24 / Russia row over Nazi massacre site in Rostov-on-Don

A row has erupted in Russia over the replacement of a Holocaust memorial plaque in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don which named Jews as victims.
In August 1942 Nazi German troops murdered at least 27,000 people at Zmiyevskaya Balka, regarded as the worst Holocaust atrocity in Russia.
More than half the victims were Jews, the Russian Jewish Congress (RJC) says.
A new plaque does not mention Jews, but "peaceful citizens of Rostov-on-Don and Soviet prisoners-of-war".
The RJC, a secular foundation representing Russian Jews, says it will take legal action over the unauthorised decision to replace the former plaque, which spoke of "more than 27,000 Jews" murdered by the Nazis. That plaque had been put up in 2004.
According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Centre in Israel, 15,000-16,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis in Rostov-on-Don from August 1942 to February 1943.
In the Soviet Union memorials commemorating victims of Nazi massacres spoke of "Soviet citizens" rather than "Jews".
Rostov-on-Don map
Violation admitted
The former plaque mentioning Jews has now been put in the Zmiyevskaya Balka memorial hall, Rostov's Deputy Culture Minister Valery Gelas told Moscow Echo radio.
He admitted that the rules for historical memorials had been broken, but said the new plaque would remain and "we've done all we can".
He said the wording was in line with historical research and data presented to the Rostov cultural authorities.

01 / The Holocaust Center presents new teaching material about the Righteous among the Nations

With the beginning year the Holocaust Centre provides Russian teachers with new teaching material edited by I.A. Altman and D.I. Poltorak. 56 page-long package “The Righteous in Russia, 1941-1945” published by “Russkoe Slovo” Publishing House in late 2011, consists of a collection of documents and methodological recommendations. The first part includes documents and eyewitness reports, cards and photographies, 31 reports either by the rescuers or the rescued people and a description and photos of the Righteous medals and documents.

The second part presented in a form of a brochure offers methodological recommendations for the use of the package.

The volume includes documents and photographs featuring the most outstanding stories how Russsian citizens saved Jews. They are followed by documents describing the rescued Jews who lived or still live in Russia and cover all Russian regions occupied during the war.

Copies can be ordered at center@holofond.ru

16 / Holocaust Memorial Erected in Lubavitch

A Holocaust memorial commemorating the 483 local Jews who were murdered in November 1941 was dedicated in the Russian city of Lubavitch.

 The letter to Ilya Altman 
"Dear Ilya Alexandrovich,

God save Russia and have mercy on us.
 Sincerely,
Boris Kohan, pastor"

08 / Holocaust Memorial at Lubavichi to be inaugurated on November 10, 2011

On November 10, 2011, at 2 pm a monument will be inaugurated in the locality of Lubavichi (Rudnya county, Smolensk district, Russia). It is dedicated to the memory of 483 Jews executed by the Germans and their accomplices in November 1941.
This project is the first successful example of cooperation between the Russian Jewish Congress (RJC), the Russian Holocaust Center, and Russia’s Evangelical Christian communities. It is symbolic that the monument will open in the course of the International Week of Tolerance.
Lubavichi was one of the most famous centers of Judaism hosting religious schools whose students came to lead Jewish communities in Europe and USA. Therefore, the Germans destroyed local Jews with particular cruelty. The execution took place in a small ravine on the territory of slaughterhouse. Jews were shot in the head or beaten to death with sticks. Little children were dug alive.
Jewish settlement in Lubavichi existed for three centuries. Its entire population was wiped out in one day…
For many years, on the execution site there was only a symbolic rectangle with a five-pointed star but bearing no inscription. In 2002, Russian and German students erected there a memorial sign.  
The memorial will be inaugurated within the framework of the “To Return Dignity” project launched by the RJC President Yuri Kanner. Creation of the memorial was handled by a working group headed by the Co-chairman of the Russian Holocaust Center, scientific supervisor of the Holocaust Museum at the RJC Memorial synagogue on Poklonnaya Gora Ilya Altman and the director of “Even Ezer” Foundation Boris Vasyukov. Jewish national-cultural autonomy in the Smolensk district under Dmitri Levant who also heads the RJC regional branch also took part in the creation of the monument.
The memorial complex (sculptor Alexey Zamlely, architect Vladislav Kondrat’yev) includes an original monument featuring Jewish motives. Thousands of Evangelical Christians all over Russia contributed their personal means to offset the costs of the planning and construction of the memorial. They left an inscription “Forgive us” on a granite plaque. The text in Russian, English and Hebrew provides the date and details of the execution. Names of 74 murdered Jews were ascertained with the help of the Yad Vashem Project on documenting the names of Jews perished during the Holocaust in the USSR. Their names are carved in separate plaques.

26 / Co-chairman of the Russian Holocaust Center Professor Ilya Altman took part in memorial events in the city of Taganrog in southern Russia that marked70 years since the annihilation of some 1,500 loca

25 / Dr. Kiril Feferman representing the Russian Holocaust Center delivered a presentation on the “Hesitations of Kievan Jews in the first three months of the war” at a scholarly conference held on October

23 / The Museum of Jewish Heritage and Holocaust hosted a memorial session dedicated to the Holocaust in Belarus

18 / The representatives of the Russian Holocaust Center participated in a seminar on Holocaust held in Birobidzhan

15 / Co-chairman of the Russian Holocaust Center Professor Ilya Altman delivered several lectures on Holocaust in the city of Novosibirsk, in Russia’s Siberia, in local schools and universities.

October 15. Co-chairman of the Russian Holocaust Center Professor Ilya Altman delivered several lectures on Holocaust in the city of Novosibirsk, in Russia’s Siberia, in local schools and universities.

05 / VI International Conference “Holocaust Lessons and Contemporary Russia: Problems of Memorialization”

Our books

Frieda Michelson. I survived Rumbula. Moscow 2011.

Frieda Michelson. I survived Rumbula. Moscow 2011.

The book is an account of the annihilation of the Jews of Riga during WWII in what is one of the Nazi's and their collaborators' most brutal crimes on the occupied Soviet territories. The mass murder near the Rumbula forest is with out a doubt on the same level as other places of human tragedy such as Babi Yar, Paneriai and the Kaunas Ghetto.

«I survived Rumbula» is based on the personal memories of one the only two survivors who miraculously survived the shooting of the Jews of Riga. In two large-scale operations in late 1941 nearly all 30 000 inhabitants of the Riga Ghetto were murdered. The chances of a successful escape were almost zero. But Frieda Michelson did survive and so did the memory of the atrocities. To forget these events is impossible, even if one tries to. In the sixties she wrote down her memories in her mother tongue Jiddish. These served as literary inspiration for David Silberman's book in Russian language that was recently released in fourth edition. Due to the comparatively small number of copies, the book is mainly known within Latvia.

Silberman was born in 1941 in the town of Preili, Latvia. His family managed to leave their home before the arrival of the Wehrmacht. During his time in Riga in the 1960ies he actively fought for the rights of Jews in the USSR – a goal for which he risked severe repressive measure towards him by the Soviet government.  In 2004 a memorial monument for the victims of the Holocaust was built in Pereili thanks to the financial means provided by David Silberman.

Yitzhak Arad. In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War against Nazi Germany. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, The International Institute for Holocaust Research; Gefen, 2010. 384 pp.

   The claim that Jews did not contribute sufficiently in the war effort of their host country, or to put it otherwise, stayed in the rear instead of fighting, is not new and was never limited to Russia. Suffice it to mention the accusations made against German Jewry during the First World War and its aftermath at the official level and in public opinion. In the Tsarist Empire such charges were especially pronounced during the First World War when they were made by the country’s military and civil authorities.

The situation in the Soviet Union during the Second World War was different. Soviet government never accused its Jewish citizens of sitting on the fence. Yet, Soviet public opinion was permeated to no small extent by such accusations. This came partly from traditional centuries-long perception of Jews as a nation that did best to refrain from getting involved in fighting. Much more perilous, however, was the Nazi propaganda claim that attempted to inculcate in the Soviet population the idea of Jewish cowardice and of their sending non-Jews to fight for Jews.

In a way, it seems to me that Nazi propaganda succeeded, at least partly, in this respect. That Soviet Jews excelled on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet-German war in 1941-45 came to be known in the USSR, was known to masses of Soviet Jews by virtue of the fact that very many of them served in the army, worked in military plants, and, to a smaller extent, were involved in anti-German activities in the occupied territories. Yet, apart from a circle of those with whom Jews fought and worked to achieve the victory over Nazi Germany, this was far from being clear to many in the midst of the Soviet population.

Furthermore, the fact that many Soviet Jews, whether in the occupied territories or in those under Soviet control, struggled and were “not led to slaughter like cattle” remained for years far from being clear to Western and Israeli audience. This had to do with the main Holocaust narrative underlining suffering and martyrdom. In Israel, Jewish heroism was largely associated with the Warsaw ghetto uprising. But the main reason why this knowledge escaped the attention of Western and Israeli public was “Iron curtain”. During the Cold War, the overwhelming trend in Holocaust research was to downplay the affinity of Soviet and Jewish interests in the Second World War. Only the fall of the USSR made it possible for Holocaust scholars to acknowledge high profile fighting of Jews on the Soviet side or alongside the Soviet side. And Yitzhak Arad, himself a Jewish fighter who fought on the Soviet side against the Nazis, and who rose to prominence in Israel both as a public figure and a leading Holocaust historian, is probably the ideal one to chronicle the heroic saga of Jews who struggled “under the Red banner” against Nazi Germany.

Arad’s account is truly panoramic, multidimensional account and encompasses, to borrow his own words, “the broad spectrum of Jewish activities during the war in their entirety: the army, the underground, the partisans, the battle waged by the prisoners of war for survival and the development and manufacture of weapons” (p. xvii).

The volume provides a solid background describing the developments in Eastern Europe from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The author then studies meticulously the participation of Jews in fighting in the ranks of the Red Army on the fronts, in the branches (including medical corps, political administration, air forces, navy, and intelligence) throughout the entire war period.  Part two covers Jewish participation in the war industries. Arad then turns to depicting the Nazi occupation of the Soviet territories and the activities of varied partisan movements operating there. This serves him as a background for the Jewish armed resistance in the occupied territories (underground in ghettos -- the subject where the book is particularly strong -- and fighting in forests) described in the next chapters.

One of the delights of this volume is the verve with which its author knowingly describes the Jewish fighting. He does not write in numbers -- although his conclusions rely heavily on statistics, Arad admits that in too many cases such data are controversial or simply unavailable – but describes in details hundreds of examples of Jewish heroism.

In the Shadow of the Red Banner corresponds to no small extent with previous books by Yitzhak Arad, in particular with his “History of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union” (two volumes in Hebrew and one volume in English). In my opinion, part of this background information, could be omitted from the present volume, without jeopardizing its integrity.

I feel a certain amount of discomfort because in such a big (in all senses) book Yitzhak Arad did not tell us explicitly how he gauges Jewish contribution to the Soviet military effort, below the average, at the average, or over the average. Nor did he provide a clue to the question that haunted me: why did the Jews fight the way they did? Was it only fighting against the Nazis because understandably, they had no choice? If so, what about the first period of the war, when the news of German mistreatment of Jews did not reach Jewish soldiers and civilians?

Despite my concerns and questions, In the Shadow of the Red Banner, offers a rich and comprehensive history of Jewish contribution to the Soviet victory. The author should be particularly praised for a wide range of sources in several languages and an updated bibliography. In short, this is a wonderful and well-written study of a critically important case that continues to have impact both for the Jewish audience and beyond its borders.

D-r Kirill Feferman,
Martyrdom and Resistance 37, 3 (January-February 2011).
 

We can not remain silent – pupils and students about the Holocaust (7th edition)

The collection includes Russian scientific papers, essays and drawings by students from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, who won the 7th International writing and drawing competition to commemorate the Holocaust. Another section of the book contains selected speeches and presentations of the International Youth Conference on Holocaust remembrance. Many works are based on interviews with victims and witnesses, careful research in archives, as well as new historical and philosophical theses. The collection is aimed primarily at historians, teachers, students and pupils.
 We can not remain silent – pupils and students about the Holocaust (7th edition), written by I.A. Altman, Prokudin DV, eds: Center Foundation and „Holocaust“ in 2010, 176 p., ISBN 978-5-87902-223-0

 

25. November / „Preserve my letters“ (Russian: „Сохрани мои письма...“) – Presentation of the second edition

  On the basis of more than 1000 letters, diaries and photos from the archives of the Holocaust Center in 2007, the first collection of Soviet-Jewish memories of the Second World War was published. Due to this book, the archive of the center was substantially complemented with new personal documents. They include among other things, letters and diaries of many well-known writers, poets, scholars and war heroes. The anthology includes also some other letters from other museums and archives. The documents examplify the events from the beginning to the end of the war. The book is not only intended for historians, but also to the wider readership.

„Preserve my letters… A collection of Jewish letters from the time of the Great Patriotic War (2nd edition). Eds: IA. Altman, LA Terushkin, IV Bordskaya; text and foreword by IA Altman, 2010, 328 p., ISBN 978-5-87902-222-3

 Natalie Belsky
University of Chicago
Sokhrani Moi Pis’ma…:Sbornik pisem evreev perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny [Save my Letters: Collection of Jewish letters from the period of the Great Patriotic War]
Vypusk 2
Comp: Il’ia Altman, Leonid Terushkin, Irina Brodskaia
Foreword: Il’ia Altman
Moskva: Tsentr i Fond ‘Holocaust’, 2010

This important volume is the second installment of a collection of letters penned by Soviet Jews during the Great Patriotic War which has been compiled and published by Moscow based Russian Holocaust Center. It is an incredible testament to the Center’s painstaking efforts in collecting and bringing together family archives. In fact, as the introduction indicates, many of the letters and diaries featured in the present volume have been acquired by the Center just over the 2.5 years since the publication of the first volume.  The volume brings to light a vital body of sources that reveal a great deal about Soviet Jewish life during the war years.

The bulk of the collection consists of letters sent by Soviet Jewish soldiers at the front to their families in the rear. Their stories give the reader a glimpse of everyday life at the frontlines. They describe the living conditions servicemen had to contend with and the responsibilities that they shouldered. Moreover, the soldiers offer incredible accounts of their experiences in battle and reflect upon their thoughts during those critical moments when their lives seemed to hang by a thread. Surrounded by the enemy with bullets whizzing by inches above his head, Aleksandr Abramovich Anikst contemplated the landscape all about him – the trees, the ground, the sky, and the ant unhurriedly climbing the tree trunk: “I lay on the fallen autumn leaves, holding in front of me the self-loading rifle on the ready. Squeezing it in my hands and concentrating on what lay ahead, I thought: is this really the end? And I could not believe that….A tree trunk stood right in front of me, behind which I planned to hide in case of danger. A brown ant crawled along its uneven bark.” (p. 85). Along with the letter writers, the reader celebrates victories and laments the setbacks of the Red Army. Though the letters are largely personal, they convey the patriotism of the soldiers, their commitment to liberating their homeland from the Nazis, and, to some extent, their dedication to the Soviet project. We hear about their disappointments about the progress of the war, expectations of future developments, and, most of all, hopes for victory and a bright future ahead.

One of the many benefits of the collection is the inclusion of accounts from men and women who served in different capacities and in different zones. The collection features accounts from artillerymen and navy men, seasoned commanders and teenage recruits, war correspondents and medics, and even the director of a jazz orchestra that entertained soldiers at the front. The diversity of the authors allows the reader to get a multi-faceted view of the events and appreciate the distinct perspectives of the participants. Deeper insight into the daily routines of Soviet Jewish soldiers at the front is provided by excerpts from several diaries. This is truly a unique source that gives the reader a sense of the daily tribulations soldiers faced and the rhythm and pace of their days and weeks on the frontlines. While soldiers certainly tried to be optimistic in their letters home in order to assure their loved ones of their well-being, diary entries can be trusted to be more candid about the grim realities of life. Diaries also allow us to examine the changing tide of the war effort and the transformations within the authors themselves. At the same time, we must pause before assuming that these materials are either objective or representative of the perspective of the ‘typical’ Jewish soldier. First of all, while many letters were carried to their destinations by fellow soldiers who were traveling to the rear, soldiers still had to contend with the possibility that their letters and diaries would fall into the hands of censors. Thus, they had to be careful about the kind of information they shared. Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that letter and diary writers are a self-selecting group – descriptive and well-written letters like the ones included in the collection could only have been written by soldiers who were relatively well-educated. Furthermore, the collection privileges letters from urbanites who had been living in cities in the RSFSR (particularly Moscow and Leningrad) and eastern Ukraine in 1939. The reason for this is simple – letters would only have survived if their recipients were fortunate enough to not fall under Nazi occupation. Most of the letters were written to family members who had evacuated to the East; evacuation initiatives largely targeted the cities and were most successful in the RSFSR, and eastern Ukraine and Belorussia (the western regions of the Soviet Union, where significant populations of Jews lived, were occupied so quickly that it often did not allow for effective evacuation).
 Concern about loved ones and consternation over lack of information of their family’s whereabouts is a main theme in the correspondence.  Most soldiers regarded service at the front as both a duty and an honor, but they often felt frustrated at their inability to support their families. Far away from the frontlines, soldiers’ wives, parents and children often confronted a great deal of deprivation as well. Soldiers’ letters reflect their concern that, with men at the front, their families would find it difficult to make ends meet; many soldiers tried to send as much of their earnings home as possible. Of course, the separation caused not only material troubles but also emotional tribulations. Among the most memorable letters within the collection is Solomon Mendelevich’s birthday greetings to his daughter whom he has never met because she was born after he left for the front:  “It is possible to send birthday greetings in a letter to a friend, an acquaintance, a relative. But it is very difficult to send birthday greetings in a letter to my own one and only daughter, whom I have not even seen.” (p. 235) An interesting and important component of the present collection are letters from evacuated family members to soldiers at the front which describe their harrowing journey East and their uncertain existence in unfamiliar lands. It is important to bear in mind that it was not only soldiers who were constantly on the move, but their families as well. Displacement coupled with poor postal service meant that many did not receive tidings from relatives for weeks and months at a time. In many cases, elaborate networks of contacts were devised to facilitate the flow of information. Stationed in Leningrad, lieutenant Mikhail Binevich found that most of his relatives and friends had left the city for various destinations. Eager to re-establish family ties, he writes to his wife: “in short, I decided to become the connecting link between all you refugees.” (p. 89). Family correspondence both to and from the front help us gain a better understanding of the many facets of Soviet Jewish experience during the war years. One of the most fascinating aspects of the correspondence are soldiers’ accounts of the Red Army’s liberation of the occupied territories of Ukraine and Belarus and its offense into Poland and Germany. With a mixture of heartbreak and resentment, the liberators describe the devastation that they find in the western Soviet republics. For many, the pain is even more acute for these are the places where they had been born and raised. In November of 1943, Pavel Kopysitskii writes to his wife that his unit is liberating Ukrainian territory and that “local residents, who were under German occupation, tell us terrible things. The regions where they [the German forces] were able to entrench themselves are completely destroyed – the homes are burned down and the youth has been deported into slavery in Germany” (p.144). Once they enter Poland, the troops describe their encounters with local peoples and the amazement at the incredible (in comparison!) living conditions that they find there. For many, it is the first time in three years of war that they are able to sleep in a proper bed and enjoy delicacies. The diary of medic Abram Shevelev records his impressions of the three foreign lands that he has visited during his tour of duty– Bessarabia, Romania and Hungary. Shevelev describes the cities and towns through which his unit has passed, the attitudes of local peoples, their culture and habits (pp. 264-5). For many servicemen and women, it was difficult to even conceive of the incredible journey they had traversed during the years of the war. As Bela Zel’bet writes to her loved ones, “Did any one of us even think about finding ourselves so far away from our familiar places? In my childhood, I dreamt of entering German towns as a traveler, now I enter them as a master [khoziain]” (p. 210)  
 As they made their way to the West, Soviet soldiers confronted the gruesome realities of the Holocaust. In town after town, they found out that the Jewish population was gone and heard the tragic accounts of how Jews had been rounded up and either shot or sent to death camps in Poland. For Jewish soldiers, this news was particularly horrifying. Passing through Briansk, Lev Tsukerman learned of the fate of his relatives who had stayed behind under Nazi occupation. Writing to his parents (who had evacuated to Siberia), he recounts his eerie and heartbreaking experience there: “I was at the home of Chaim Eisef Shapiro on Sovetskaia st., no. 67, where grandfather and his family lived in the ghetto, I sat on the couch where grandfather had slept, and I was served breakfast at the table where our family had supped for the last time in Briansk, on November 6, 1942” (p. 261). At the same time, for many soldiers, their Jewish identity was a key motivating factor that pushed them to fight even harder to repay the Nazis for their crimes against the Jewish population. In a letter to his parents from the spring of 1943, Iakov Zaslavskii writes, “we must firmly avenge the Germans. And I especially, as I am a Jew” (p. 200).  

Still, it is important to mention that discussion of the Holocaust and references to one’s Jewish identity are relatively few and far between. There might have been several reasons for this, such as the lack of information about the catastrophe that had hit the Jewish population. The Soviet press was by and large unwilling to admit the Nazi targeted attack on Soviet Jewry and tended to group everyone under the heading of Soviet victims of Nazism. Secondly, the fear of censorship as well as the growth of anti-Semitism at the front may have encouraged soldiers themselves to avoid discussing their Jewish identity. Lastly, the fact that the majority of the letters come from well-educated, urban members of the intelligentsia would indicate that many of the letter writers were not observant and practicing Jews.     

Undoubtedly, this volume will become an invaluable resource for both historians and non-specialists alike for it offers readers a privileged view of the everyday lives of the Soviet Jewish servicemen who sacrificed so much in order to secure a victory over Nazism. It will enable readers to appreciate the mentality of Soviet Jewish soldiers – their  day-to-day concerns, preoccupations and hopes. Among the many volumes on the war that deal with epic battles and military strategy, this collection will fill an im

Indiana University Press is pleased to announce the recent publication of:

The Unknown Black Book
The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories

Edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman

Introductions by Joshua Rubenstein, Ilya Altman, and Yitzhak Arad
Translated by Christopher Morris and Joshua Rubenstein

"These accounts from those who saw what happened convey what we cannot learn from official documents about the nature of this vast criminal enterprise, in which hundreds of thousands were transformed into monsters . . . and millions of others became helpless, dehumanized, mutilated, and finally forgotten victims." —Wall Street Journal

The Unknown Black Book provides a revelatory compilation of testimonies from Jews who survived open-air massacres and other atrocities carried out by the Germans and their allies in the occupied Soviet territories during World War II—Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Crimea. These documents are first-hand accounts by survivors of work camps, ghettos, forced marches, beatings, starvation, and disease. Collected under the direction of two renowned Soviet Jewish journalists, Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, they tell of Jews who lived in pits, walled-off corners of apartments, attics, and basement dugouts, unable to emerge due to fear that their neighbors would betray them, as often happened.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
496 pp., 20 b&w illus., 2 maps
paper 978-0-253-22267-1 $24.95
For more information, visit:

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?isbn=978-0-253-22267-1

For Instructors:
If you are interested in adopting this book for course use, please see our exam copy policy:

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/information.php?info_id=122&meid=122

SOVIET JEWISH STEPCHILD von Kiril Feferman

July 14, 2009. Dr. Kiril Feferman's fascinating book analyzes the Soviet Union's treatment of the Holocaust from 1941-1964 through the litmus text of the Babi Yar massacre of 1941. "In the West, while we are familiar with the concept of Holocaust denial, the Soviet concept of Holocaust suppression is quite foreign to us," explains Feferman, Yad Vashem lecturer, researcher, and overall expert on the Former Soviet Union, the Holocaust, and the Second World war. Feferman attempts to answer such questions as: Why and how did the Soviet views towards the extermination of Jews aim at avoiding Nazi accusations that that the Soviets were fighting a Jewish war ? Why the Holocaust did not fit in the simplistic, black-and-white Soviet mindset of "he who is not with us, is against us ? Finally, Why the Bolsheviks, who never had any scruples about the many millions of Soviet civilians they themselves killed, were forced to accept over time that the Holocaust had to be treated differently than other, related topics? Feferman does a masterful job of answering these questions and many more in this carefully
researched, fascinating work.

The text

www.hugendubel.de/cat/soviet_jewish_stepchild/kiril_feferman/isbn13_9783639149807.aspx

"Antisemitism- The Generic Hatred: Essays in Memory of Simon Wiesenthal"

  The book is now published in Russian- language. It was edited and co-edited by Shimon Samuels, Mark Weitzman and Ilya Altman and the tributes for this version are from:
 -President Dimitri Medvedev
-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin -The late Patriarch Alexei II-Foreign Minister and Chair of Russian National Commission of UNESCO, Sergei Lavrov

-St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matvieienko

-Former President Mikhail Gorbachov
-Former Minister of Minorities Valeri Tishkov
-Father Vyacheslav Chaplin, Spokesman of the Patriarch of the Russian
Orthodox Church

The book was launched under the co-auspices of the Russian Holocaust Centre, Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Verbe et Lumiere-Vigilance and the UNESCO.
It was presented at various locations:

--The Central Synagogue of Moscow chaired by Jewish Community

Chairman, Leopold Kaiymovskiy

--The RIA- Novosti Press agency

-The official Moscow Holocaust Commemoration ceremony at the Central
House of Literature in Moscow

- The Herzen Pedagogical University of St. Petersburg at a seminar on

the Holocaust (UNESCO Chair in Education in the Multicultural Society
also attended). The session was chaired by Vice-Rector Sergei Shilov.

-The Interfax Press agency of St. Petersburg

-In a meeting with St Petersburg's Governor, Valentina Matveienko, at
the Smolny Palace. The Governer announced to the press, who were present
at the meeting, the purchase of 700 copies of the book for high
schools in St. Petersburg.

New books in the library of the Russian Research and Educational Center

The library of the Russian Research and Educational Center is regularly enriched with new international books, dealing with the theme of the holocaust on the occupied territories of the USSR.

  

Due to the German book “Holocaust in Litauen” (Böhlau Verlag, 2008), the book “The Shoah in Ukraine”, edited by Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) can be found in our library now.

For the Ukraine was home to the largest population of Jews in the Russian Empire, it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life and culture, destroyed by the holocaust. Until yet, less is known about this part of the holocaust history and the book tells us more about lives and deaths of not only Jews, but Poles, Russians, Romanians and many more in this part of Europe

"The Unknown Black Book"

   

 "The Unknown Black Book" provides, for the first time in English, a revelatory compilation of testimonies from Jews who survived open-air massacres and other atrocities carried out by the Germans and their allies in the occupied Soviet territories during World War II. These documents, from residents of cities, small towns, and rural areas, are first-hand accounts by survivors of work camps, ghettos, forced marches, beatings, starvation, and disease. Collected under the direction of two renowned Soviet Jewish journalists, Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, they tell of Jews who lived in pits, walled-off corners of apartments, attics, and basement dugouts, unable to emerge due to fear that their neighbours would betray them, which often occurred.

 Zoe Waxman about "The Unknown Black Book"

 

" Save My Letters… "

"Save My Letters… " - a collection of letters and diaries of Jews written during World War Two /Compiled by I.A.Altman and L.A.Terushkin. - M.: Holocaust Center and Foundation, MIK Publishers, 2007. - 320 p. The collection includes over 250 letters, diaries and photographs related to the Holocaust, Jewish Resistance, the participation of Jews in the war, their every-day lives in evacuation, as well as in Moscow and in Leningrad during the siege of the city - from the Holocaust Center Archive.