The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia

The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia PDF Author: Livia Rothkirchen
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803205023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem “We were both small nations whose existence could never be taken for granted,” Vaclav Havel said of the Czechs and the Jews of Israel in 1990, and indeed, the complex and intimate link between the fortunes of these two peoples is unique in European history. This book, by one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of Czech and Slovak Jewry during the Nazi period, is the first to thoroughly document this singular relationship and to trace its impact, both practical and profound, on the fate of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia during the Holocaust. Livia Rothkirchen provides a detailed and comprehensive history of how Nazi rule in the Czech lands was shaped as much by local culture and circumstances as by military policy. The extraordinary nature of the Czech Jews’ experience emerges clearly in chapters on the role of the Jewish minority in Czech life; the crises of the Munich agreement and the German occupation, the reaction of the local population to the persecution of the Jews, the policies of the London-based government in exile, the question of Jewish resistance, and the special case of the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia is based on a wealth of primary documents, many uncovered only after the 1989 November Revolution. With an epilogue on the post-1945 period, this richly woven historical narrative supplies information essential to an understanding of the history of the Jews in Europe.

The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia

The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia PDF Author: Livia Rothkirchen
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803205023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem “We were both small nations whose existence could never be taken for granted,” Vaclav Havel said of the Czechs and the Jews of Israel in 1990, and indeed, the complex and intimate link between the fortunes of these two peoples is unique in European history. This book, by one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of Czech and Slovak Jewry during the Nazi period, is the first to thoroughly document this singular relationship and to trace its impact, both practical and profound, on the fate of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia during the Holocaust. Livia Rothkirchen provides a detailed and comprehensive history of how Nazi rule in the Czech lands was shaped as much by local culture and circumstances as by military policy. The extraordinary nature of the Czech Jews’ experience emerges clearly in chapters on the role of the Jewish minority in Czech life; the crises of the Munich agreement and the German occupation, the reaction of the local population to the persecution of the Jews, the policies of the London-based government in exile, the question of Jewish resistance, and the special case of the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia is based on a wealth of primary documents, many uncovered only after the 1989 November Revolution. With an epilogue on the post-1945 period, this richly woven historical narrative supplies information essential to an understanding of the history of the Jews in Europe.

The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia

The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia PDF Author: Wolf Gruner
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178920285X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454

Get Book Here

Book Description
Prior to Hitler’s occupation, nearly 120,000 Jews inhabited the areas that would become the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; by 1945, all but a handful had either escaped or been deported and murdered by the Nazis. This pioneering study gives a definitive account of the Holocaust as it was carried out in the region, detailing the German and Czech policies, including previously overlooked measures such as small-town ghettoization and forced labor, that shaped Jewish life. Drawing on extensive new evidence, Wolf Gruner demonstrates how the persecution of the Jews as well as their reactions and resistance efforts were the result of complex actions by German authorities in Prague and Berlin as well as the Czech government and local authorities.

German Reich and Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia September 1939–September 1941

German Reich and Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia September 1939–September 1941 PDF Author: Andrea Löw
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110526360
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 848

Get Book Here

Book Description
Executive editor: Andrea Löw; English-language edition prepared by: Caroline Pearce, Georg Felix Harsch, and Dorothy Mas This volume chronicles the situation of the Jews in the German Reich and in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia between the start of the Second World War and September 1941. The German authorities used the start of the war on 1 September 1939 as an opportunity to intensify the campaign against the supposed enemies within – primarily the Jews. Thousands of Jews were expelled to Poland and France in initial deportations. Emigration or flight became virtually impossible. In February 1941 a Jewish woman from Vienna feared for her parents: ‘We know now that there is no age limit, everyone is being sent away, little children, the very old, even sick people are taken from the hospital and transported somewhere, into uncertainty, into misery.’ The volume documents the increasing isolation of the German and Czech Jews and the plans and ambitions of their persecutors in the period leading up to the systematic deportations. Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/

Yad Vashem Studies

Yad Vashem Studies PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Get Book Here

Book Description


Rabbis and Revolution

Rabbis and Revolution PDF Author: Michael Miller
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804776520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Habsburg province of Moravia straddled a complicated linguistic, cultural, and national space, where German, Slavic, and Jewish spheres overlapped, intermingled, and sometimes clashed. Situated in the heart of Central Europe, Moravia was exposed to major Jewish movements from the East and West, including Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment), Hasidism, and religious reform. Moravia's rooted and thriving rabbinic culture helped moderate these movements and, in the case of Hasidism, keep it at bay. During the Revolution of 1848, Moravia's Jews took an active part in the prolonged and ultimately successful struggle for Jewish emancipation in the Habsburg lands. The revolution ushered in a new age of freedom, but it also precipitated demographic, financial, and social transformations, disrupting entrenched patterns that had characterized Moravian Jewish life since the Middle Ages. These changes emerged precisely when the Czech-German conflict began to dominate public life, throwing Moravia's Jews into the middle of the increasingly virulent nationality conflict. For some, a cautious embrace of Zionism represented a way out of this conflict, but it also represented a continuation of Moravian Jewry's distinctive role as mediator—and often tamer—of the major ideological movements that pervaded Central Europe in the Age of Emancipation.

Prague in Black

Prague in Black PDF Author: Chad Bryant
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674261666
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Get Book Here

Book Description
In September 1938, the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany. Six months later, Hitler’s troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—the first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as “good Czechs.” By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the postwar expulsion of Czechoslovakia’s three million Germans and for the Communists’ rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their postwar successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.

Languages of Community

Languages of Community PDF Author: Hillel J. Kieval
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520921160
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
With a keen eye for revealing details, Hillel J. Kieval examines the contours and distinctive features of Jewish experience in the lands of Bohemia and Moravia (the present-day Czech Republic), from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. In the Czech lands, Kieval writes, Jews have felt the need constantly to define and articulate the nature of group identity, cultural loyalty, memory, and social cohesiveness, and the period of "modernizing" absolutism, which began in 1780, brought changes of enormous significance. From that time forward, new relationships with Gentile society and with the culture of the state blurred the traditional outlines of community and individual identity. Kieval navigates skillfully among histories and myths as well as demography, biography, culture, and politics, illuminating the maze of allegiances and alliances that have molded the Jewish experience during these 200 years.

Resisting Persecution

Resisting Persecution PDF Author: Thomas Pegelow Kaplan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789207215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since antiquity, European Jewish diaspora communities have used formal appeals to secular and religious authorities to secure favors or protection. Such petitioning took on particular significance in modern dictatorships, often as the only tool left for voicing political opposition. During the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews turned to individual and collective petitions in the face of state-sponsored violence. This volume offers the first extensive analysis of petitions authored by Jews in nations ruled by the Nazis and their allies. It demonstrates their underappreciated value as a historical source and reveals the many attempts of European Jews to resist intensifying persecution and actively struggle for survival.

Prague and Beyond

Prague and Beyond PDF Author: Kateřina Čapková
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812299590
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
Prague's magnificent synagogues and Old Jewish Cemetery attract millions of visitors each year, and travelers who venture beyond the capital find physical evidence of once vibrant Jewish communities in towns and villages throughout today's Czech Republic. For those seeking to learn more about the people who once lived and died at those sites, however, there has until now been no comprehensive account in English of the region's Jews. Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written by an international team of scholars. It offers a multifaceted account of the Jewish people in a region that has been, over the centuries, a part of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, was constituted as the democratic Czechoslovakia in the years following the First World War, became the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and later a postwar Communist state, and is today's Czech Republic. This ever-changing landscape provides the backdrop for a historical reinterpretation that emphasizes the rootedness of Jews in the Bohemian Lands, the intricate variety of their social, economic, and cultural relationships, their negotiations with state power, the connections that existed among Jewish communities, and the close, if often conflictual, ties between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.

The Greater German Reich and the Jews

The Greater German Reich and the Jews PDF Author: Wolf Gruner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782384434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between 1935 and 1940, the Nazis incorporated large portions of Europe into the German Reich. The contributors to this volume analyze the evolving anti-Jewish policies in the annexed territories and their impact on the Jewish population, as well as the attitudes and actions of non-Jews, Germans, and indigenous populations. They demonstrate that diverse anti-Jewish policies developed in the different territories, which in turn affected practices in other regions and even influenced Berlin's decisions. Having these systematic studies together in one volume enables a comparison - based on the most recent research - between anti-Jewish policies in the areas annexed by the Nazi state. The results of this prizewinning book call into question the common assumption that one central plan for persecution extended across Nazi-occupied Europe, shifting the focus onto differing regional German initiatives and illuminating the cooperation of indigenous institutions.