Download or read book The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust written by Ion Popa and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An important book” that delves into the role of religious authorities in Romania during the Holocaust, and the continuing effects today (Antisemitism Studies). In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, are details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania coming to light. Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 to the present day. Popa unveils and questions whitewashing myths that covered up the role of the church in supporting official antisemitic policies of the Romanian government. He analyzes the church’s relationship with the Jewish community in Romania, with Judaism, and with the state of Israel, as well as the extent to which the church recognizes its part in the persecution and destruction of Romanian Jews. Popa’s highly original analysis illuminates how the church responded to accusations regarding its involvement in the Holocaust, the part it played in buttressing the wall of Holocaust denial, and how Holocaust memory has been shaped in Romania today.

Download or read book Jewish Forced Labor in Romania 1940 1944 written by Dallas Michelbacher and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the Antonescu regime’s forced-labor system “offers precious insights to historians and social scientists alike” (Dennis Deletant, author of Ion Antonescu: Hitler’s Forgotten Ally). Between Romania’s entry into World War II in 1941 and the ouster of dictator Ion Antonescu three years later, over 105,000 Jews were forced to work in internment and labor camps, labor battalions, government institutions, and private industry. Particularly for those in the labor battalions, this period was characterized by extraordinary physical and psychological suffering, hunger, inadequate shelter, and dangerous or even deadly working conditions. And yet the situation that arose from the combination of Antonescu’s paranoias and the peculiarities of the Romanian system of forced-labor organization meant that most Jewish laborers survived. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania explores the ideological and legal background of this system of forced labor, its purpose, and its evolution. Author Dallas Michelbacher examines the relationship between the system of forced labor and the Romanian government’s plans for the “solution to the Jewish question.” In doing so, Michelbacher highlights the key differences between the Romanian system of forced labor and the well-documented use of forced labor in Nazi Germany and neighboring Hungary. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania explores the internal logic of the Antonescu regime and how it balanced its ideological imperative for antisemitic persecution with the economic needs of a state engaged in total war whose economy was still heavily dependent on the skills of its Jewish population.

Download or read book Romania s Holy War written by Grant T. Harward and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romania's Holy War rights the widespread myth that Romania was a reluctant member of the Axis during World War II. In correcting this fallacy, Grant T. Harward shows that, of an estimated 300,000 Jews who perished in Romania and Romanian-occupied Ukraine, more than 64,000 were, in fact, killed by Romanian soldiers. Moreover, the Romanian Army conducted a brutal campaign in German-occupied Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and civilians. Investigating why Romanian soldiers fought and committed such atrocities, Harward argues that strong ideology—a cocktail of nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism—undergirded their motivation. Romania's Holy War draws on official military records, wartime periodicals, soldiers' diaries and memoirs, subsequent war crimes investigations, and recent interviews with veterans to tell the full story. Harward integrates the Holocaust into the narrative of military operations to show that most soldiers fully supported the wartime dictator, General Ion Antonescu, and his regime's holy war against "Judeo-Bolshevism." The army perpetrated mass reprisals, targeting Jews in liberated Romanian territory; supported the deportation and concentration of Jews in camps or ghettos in Romanian-occupied Soviet territory; and played a key supporting role in SS efforts to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory. Harward proves that Romania became Nazi Germany's most important ally in the war against the USSR because its soldiers were highly motivated, thus overturning much of what we thought we knew about this theater of war. Romania's Holy War provides the first complete history of why Romanian soldiers fought on the Eastern Front.

Download or read book Bucharest Diary written by Alfred H. Moses and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insider's account of Romania's emergence from communism control In the 1970s American attorney Alfred H. Moses was approached on the streets of Bucharest by young Jews seeking help to emigrate to Israel. This became the author's mission until the communist regime fell in 1989. Before that Moses had met periodically with Romania's communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, to persuade him to allow increased Jewish emigration. This experience deepened Moses's interest in Romania—an interest that culminated in his serving as U.S. ambassador to the country from 1994 to 1997 during the Clinton administration. The ambassador's time of service in Romania came just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. During this period Romania faced economic paralysis and was still buried in the rubble of communism. Over the next three years Moses helped nurture Romania's nascent democratic institutions, promoted privatization of Romania's economy, and shepherded Romania on the path toward full integration with Western institutions. Through frequent press conferences, speeches, and writings in the Romanian and Western press and in his meetings with Romanian officials at the highest level, he stated in plain language the steps Romania needed to take before it could be accepted in the West as a free and democratic country. Bucharest Diary: An American Ambassador's Journey is filled with firsthand stories, including colorful anecdotes, of the diplomacy, both public and private, that helped Romania recover from four decades of communist rule and, eventually, become a member of both NATO and the European Union. Romania still struggles today with the consequences of its history, but it has reached many of its post-communist goals, which Ambassador Moses championed at a crucial time. This book will be of special interest to readers of history and public affairs—in particular those interested in Jewish life under communist rule in Eastern Europe and how the United States and its Western partners helped rebuild an important country devastated by communism.

Download or read book The Holocaust in Romania written by Radu Ioanid and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2000 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radu Ioanid's account of the Holocaust in Romania, based upon privileged access to secret East European government archives, is an unprecedented analysis of heretofore purposely hidden materials.

Download or read book The State Antisemitism and Collaboration in the Holocaust written by Diana Dumitru and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores regional variations in civilians' attitudes toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet Union.

Download or read book The History of the Holocaust in Romania written by Jean Ancel and published by Comprehensive History of the H. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from an exhaustive collection of original Jewish accounts and sources not available until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in the late 1980s, Jean Ancel provides a detailed analysis of the path of antisemitism that led to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust in Romania. The Romanians and other nations inside and outside the Balkans related differently to "their Jews" and "other Jews," that is, those living in districts annexed to Romania after the First World War and those in areas occupied and annexed to the Romanian military administration after the Soviet invasion in June 1941. The Jews of the Regat, the core Romanian principality, suffered pogroms, decrees, and degradation, but on the whole they survived the Holocaust. Although more Jews survived in Romania than in any other non-occupied country allied with Germany, contemporary Romanian sources show that the Antonescu regime and Romania itself killed at least 400,000 Jews, including 180,000 Ukranian Jews. Among Nazi Germany's allies, Romania contributed most to the extermination of the Jewish people. Jean Ancel (1940-2008) was a Romanian-born Israeli independent historian and a research associate of Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Economic Destruction of Romanian Jewry (Yad Vashem, 2007), Prelude to Mass Murder: The Pogrom in Iisi, Romania, June 28 and Thereafter (Yad Vashem, 2014), and Resisting the Storm: Romania, 1940-1947: Memoirs.

Download or read book So They Remember written by Maksim Goldenshteyn and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2022-01-23 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany’s Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember illuminates this oft-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust. In December 1941, with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in its sixth month, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy named Motl Braverman, along with family members, was uprooted from his Ukrainian hometown and herded to the remote village of Pechera, the site of a Romanian death camp. Author Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of Motl, first learned of his family’s wartime experiences in 2012. Through tireless research, Goldenshteyn spent years unraveling the story of Motl, his family members, and their fellow prisoners. The author here renders their story through the eyes of Motl and other children, who decades later would bear witness to the traumas they suffered. Until now, Romanian historians and survivors have served as almost the only chroniclers of the Holocaust in Transnistria. Goldenshteyn’s account, based on interviews with Soviet-born relatives and other survivors, archival documents, and memoirs, is among the first full-length books to spotlight the Pechera camp, ominously known by its prisoners as Mertvaya Petlya, or the “Death Noose.” Unfortunately, as the author explains, the Pechera camp was only one of some two hundred concentration sites spread across Transnistria, where local Ukrainian policemen often conspired with Romanian guards to brutalize the prisoners. In March 1944, the Red Army liberated Motl’s family and fellow captives. Yet for decades, according to the author, they were silenced by Soviet policies enacted to erase all memory of Jewish wartime suffering. So They Remember gives voice to this long-repressed history and documents how the events at Pechera and other surrounding camps and ghettos would continue to shape remaining survivors and their descendants.

Download or read book The Jewish Enlightenment written by Shmuel Feiner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-08-17 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions. Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity. The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive treatment of this major cultural movement.

Download or read book Final Report written by International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania was established in October 2003 on the initiative of Ion Iliescu, the President of Romania; this final report was presented to him in November 2004. The aim of the Commission was to research the facts and determine the truth about the Holocaust in Romania during World War II. The report examines various aspects of the state-organized participation of Romania in the mass murder of Jews in Romania and in Romanian-controlled territories, as well as in northern Transylvania where the genocide was perpetrated by the Nazis and their Hungarian allies. Inter alia, it discusses antisemitism and the evolution of Romanian anti-Jewish policies from the late 1930s to 1944, the impact of the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina on antisemitism in Romania, anti-Jewish incidents in 1940 and the pogroms in Bucharest and Iaşi, mass murders of Jews in the recaptured provinces and deportation to Transnistria in 1941, mass murder of Jews in Odessa and in Transnistrian camps, the "Romanianization" of the economy and the expropriation of Romanian Jews, the reaction of the Jewish community in Romania to anti-Jewish policies, and the personal responsibility of Ion Antonescu for the genocide. Relates, also, to war crimes trials held in Romania, and to the trivialization of the Holocaust and its "selective" and outright denial in postwar Romania.

Download or read book The Ransom of the Jews written by Radu Ioanid and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-06-23 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After 1948, the 370,000 Jews of Romania who survived the Holocaust became one of the main sources of immigration for the new state of Israel as almost all left their homeland to settle in Palestine and Israel. Romania's decision to allow its Jews to leave was baldly practical: Israel paid for them, and Romania wanted influence in the Middle East. For its part, Israel was rescuing a community threatened by economic and cultural extinction and at the same time strengthening itself with a massive infusion of new immigrants. Radu Ioanid traces the secret history of the longest and most expensive ransom arrangement in recent times, a hidden exchange that lasted until the fall of the Communist regime. Including a wealth of recently declassified documents from the archives of the Romanian secret police, this updated edition follows Israel’s long and expensive ransom arrangement with Communist Romania. Ioanid uncovers the elaborate mechanisms that made it successful for decades, the shadowy figures responsible, and the secret channels of communication and payment. As suspenseful as a Cold-War thriller, his book tells the full, startling story of an unprecedented slave trade.

Download or read book Hitler s Forgotten Ally written by D. Deletant and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-04-12 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first complete study in English of Antonescu's part in the Second World War. Antonescu was a major ally of Hitler and Romania fielded the third largest Axis army, joined the Tripartite Pact in November 1940 as a sovereign state and participated in the attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941 as an equal partner of Germany.

Download or read book Purifying the Nation written by Vladimir Solonari and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a rigorous, archive-based analysis of the country’s interwar political and intellectual climate and policies and practices during its alliance with the Nazis, Solonari sheds valuable new light on the genocidal activities of one of Hitler’s European satellites.

Download or read book The Holocaust in the Soviet Union written by Yitzhak Arad and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem The Holocaust in the Soviet Union is the most complete account to date of the Soviet Jews during the World War II and the Holocaust (1941-45). Reports, records, documents, and research previously unavailable in English enable Yitzhak Arad to trace the Holocaust in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union through three separate periods in which German political and military goals in the occupied territories dictated the treatment of the Jews. Arad's examination of the differences between the Holocaust in the Soviet Union compared to other European nations reveals how Nazi ideological attacks on the Soviet Union, which included war on "Judeo-Bolshevism," led to harsher treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union than in most other occupied territories. This historical narrative presents a wealth of information from German, Russian, and Jewish archival sources that will be invaluable to scholars, researchers, and the general public for years to come.

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust K Sered written by Shmuel Spector and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-volume encyclopedia, abridged from a 30-volume set in Hebrew and with a foreword by Elie Wiesel, chronicles Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. Arranged alphabetically by town, thousands of entries explore centuries of Jewish life. Some entries, particularly for large cities, provide information on Jewish residents as early as the Middle Ages and discuss the fate of Jews during the Black Death persecutions (1348-1349) and various pogroms from the 17th to 20th centuries. Each entry provides information on the town's Jewish inhabitants on the eve of German occupation, gives the dates of Jewish roundups and mass executions and estimates how many Jews from that community survived the war. Includes more than 600 black-and-white photographs.

Download or read book Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis written by Patrick Henry and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2014-04-20 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume puts to rest the myth that the Jews went passively to the slaughter like sheep. Indeed Jews resisted in every Nazi-occupied country - in the forests, the ghettos, and the concentration camps.The essays presented here consider Jewish resistance to be resistance by Jewish persons in specifically Jewish groups, or by Jewish persons working within non-Jewish organizations. Resistance could be armed revolt; flight; the rescue of targeted individuals by concealment in non-Jewish homes, farms, and institutions; or by the smuggling of Jews into countries where Jews were not objects of Nazi persecution. Other forms of resistance include every act that Jewish people carried out to fight against the dehumanizing agenda of the Nazis - acts such as smuggling food, clothing, and medicine into the ghettos, putting on plays, reading poetry, organizing orchestras and art exhibits, forming schools, leaving diaries, and praying. These attempts to remain physically, intellectually, culturally, morally, and theologically alive constituted resistance to Nazi oppression, which was designed to demolish individuals, destroy their soul, and obliterate their desire to live.

Download or read book Historical Implications of Jewish Surnames in the Old Kingdom of Romania written by Alexander Avram and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic and semantic features in names—and surnames in particular—reveal evidence of historical phenomena, such as migrations, occupational structure, and acculturation. In this book, Alexander Avram assembles and analyzes a corpus of more than 28,000 surnames, including phonetic and graphic variants, used by Jews in Romanian-speaking lands from the sixteenth century until 1944, the end of World War II in Romania. Mining published and unpublished sources, including Holocaust-period material in the Yad Vashem Archives and the Pages of Testimony collection, Avram makes the case that through a careful analysis of the surnames used by Jews in the Old Kingdom of Romania, we can better understand and corroborate different sociohistorical trends and even help resolve disputed historical and historiographical issues. Using onomastic methodology to substantiate and complement historical research, Avram examines the historical development of these surnames, their geographic patterns, and the ways in which they reflect Romanian Jews’ interactions with their surroundings. The resulting surnames dictionary brings to light a lesser-known chapter of Jewish onomastics. It documents and preserves local naming patterns and specific surnames, many of which disappeared in the Holocaust along with their bearers. Historical Implications of Jewish Surnames in the Old Kingdom of Romania is the third volume in a series that includes Pleasant Are Their Names: Jewish Names in the Sephardi Diaspora and The Names of Yemenite Jewry: A Social and Cultural History, both of which are available from Penn State University Press. This installment will be especially welcomed by scholars working in Holocaust studies.