. The younger brother of Yiddish writers Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, Singer began reading secular literature at 10, and after years of religious study, he eventually followed his brother into Warsaw’s bohemian literary Yiddish community, translating several modern writers into Yiddish. Singer’s first novel, Der Sotn in Goray [Satan in Goray], set in seventeenth-century Poland with the background of pogroms and the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, appeared in 1934, and the next year, he joined Israel Joshua in New York City where both wrote for the Yiddish press. In 1950, Singer married Alma Haimann Wassermann, a German Jewish immigrant from a once-wealthy family, who supported the couple by working as a retail clerk. Singer wrote in Yiddish for his entire life; most of his novels were serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward Yiddish newspaper. Unlike most great Yiddish writers, he found success in translation, particularly after Saul Bellow’s translation of the story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ appeared in Partisan Review in 1953.

The Revival of Jewish Life

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-182
Author(s):  
Jonathan Webber ◽  
Chris Schwarz ◽  
Jason Francisco
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
The People ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Democratic Freedom

This chapter talks about the people who are creating and maintaining projects that memorialize both the Jewish life that existed in Polish Galicia for centuries and the enormity of the Holocaust during which it was destroyed. It discloses the public acknowledgment of the Jewish heritage that has been ongoing since Poland regained its democratic freedom in 1989, which led to the revival of Jewish life. It also describes the main Holocaust memorial in Kraków, which is comprised of symbolic abandoned chairs scattered through an entire city to highlight the Jewish absence. The chapter mentions non-Jewish Poles who have become aware of the past in Poland that included Jews and Jewish culture. It details post-Holocaust Poland in the 1970s that was severely restricted and in danger of facing extinction as 90 percent of Holocaust survivors had emigrated.

“Making Antifascist Politics Visible”

2021 ◽  
pp. 245-266
Author(s):  
Tina Frühauf
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
The State ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
Musical Embodiment

In the course of the 1970s, membership of the Jewish communities dwindled further, yet Jewish music continued to strive due to the presence of the Leipziger Synagogalchor, which kept prewar repertoires alive and exposed an ever-wider audience to them. As such, Jewish music slowly entered the mainstream and moved “out of the ghetto,” as Werner Sander had expressly called for in his very first programs. But this course was also turning into a Jewish heritage music, a mode of cultural production in the present with recourse to the past, singled out for protection, nourishment, and even enshrinement. Financially supported by the state, the Leipziger Synagogalchor also became a musical embodiment of the “success” of the GDR’s antifascist course. In reality, the choir, which consisted of non-Jewish singers, represented the presence of absence, a substitute for a culturally striving Jewish life.

scholarly journals “Zwischen allen Stühlen”: Reflections on Judaism in Germany in Victor Klemperer’s Post-Holocaust Diaries

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Sepp
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Soviet Occupation Zone

This article focuses as a case study on Victor Klemperer’s diaristic representation of German-Jewish identity and culture after 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. The contribution shows how Klemperer’s professional and social situation remained very uncomfortable even in East Germany. For the diarist, the communist code ‘antifascist/fascist’, just like the code ‘German/un-German’ before it, was tantamount to concealing Jewish origin. His post-Holocaust journals provide an immediate insider’s view of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust from the perspective of a victim of active persecution. Against this backdrop, the contribution examines how the author’s original German nationalism gradually makes way, caught between contradictory impulses of assimilation and decreed Jewish identity, for a much more complex understanding of his own cultural identity. Klemperer’s diaries highlight a number of tensions that ultimately reflect on the disjunction between living and writing: The divide between a single and changing self lies at the heart of his diaries after 1945, which depict an astute, complex psychogram of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie that survived the Holocaust and tried to continue living in communist Germany.

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