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Emanuel Ringelblum was a Polish-Jewish historian, politician and social worker, known for his Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, Notes on the Refugees in Zbąszyn chronicling the deportation of Jews from the town of Zbąszyń, and the so-called Ringelblum Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The history of Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy which ended after the Partitions of Poland in the 18th century. During World War II there was a nearly complete genocidal destruction of the Polish Jewish community by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, during the German occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945, called the Holocaust. Since the fall of communism in Poland, there has been a renewed interest in Jewish culture, featuring an annual Jewish Culture Festival, new study programs at Polish secondary schools and universities, and the opening of Warsaw's Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
The ghetto uprisings during World War II were a series of armed revolts against the regime of Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1943 in the newly established Jewish ghettos across Nazi-occupied Europe. Following the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were targeted from the outset. Within months inside occupied Poland, the Germans created hundreds of ghettos in which they forced the Jews to live. The new ghettos were part of the German official policy of removing Jews from public life with the aim of economic exploitation. The combination of excess numbers of inmates, unsanitary conditions and lack of food resulted in a high death rate among them. In most cities the Jewish underground resistance movements developed almost instantly, although ghettoization had severely limited their access to resources.
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Isaac Leib Peretz, also sometimes written Yitskhok Leybush Peretz was a Yiddish language author and playwright from Poland. Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers. Sol Liptzin wrote: "Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz was the great awakener of Yiddish-speaking Jewry and Sholom Aleichem its comforter.... Peretz aroused in his readers the will for self-emancipation, the will for resistance against the many humiliations to which they were being subjected."
YIVO, established in 1925 in Wilno in the Second Polish Republic as the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to Yiddish. The English name of the organization was changed to the Institute for Jewish Research after its relocation to New York City, but it is still known mainly by its Yiddish acronym. YIVO is now a partner of the Center for Jewish History and serves as the de facto recognized language regulator of the Yiddish language.
The Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye was a Jewish resistance organization based in the Vilna Ghetto that organized armed resistance against the Nazis during World War II. The clandestine organisation was established by Communist and Zionist partisans. Their leaders were writer Abba Kovner, Josef Glazman and Yitzhak Wittenberg.
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Jacob Shatzky (1893–1956) was a distinguished Jewish historian.
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Zalman Reisen, also known as Zalman Reyzen, was a lexicographer and literary historian of Yiddish literature.
Shmuel Niger was a Yiddish writer, literary critic and historian and was one of the leading figures of Yiddish cultural work and Yiddishism in pre-revolution Russia.
Leibush L. Lehrer was a leading Yiddish pedagogue, writer, philosopher and lyricist. He authored several books on education, psychology, and literature. Born in Warsaw, he emigrated to the United States in 1909. From 1919 until his death, he lectured at the Jewish Teachers Seminary. Lehrer was also involved with the research efforts of YIVO as the Secretary for the Section on Psychology and Education. He was a proponent of the position that Judaism was an entire folk culture, not merely a religion.
Dina Abramowicz was a librarian at YIVO and a Yiddish language expert.
Rokhl Auerbakh was an Israeli writer, essayist, historian, Holocaust scholar, and Holocaust survivor. She wrote prolifically in both Polish and Yiddish, focusing on prewar Jewish cultural life and postwar Holocaust documentation and witness testimonies. She was one of the three surviving members of the covert Oyneg Shabes group led by Emanuel Ringelblum that chronicled daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto, and she initiated the excavation of the group's buried manuscripts after the war. In Israel, she directed the Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony at Yad Vashem from 1954 to 1968.
Yiddish cinema refers to the Yiddish language film industry which produced some 130 full-length motion pictures and 30 short during its heyday from 1911 and 1940. Yiddish film almost disappeared after World War II, due to the Holocaust and the linguistic acculturation of Jewish immigrants, though new pictures are still made sporadically.
Shmaryahu "Shmerke" Kaczerginski was a Yiddish-speaking poet, musician, writer and cultural activist. Born to a poor family in Vilna and orphaned at a young age, Kaczerginski was educated at the local Talmud Torah and night school, where he became involved in communist politics and was regularly beaten or imprisoned.
Jacques Calmanson, born Solomon Jacob ben Kalman, was a Polish Jewish maskilic writer, translator, and personal physician of King Stanislaw II.
Jacob Dinezon, also known as Yankev Dinezon, was a Yiddish author and editor from Lithuania. There are various spellings of Dinezon's name in both Yiddish and English transliteration. Early in his career, Yiddish publications spelled his name דינעזאהן (Dinezohn). Later publications removed the ה and spelled his name דינעזאן or דינעזאָן (Dinezon). In English, his name has been spelled Dienesohn, Dinesen, Dineson, Dinezon, Dinesohn, Dineszohn, Dinezohn, Dynesohn, and Dynezon.
References
- ↑ "Guide to the YIVO Archives". YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
- ↑ "Pinkhos Schwartz Is Dead at 61". The New York Times. December 16, 1963. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
- ↑ "Jacob Shatzky, Historian, Was 61 – Author of Monumental Work on Jews of Warsaw Dies –Editor and Librarian" (PDF). The New York Times. June 14, 1956. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
- ↑ Spiegel, Irving (April 13, 1961). "Jews Remember Warsaw Revolt – 18th Anniversary of Ghetto Uprising Against Nazis is Widely Observed". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
- ↑ Leon, Masha (April 22, 2014). "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Honored in Word and Song". The Jewish Daily Forward. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
