Leah Goldstein

"A Very Real Threat": Jewish Elderly Resistance in Nazi Germany

In the summer of 1940, Berlin police officers arrested 70-year-old Siegmund Dornbusch, because he had watched a film despite the fact that it was forbidden for Jews. His case clearly challenges the assumption that it was mostly young Jews who rebelled against Nazi orders. Dornbusch’s story originates from a larger research project on individual Jewish resistance in Nazi Germany by Prof. Wolf Gruner (University of Southern California), which is due to be published with Yale University Press in... Continue reading

Dance in Ghettos and Camps: Between Persecution and Survival

While investigating the deportation of dancers, Dr. Laure Guilbert, Fellow at Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research in the summer of 2022, became aware of aspects of the Holocaust unexplored in the history of ghettos and concentration camps: the role of dance in the genocidal strategies of the Nazi perpetrators, as well as in the deportees’ struggle for survival. A cultural historian, Dr. Guilbert was chief editor of the dance books (program brochures) at the Paris... Continue reading

"We Must Always Stand Up and Speak Out": Visitors to Yad Vashem on Holocaust Remembrance Day

This year's activities marking Israel's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day began, as in year's past, with the Official State Opening Ceremony on the evening of 17 April 2023, with the participation of Holocaust survivors lighting the torches with members of their families and speaking on behalf of all the survivors worldwide. The following day, after the nationwide siren, Yad Vashem hosted the traditional Wreath-Laying, Names Reading and Youth Movement ceremonies – which concluded... Continue reading

A Truly Meaningful Service: Holocaust Survivors' Descendant Volunteers at Yad Vashem

Last year, Orli Hartstein, originally from Columbus, Ohio, volunteered at Yad Vashem for a year of national service in the Art Department of Yad Vashem's Museums Division. There, she helped catalog art pieces and conducted research about artists whose works are among the thousands of creations in the Yad Vashem's unrivalled art collection. This job was both fulfilling and meaningful, as her family on both sides was deeply affected by the Holocaust. Orli's paternal ancestors hailed from Galicia... Continue reading

The Yad Vashem Story Chapter 2: Establishing Yad Vashem in the Jewish Homeland

At the end of WWII, when the extent of the mass murders that were the lot of the Jews in Europe and North Africa (and could have been that of the Yishuv in the Land of Israel) were revealed, Mordechai Shenhavi once again raised the idea of a national institution to commemorate the Holocaust in Israel. On 25 May 1945, Shenhavi published his proposal for the "Yad Vashem Memorial for Destroyed Diaspora Jewry" in the Devar newspaper. "This eternal memorial that the Jewish people will establish in... Continue reading

The Yad Vashem Story. Chapter 1: Memorializing the Holocaust – Before It Had Ended

This month marks 80 years since the idea of Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Center – was proposed. The establishment of an institution or site to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust was formulated back in the darkest days of World War II, in 1942, while the campaign of extermination was still in progress. Many of the Jews, while living in the ghettos or in hiding, wrote diaries and letters, created artworks and film clips, collected documentation in secret archives, and... Continue reading

Voices from the Ghettos: Advanced Online Seminar for Italian Teachers

Some 120 Yad Vashem graduates from schools around Italy recently took part in an advanced online seminar entitled “Voices from the Ghetto.” Part of a series of activities offered by Yad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies to deepen the knowledge of subjects related to the Shoah, “Voices from the Ghetto” was introduced to the teachers in cooperation with Figli della Shoah, a Holocaust-education association based in Milan. After introductory words by Figli della Shoah... Continue reading

A Personal Tragedy: Nachman Blumental’s Archive Reveals the Fate of His Family

Dr. Katrin Stoll is a German-born Holocaust historian, today residing in Warsaw. In the new volume of Yad Vashem Studies (49:2), she takes a fascinating look at her chance findings of deeply personal accounts in the archive carefully built by Holocaust survivor Nachman Blumental in the 1940s. Nachman Blumental was a Polish-Jewish historian who studied literature and languages before WWII. He survived the Shoah by fleeing to the Soviet Union, and wrote for many underground newspapers. In 1944... Continue reading

The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw (Part III)

In this final segment of an interview regarding the English-language version "The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw," Academic Editor Dr. Tikva Fatal-Knaani recalls some of the challenges and unusual discoveries she encountered while working on the project. How did the ideological and political streams that were popular in the ghetto affect their overall outlook on the plight of the Jews during the war? The ideology and political way of thinking often led to attacks on the Jewish leadership,... Continue reading

The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw (Part II)

The creators of the underground press Sought to correct injustices, and presented the Jewish public with a purpose and content for its existence. With the discovery of the "Oyneg Shabes" Archives and other sources, Yad Vashem experts began the arduous work of deciphering and cataloguing the underground press from the Warsaw ghetto. Dr. Tikva Fatal-Knaani, the Academic Editor of the research project "The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw," gives us a fascinating overview of the project's... Continue reading

The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw

Established by the occupying Germans in October 1940, the Warsaw ghetto was the largest of its kind during WWII, with some 450,000 Jewish men, women and children incarcerated there at its peak in extremely overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. Within the ghetto, their lives oscillated in the desperate struggle between survival and death from disease or starvation. Yet the walls of the ghetto and the guards surrounding them could not silence the educational, religious and cultural activity of... Continue reading

Commemoration from a Personal Perspective: News from the Library

Among its recent acquisitions, the Yad Vashem Library – the most comprehensive collection of published material about the Holocaust – counts two unique publications that highlight the wide variety of ways in which private individuals have dedicated themselves to bringing new narratives to a wider audience. One is a personal quest in search of the wartime fate of a relative the author discovered by chance; and the other is the fruit of an unusual endeavor to bring Holocaust commemoration to... Continue reading

"But My Soul is Free"

On 25 January 2016, the week of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, German Chancellor H.E. Angela Merkel opened a new exhibition of artworks from the Yad Vashem Art Collection at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Jointly curated by Yad Vashem and the Bonn-based Foundation for Art and Culture, "Art from the Holocaust: 100 Works from the Yad Vashem Collection" was the first-ever art exhibition of its size and stature that Yad Vashem has sent abroad. The exhibition was on display until... Continue reading

An Arduous Road

On 8 December 2006, an exhibition entitled “An Arduous Road: Samuel Bak – 60 Years of Creativity” opened at Yad Vashem’s Exhibitions Pavilion, in the presence of Ambassador of Lithuania H.E. Mrs. Asta Skaisgiryte Liauskiene, celebrated author Amos Oz, renowned artist Samuel Bak, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council Joseph (Tommy) Lapid, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev and Senior Art Curator of Yad Vashem’s Museums Division Yehudit Shendar. “The interconnected... Continue reading

An Incredible Journey

Twinning Program Connects British Schoolgirl to the Fate and Family of Young Holocaust Victim Two years ago, British schoolgirl Victoria Sarah Galia Caplin began a journey whose ending she could never have imagined. Just before her Bat Mitzvah in the summer of 2015, she and her parents decided to mark this special milestone in her life by remembering a young Jewish girl who had been murdered in the Holocaust and was not lucky enough to celebrate her own Bat Mitzvah. "I had heard about Yad... Continue reading

"Superficial Knowledge Can be Catastrophic". Swedish Educators Attend Teachers Seminar at Yad Vashem

"I grew up in a pretty normal family – a mother and five siblings – but in a xenophobic environment. My older brother was in the neo-Nazi movement, my mother was a xenophobe, my grandfather was a Nazi in the 1940s. That is my family story." So recalled Peter Sundin, a participant of a recent seminar at Yad Vashem for Swedish educators. Sundin and a colleague who also hailed from a neo-Nazi background joined 25 teachers who came to the Mount of Remembrance to learn more about the Shoah and... Continue reading

"Interesting, Inspiring, Surprising": Summer Interns at Yad Vashem

Over the months of June-August 2017, Yad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies welcomed a number of young interns eager to help out in preparing materials and organizing seminars, and looking forward to learning more about the World Center for Holocaust Remembrance in return. Four of the interns – a Rwandan genocide survivor, and Evangelical Christian, a Latin-American Jewish history student and a former Birthright participant – spoke about their time at the International... Continue reading