emmanuelringelblumresearchcenter.org

Emanuel Ringeblum was a Jewish historian, best known as the founder and leader of the Oyneg Shabes (Joy of the Sabbath) group, which documented life in the Warsaw Ghetto and met each Sabbath, justified under Jewish law as a sacred duty. Its archive was buried in tin cans and milk boxes on the territory of the ghetto in three parts. The first two parts were excavated in 1946 and 1950. The third has not been found.
Less well known is Ringeblum’s activity outside the Warsaw ghetto, as a member of the presidium of the Jewish National Committee (Żydowski Komitet Narodowy — ŻKN), an umbrella group for the Zionist parties and the religious party Agudas Yisroel, The ŻKN, headed by Ringeblum’s close friend and fellow member of the Left Labour Zionist party (Poalei Hatsion Smol) Adolf Berman supported Jews hiding outside the ghetto, “on the Aryan side.” With Ringeblum’s inspiration and guidance, the ŻKN’s activists and case workers preserved extensive records, documenting their activity on the Aryan side and the lives of about 5,000 Jews receiving aid from the ŻKN. Known as the Berman Archive, this treasure trove of material was donated to the Ghetto Fighters’ House (Beit Lohamei Hagetaot – BLHG or GFH) in Israel after Berman’s death in 1978, where it lay, untouched and unknown, until our founder and director, Steve (Gunnar S.) Paulsson came across it in 1994. Today, it is accessible on the BLHG’s website as part of the Adolf-Avraham Berman Collection, which also includes complete recipient lists of the “Felicja” cell of thePolish organization Żegota, headed by Maurycy Herling-Grudziński, a convert, but still Jewish in the eyes of theNazis, who sheltered 476 Jews, many on his suburban estate.

The ŻKN also co-operated closely with the General Jewish Workers’ Bund (“the Bund”), led by Leon Feiner, which also preserved complete recipient lists.

Ringelblum’s biographer, Samuel Kassow, describes Ringelblum’s activity before the war in the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), directed by Yitzhak Giterman, who “served as a role model who taught his younger protege to see the difference between self-help, based on community involvement, and traditional philanthropy. The latter, he believed, demeaned those it tried to help and reinforced traditional class divisions in Jewish society; self-help, on the other hand, galvanized the community, lifted national morale, and served as a powerful weapon against anti-Semitism.” (S. Kassow, Who Will Write our History (2007), p. 90)

An Unholy Crusade

Our Center’s founding premise is that the period from 1933 to 1945 is a central chapter in the history of the Jewish people, when all strands of Jewish life came together in a common struggle. The standard literature treats the Holocaust as a subset of the Second World War, but the Jews were fighting an entirely different war — not a war, but an unholy crusade, with the avowed aim of “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” (Hitler, Reichstag speech, 30 January 1939). All Jews everywhere watched the rise of the Nazis with concern, and responded in whatever ways their circumstances allowed. On 23 March 1933, the Reichstag passed the “enabling law” giving Hitler dictatorial powers, and the response was immediate: the American Jewish Committee declared 27 March a national day of protest and organized a rally to an overflow crowd of 50,000.

New York was the great melting-pot, where all strands were represented. Warsaw was the capital of the European diaspora, where all strands were also present. The Jewish aid agencies on the Aryan side reached the whole range, from Agudas Yisroel, to the whole spectrum of ZIonist parties, to the anti-Zionist Bund, to the convert Herling-Grudziński. In the run-up to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Bund initially joined the communist Anti-Fascist Front, until Henryk Woliński, head of the Polish underground’s Jewish bureau, whosewife was Jewish, advised Feiner that associating with the communists was not a good look if the Bund wanted Polish support, so the Bund joined the Zionists’ Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa – ŻOB) and with the ŻKN formed the Jewish Co-ordinating Committee (Żydowski Komitet Koordynacyjny – ŻKK). Jewish solidarity went still further, with two offshoots of the ghetto’s Social Self-help (Aleynhilf), the Jewish Welfare Committee (Żydowski Komitet Opiekuńczy – ŻKO) catering mainly to Jewish members of the Polish Socialist Party, and JUS (Judische Unterschutzungsstelle), an above-ground organization that Ringeblum denounced as a fig-leaf for the Nazis which diverted funds from legitimate Jewish organizations.

An International Network

The ŻKN and the Bund drew 86% of their funding from money raised by Jewish communities abroad, funnelled through the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Labor Committee, through their representatives in London. But a broad international network existed long before the war, intensifying its activity as the danger grew. On 11 November 1940, a few days before the ghetto was closed, in his Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto, Ringeblum, listed sums raised in the last two years by the Joint Palestine Appeal and the National Refugee Service, adding that since the war began Hadassah had raised $1 million and the Zionist parties expected to raise $15 million in 1941. Keren Hayesod, he writes, had raised $45 million since it was founded in 1920. He goes on to summarize Jewish and anti-Jewish activity in Vichy France, Belgium, occupied France, Germany, Vienna, Hungary, and reports that since the war began, 1,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine, while 1,771 were denied entry and were deported to British colonies. In Canada, citing the Kanader Idisze Wochenblat, a pro-Soviet Yiddish-language weekly, Ringelblum reports that 1,700 foreign Jews had been interned, while 3,000 Jews were serving in the Canadian Army.

The Myth of Jewish Passivity

The Holocaust emerged as a subject distinct from the Second World War in its immediate aftermath, when allegtions and recriminations flew in all directions, including no small amount of Jewish self-flagellation. The first big book, long regarded as the foundation of Holocaust Studies, was Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), based on his Columbia PhD dissertation in 1955, when there was practically no literature. Hilberg writes: “In a destruction process the perpetrators do not play the only role; the process is shaped by the victims, too. It is the interaction of perpetrators and victims that is ‘fate.’ We must therefore discuss the reactions of the Jewish community and analyze the role of the Jews in their own destruction.” Asan authority, he quotes Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a high-ranking Nazi and war criminal, who, writes Hilberg, “observed Jews and killed them from 1941 to the end.” Von dem Bach exculpates himself