‘Bais Yaakov, Let Us Walk in the Light of the Lord’

Author(s):  
Naomi Seidman

This chapter details the phenomenology of the Bais Yaakov movement during the Holocaust and after. The experiment that was Bais Yaakov was still expanding at a rapid rate and had hardly had a chance to come into its own when it fell victim to the destruction of European Jewry. Despite the disbanding of Bais Yaakov schools with the outbreak of the Second World War, numerous memoirs and histories of the movement attest to its continued clandestine activity during the war years. The networks forged in the interwar movement aided in the rapid re-emergence of Bais Yaakov schools and Bnos groups in the immediate aftermath of the war. Bais Yaakov established itself more permanently after the Holocaust in the centres of Orthodox life throughout the world, particularly in North America and Israel. Bais Yaakov schools had already been founded in both countries during the interwar period, and the Beth Jacob High School established in 1938 by Sarah Schenirer's student Vichna Kaplan operated under the authority of the Central Office in Europe.

Author(s):  
Naomi Seidman

This chapter details the phenomenology of the Bais Yaakov movement during the Holocaust and after. The experiment that was Bais Yaakov was still expanding at a rapid rate and had hardly had a chance to come into its own when it fell victim to the destruction of European Jewry. Despite the disbanding of Bais Yaakov schools with the outbreak of the Second World War, numerous memoirs and histories of the movement attest to its continued clandestine activity during the war years. The networks forged in the interwar movement aided in the rapid re-emergence of Bais Yaakov schools and Bnos groups in the immediate aftermath of the war. Bais Yaakov established itself more permanently after the Holocaust in the centres of Orthodox life throughout the world, particularly in North America and Israel. Bais Yaakov schools had already been founded in both countries during the interwar period, and the Beth Jacob High School established in 1938 by Sarah Schenirer's student Vichna Kaplan operated under the authority of the Central Office in Europe.


Horizons ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Elisee Rutagambwa

When the world came to its senses after the Second World War and reports of the horrors of the Holocaust began to spread, the international community reacted with disbelief. And when reality proved much worse than even the worst nightmare, the world community reacted unanimously with a general outcry: crimes of this magnitude must never happen again. It appeared quite clear that, in the future, the international community would never again remain inactive in the face of such appalling tragedy. Yet, the firm imperative “never again” has become “again and again,” and the same dreadful crimes have been repeated in many parts of the world.


Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans

“The Yiddish self” analyzes the emergence and dissemination of Yiddish as the lingua franca of eastern European Jews from the thirteenth century to the Holocaust and beyond, focusing on the three founders of Yiddish literature: Mendele Mokher Sforim, Israel Joshua Singer, and Sholem Aleichem. Sholem Aleichem’s volume of interconnected stories Tevye the Dairyman is arguably the most important narrative ever to be produced in the Yiddish language. Yiddish writers have reflected on anti-Semitism and migration. Yiddish writing in the United States, Latin America, and other parts of the world and the Singer siblings (Israel Joshua, and Isaac Bashevis) in particular are examples of adaptation to different environments after the Second World War.


Author(s):  
Robert W. Lewis

This chapter turns to the ways in which stadia, sport and spectators both in France and elsewhere around the globe helped generate changing place-based communities and identities. French stadia created discourses about local places through the depiction of spectators within their confines. But stadium spectatorship also helped define the national collective, through literal and imaginary voyages within France and abroad to other stadia around the world. These latter voyages generated a series of comparisons that provided French men and women with convenient benchmarks for monitoring the perceived vitality and social cohesion of France in relation to its rivals on the world stage. These comparisons predominantly reinforced a sense of French inadequacy and decline throughout the interwar period, if not necessarily after the Second World War. At the same time, however, the comparisons with the wider world testified to the global character of sport itself in the first half of the twentieth century, as a mass media complex in Western Europe and North America publicised and promoted sporting competitions that helped create transnational communities of spectators invested in the same sporting events.


2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-25
Author(s):  
Marcin Kępiński

Literature of an autobiographical character acquires a special significance in the world of the bloody tragic events of the 20th century, i.e. the Holocaust, the Second World War, the realities of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms, death camps, and forced labour. Those are the recollections of experienced trauma which shatters identity, and of existential experiences of a borderline nature, of which Shalamov, a witness to the epoch, felt an obligation to talk. An anthropological analysis of Varlam Shalamov’s short story titled Artificial Limbs, Etc. enables one to grasp the role of memory and autobiographical testimony as a kind of cultural and literary antidote to silence and memory distorted by the Soviet totalitarianism. The author of Kolyma Tales offered a faithful description of a world outside the‘human’ world, one which was almost impossible to describe due to its inherent moral void, level of violence, and fear of the authorities who made people forget about the crimes, victims, and oppressors.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-106
Author(s):  
Magdalena Howorus-Czajka

The World War II has left an emotional wound, and its direct victims as well as new generations have to cope with it. The main subject of my presentation will be an analysis of methods for presenting World War II history in against the background of a theory of memory and postmemory of war’s trauma through the example of picturebooks which were published in Poland during the first two decades of the XXI century. I would like to discuss the main trends in presenting the issues pertaining to the war. The transcription of the Second World War memory into picturebooks is especially interesting for me as a historian of art. I analyse the artistic styles adapted by the artists to express difficult topics, such as the holocaust, the horror of concentrations camps, hunger, fear, loss of family, death. Composition, artistic techniques, colour, vocabulary, typography – these are the tools in the hands of artists through which they can not only tell the story, but also stir up emotions and shape the personality. The picturebook, like other types of art, operates through the language of fiction to tell the truth. Art is one of the languages of historical narration


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00007
Author(s):  
B Dewi Puspitaningrum ◽  
Airin Miranda

<p class="Keyword">Nazi Germany used Endlösung to persecute Jews during the Second World War, leading them to the Holocaust, known as “death”. During the German occupation in France, the status of the Jews was applied. Polonski reacted to the situation by establishing a Zionist resistance, Jewish Army, in January 1942. Their first visions were to create a state of Israel and save the Jews as much as they could. Although the members of the group are not numerous, they represented Israel and played an important role in the rescue of the Jews in France, also in Europe. Using descriptive methods and three aspects of historical research, this article shows that the Jewish Army has played an important role in safeguarding Jewish children, smuggling smugglers, physical education and the safeguarding of Jews in other countries. In order to realize their visions, collaborations with other Jewish resistances and the French army itself were often created. With the feeling of belonging to France, they finally extended their vision to the liberation of France in 1945 by joining the French Forces of the Interior and allied troops.</p>


This chapter reviews the book The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews in Kovno in the Second World War (2014), by Dov Levin and Zvie A. Brown, translated by Jessica Setbon. The Story of an Underground is about the Jews of Kovno (Kaunas) who founded an underground movement during the Holocaust. The armed underground developed a plan to escape to the forests and join the partisans. The ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944. Many of the remaining Jews were sent to the Stutthof and Dachau concentration camps. The book highlights the dilemmas of Jewish armed resistance such as difficulties in obtaining weapons and training, some of the failures of the resistance, and some of the positive aspects of those who thought differently from members of the armed resistance.


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