I am currently reading a book of testimonies about the Jews who were saved by a whole village – Le Chambon-sur-Lignon – during WW2. Theses testimonies were written by some of the Jews who were saved by the villagers; there are also a few portraits of the people who saved them.
A few years ago [...]
Of course, Rabbi Lau wasn’t physically present in my classroom this morning but the words he spoke in the video we watched seem to have made quite an impact on my students.
Thanks to Jew Wishes, who provided the link in a blog post, I read a wonderful and poignant article about Rabbi Lau and the [...]
Being in Stockholm I wished to take some photos of the Raoul Wallenberg Square as well as the Wallenberg monument. I also photographed the memorial that was added a few years ago, even if it is controversial as some people find its lying stuatues meaningless.
The monument is a stone globe on the ground, with the [...]
Numerous Jews took part in the various movements of the French Resistance during WW2. However some chose to join the M.J.S. (Mouvement de Jeunesse Sioniste) to bring specific help to the Jews that needed it.
Paul Giniewski who was an active member of the M.J.S. during the war has just written a book about this organization [...]
As I was having trouble sleeping last night, I listened to a podcast I had downloaded on my mp3 player. It dealt with a new book in French, Dictionnaire de la Shoah.
This dictionary was published last April and supervised by four historians: Georges Bensoussan a French authority on the subject, Jean-Marc Dreyfus who lectures in [...]
Iasi “Great Synagogue”
Few people have heard of Cartea Neagra – “The Black Book of the Sufferings of Romanian Jews”. This book, published in a four-volume series in Bucharest between 1946 and 1948, was written by Mataties Carp. It relates the largely unknown story of the slaughter of close to 400,000 Jews by the war time [...]
Demographer Professor Sergio Della Pergola reckons that were it not for the Holocaust, there would be as many as 32 million Jews worldwide, instead of the current 13 million.
In an article soon to be published for a Yad Vashem periodical, he writes: “This was the destruction of a generation, and what we are lacking now [...]
Last year, I wrote a post about the Jewish community in my hometown during WWII and especially about a whole family who had been deported and slaughtered in the death camps.
I had shown the photographs of the memorial to a colleague who teaches History and she had started working with a class on what archives [...]
Martine Poulain, a French socioiogist whose field is reading , recently published a book about the pilfered libraries in Nazi-occupied France between 1940 and 1944.
When she discovered that nothing had been written on the subject, Martine Poulain decided to explore it. She started with public libraries but found that they had been for the most [...]
Last Sunday I listened to a wonderful podcast about the photo above. The radio host was interviewing a French historian, Frédéric Rousseau, who has just published a book about it, L’Enfant juif de Varsovie : Histoire d’une photographie. However, as I try to put this into words, I find it hard to convey and [...]
