Abstract: Transnistria, meaning “beyond the Dniester”, was an artificial geographic term created during the Second World War, referring to a region in the Ukraine that was situated between the Dniester River on the west and the Bug River on the east, also extending southward to the Black Sea. During October and November 1941, thousands of terrorized Jews, mostly without food and water, were deported on foot or by wagon to Transnistria. Depending on whose numbers one uses, between 120,000 and 180,000 Jews were deported to Transnistria from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Of this group, only 50,000 would survive the war.
For years, the fate of the Jews in Transnistria was not emphasized in Holocaust remembrance, education, or commemoration. The reasons for this were manifold. They included problems of documentation; attitudes of Eastern European governments until the transition of the 1990s; priorities of major Holocaust memorial organizations until that transition; activities, primarily internally focused, of the survivor organizations from Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria; and, finally, the dynamics among Jewish survivors from Romania as they reassembled their lives in the first postwar decades. All this contributed to Transnistria becoming “the forgotten Holocaust”.
As the last Jewish survivors of the Transnistrian ghettos and camps reached their eighth and ninth decades at the beginning of the 21st century, various political, social, educational, and demographic factors coalesced, changing pre-existing dynamics regarding the memory of Transnistria. In this chapter, I focus on these factors, showing how and why this “forgotten Holocaust” is slowly being remembered again.
Abstract: Public engagement with the Holocaust in Romania has developed slowly and unevenly, shaped by decades of political constraint and institutional silence. Until 1989, restricted archival access and an antifascist ideological framework marginalized the specificity of Jewish persecution, subsuming it under a generalized narrative of “victims of fascism”. A substantive public acknowledgment of Romania’s responsibility emerged only in 2004, with the adoption of the Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. This belated recognition profoundly influenced the spatial articulation of memory in Bucharest.
The chapter examines the fragmented mnemonic landscape of the city through a theoretical distinction between imprints and places. Imprints are material interventions – monuments, plaques, museums – that inscribe historical facts into public space. While essential for visibility and moral acknowledgment, they operate largely as static markers. Places, by contrast, are urban sites whose latent memory is reactivated through collective engagement. Rather than merely preserving the past, they generate memory through interaction, interpretation, and embodied experience.
Through case studies – including Giurgiului Cemetery, the Bucharest Holocaust Memorial (2009), and the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Bucharest Pogrom (2016) – the chapter traces the transition from enclosed, community-bound remembrance to civic visibility. It then analyzes the pedagogical project PLACES (2021), developed with architecture students, which reconstructed the prewar addresses of the 125 pogrom victims and reinscribed them into the contemporary city through mapping, archival research, and digital interfaces.
By shifting attention from sites of death to spaces of everyday life, PLACES exemplifies a performative model of remembrance grounded in secondary witnessing. The study argues that, in the absence of living testimony, urban space itself becomes a medium of memory – capable not only of conserving history but of ethically reactivating it within the present.
Abstract: The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) commissioned Schoen Cooperman Research to conduct a comprehensive national study of Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in the Netherlands.
Schoen Cooperman Research conducted 2,000 interviews across the Netherlands. The margin of error for the study is 2 percent. This memo presents our key research findings and compares these findings with prior Claims Conference studies, which were conducted in five other countries.
Our latest study finds significant gaps in Holocaust knowledge and awareness in the Netherlands, as well as widespread concern that Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion are problems in the Netherlands today.
We found that 23 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z respondents believe the Holocaust is a myth, or that it occurred but the number of Jews who died has been greatly exaggerated – the highest percentage among Millennials and Gen Z respondents in all six countries the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany has previously studied.
Further, 29 percent of Dutch respondents, including 37 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z respondents believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Moreover, despite the fact that more than 70 percent of the Netherlands’ Jewish population perished during the Holocaust, a majority of Dutch respondents (53
percent), including 60 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z, do not cite the Netherlands as a country where the Holocaust took place. Finally, 53 percent of Dutch respondents believe that something like the Holocaust
could happen again today.
Abstract: Bohemia and Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic, was the first territory with a majority of non-German speakers occupied by Hitler’s Third Reich on the eve of the World War II. Tens of thousands of Jewish inhabitants in the so called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia soon felt the tragic consequences of Nazi racial politics. Not all Czechs, however, remained passive bystanders during the genocide. After the destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Slovakia became a formally independent but fully subordinate satellite of Germany. Despite the fact it was not occupied until 1944, Slovakia paid Germany to deport its own Jewish citizens to extermination camps.
About 270,000 out of the 360,000 Czech and Slovak casualties of World War II were victims of the Holocaust. Despite these statistics, the Holocaust vanished almost entirely from post-war Czechoslovak, and later Czech and Slovak, historical cultures. The communist dictatorship carried the main responsibility for this disappearance, yet the situation has not changed much since the fall of the communist regime. The main questions of this study are how and why the Holocaust was excluded from the Czech and Slovak history.
Abstract: NEW YORK, NEW YORK: January 23, 2025—The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) today released the first-ever, eight-country Index on Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness, exposing a global trend in fading knowledge of basic facts about the Holocaust. The countries surveyed include the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania.
The majority of respondents in each country, except Romania, believe something like the Holocaust (another mass genocide against Jewish people) could happen again today. Concern is highest in the United States, where more than three-quarters (76%) of all adults surveyed believe something like the Holocaust could happen again today, followed by the U.K. at 69%, France at 63%, Austria at 62%, Germany at 61%, Poland at 54%, Hungary at 52%, and Romania at 44%.
Shockingly, some adults surveyed say that they had not heard or weren’t sure if they had heard of the Holocaust (Shoah) prior to taking the survey. This is amplified among young adults ages 18-29 who are the most recent reflection of local education systems; when surveyed, they indicated that they had not heard or weren’t sure if they had heard of the Holocaust (Shoah): France (46%), Romania (15%), Austria (14%) and Germany (12%). Additionally, while Auschwitz-Birkenau is the most well-known camp, nearly half (48%) of Americans surveyed are unable to name a single camp or ghetto established by the Nazis during World War II.
On a more positive note, there is overwhelming support for Holocaust education. Across all countries surveyed, nine-in-10 or more adults believe it is important to continue teaching about the Holocaust, in part, so it does not happen again.
Abstract: In several of Sjón’s works, there is a preoccupation with the Second World War, especially the issues and ideologies at stake in the run-up to the conflict and in its aftermath. This is evident, for instance, in his trilogy CoDex 1962 and in his most recent novel Korngult hár, grá augu (Red Milk). The issues addressed in these texts are, for instance, the fate of the Jewish immigrant in Iceland, and the peculiar circumstances of the rise of neo-Nazism in post-war Iceland. The memory of the war in Iceland is in many ways at odds with the narratives established elsewhere in Europe. The particular circumstances of the country—occupied by allied forces from 1940 onwards, with its concomitant incursion of modernity, urbanisation, and creation of wealth in what had historically been a very poor country—have greatly influenced how the war is memorialised, or more to the point rather, not memorialised in Iceland. This chapter looks at how Sjón’s novels engage with the ruling national narrative and go against that memory by telling an alternative history of the war, focussing on transnational and marginalised histories and cultures that historically have been ignored in Icelandic cultural memory.
Abstract: At the “zero hour” of 1945, as they emerged from the ruins of World War II, the ruling élites of what would become Austria's Second Republic were preoccupied with how to cope with the frequently contradictory demands they faced. This included Allied forces that demanded a comprehensive denazification process, a war-weary population that had survived the bombings, displaced persons and survivors of camps returning to their homes and expecting compensation, former Nazis expecting integration, and former Wehrmacht soldiers who also expected to have their sacrifices recognised. Continuities with National Socialism or Austrian fascism (between 1934 and 1938) were (officially) renounced, and the “new” Austrian government announced the rebirth of an Austrian Republic that was morally unburdened by past events or experiences (see Reisigl 2007; Wodak & De Cillia 2007). The first part of the so-called Moscow Declaration of 1943, in which the Allied forces had declared Austria to have been the “first victim of Nazi aggression,” supported this hegemonic narrative (Rathkolb 2009). This definition remained essentially unchallenged until the election of Kurt Wald-heim, a former SA officer, to the Austrian presidency in 1986 (see Wodak et al. 1990; Mitten 1992). The second part of the Moscow Declaration—namely that Austrians were also responsible for Nazi war crimes—was usually swept under the carpet.
Abstract: From Introduction:
Antisemitism is global and multifaceted. One area in which ADL has seen a growth of antisemitism is within elements of the political left. This often takes the form of anti-Zionism, a movement that rejects the Jewish right to self-determination and of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, and frequently employs antisemitic tropes to attack Israel and its supporters. It also manifests through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a campaign that promotes diplomatic, financial, professional, academic and cultural isolation of Israel, Israeli individuals, Israeli institutions, and Jews who support Israel’s right to exist.
Political actors and advocacy movements associated with some left-wing political organizations have engaged in such antisemitism both in the U.S. and in Europe. While antisemitism from individuals associated with left-leaning political organizations is generally less violent than right-wing antisemitism, its penetration into the political mainstream is cause for concern and has in some cases alienated Jews and other supporters of Israel. Concerns are both political and physical. As described in this report, Jews and Jewish institutions have been targeted and have suffered violent attacks, associated with anti-Zionism, often in the wake of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians, most recently in 2021.
The challenges facing Jewish communities in Europe can be a bellwether for what is to come for the U.S. Jewish community, as evidenced for example by the recent rise in violent antisemitism in the U.S., which has plagued European Jewish communities for many years, and the increase in anti-Zionism in U.S. progressive spaces, something that has existed in Europe for some time. To better understand this phenomenon in Europe, ADL asked partners in the UK, France, Germany and Spain to describe some of the expressions of left-wing political antisemitism and anti-Israel bias in their countries. The individual contributors are responsible for the content of those chapters and their positions may differ with standard ADL practice and/or policy.
Our British partner, the Community Security Trust, is the British Jewish community’s security agency, which monitors, reports on, and educates about antisemitism among other vital tasks for the safety and security of the Jewish community.
Our French partner, the politics and culture magazine “K., The Jews, Europe, the 21st Century,” reports on contemporary challenges and opportunities for Jewish life in France and elsewhere in Europe.
Our German partner, Amadeu Antonio Foundation, is one of Germany's foremost independent non-governmental organizations working to strengthen democratic civil society and eliminate extremism, antisemitism, racism and other forms of bigotry and hate.
Our Spanish partner, ACOM, is a non-denominational and independent organization that strengthens the relationship between Spain and Israel, and whose work is inspired by the defense of human rights, democratic societies, civil liberties and the rule of law.
Those European contributions comprise the first sections of this report. Based on those essays, in the subsequent chapter, ADL analyzed common themes and notable differences among the four countries.
The final section adds ADL’s perspective on left-wing antisemitism in the political and advocacy spheres in the U.S. and provides suggested actions that can be taken to address antisemitism. To be sure, while not all antisemitism that has manifested in some elements of the political left in the U.S. is imported from Europe, lessons can be learned from this transatlantic phenomenon to protect against the mainstreaming of such antisemitism in U.S. politics.
Abstract: The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), commissioned Schoen Cooperman Research to conduct a comprehensive national study of Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in the United Kingdom
(England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Schoen Cooperman Research conducted 2,000 interviews in the United Kingdom with adults aged 18 and over between September 29 – October 17, 2021. The margin of error is two percent.
The United Kingdom study finds that 89 percent say they have definitely heard about the Holocaust, and three quarters (75 percent) know that the Holocaust refers to the extermination of Jewish people. That being said, there are significant gaps in Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in the United Kingdom.
The majority of UK respondents surveyed (52 percent) do not know that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Further, a majority of UK citizens (57 percent) believe that fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust today than they used to, and 56 percent believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again today.
Abstract: The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) commissioned Schoen Cooperman Research to conduct a comprehensive national study of Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in the Netherlands.
Schoen Cooperman Research conducted 2,000 interviews across the Netherlands. The margin of error for the study is 2 percent. This memo presents our key research findings and compares these findings with prior Claims Conference studies, which were conducted in five other countries.
Our latest study finds significant gaps in Holocaust knowledge and awareness in the Netherlands, as well as widespread concern that Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion are problems in the Netherlands today.
We found that 23 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z respondents believe the Holocaust is a myth, or that it occurred but the number of Jews who died has been greatly exaggerated – the highest percentage among Millennials and Gen Z respondents in all six countries the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany has previously studied.
Further, 29 percent of Dutch respondents, including 37 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z respondents believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Moreover, despite the fact that more than 70 percent of the Netherlands’ Jewish population perished during the Holocaust, a majority of Dutch respondents (53
percent), including 60 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z, do not cite the Netherlands as a country where the Holocaust took place. Finally, 53 percent of Dutch respondents believe that something like the Holocaust
could happen again today.
Abstract: The ADL Global 100: An Index of AntisemitismTM is the most extensive poll on antisemitic attitudes ever conducted, involving 102 countries and territories. The ADL Global 100: An Index of Antisemitism has provided crucial insights into national and regional attitudes toward Jews around the world, the levels of acceptance of antisemitic stereotypes and knowledge of the Holocaust.
In 2023, ADL released a focused survey that included 10 European countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.
First conducted in 2014, with follow up surveys in select countries since that time, this data is utilized by policy makers, researchers, Jewish communities, NGOs and journalists around the globe. The findings allow understanding of the magnitude of antisemitic attitudes around the world, and exactly which anti-Jewish beliefs are the most seriously entrenched.
The 2023 survey found that roughly one out of every four residents of the European countries polled for the 2023 survey harbored antisemitic attitudes. This result is consistent with the survey’s 2019 findings, showing that antisemitism continues to be entrenched across Europe. At least one in three respondents in Western European countries believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than the countries they reside in. In Eastern Europe, the most commonly held stereotypes is that of Jewish economic control and the perception of Jews as clannish.
Among the questions asked of respondents, 11 questions measuring general acceptance of various negative Jewish stereotypes were used to compile an index that has served as a benchmark for ADL polling around the world since 1964. Survey respondents who said at least 6 out of the 11 statements are “probably true” are considered to harbor antisemitic attitudes.
The survey was fielded between November 2022 and January 2023 with 500 nationally representative samples in each of the eight European countries and 1,000 nationally representative samples in Russia and Ukraine, respectively.
Abstract: On the basis of a new heuristic model of anti-Semitism, researchers are able to distinguish between new and old aspects of anti-Semitic attitudes. The results of two studies suggest that anti-Semitism in Germany contains very different aspects and the data fit the new theoretical model. Both traditional aspects, like "manifest anti-Semitism," as well as new forms of anti-Semitic attitudes, like "latent anti-Semitism," "rejection of responsibility for Jews," "anti-Israeli attitudes," and "anti-Zionism," were found. Furthermore, we identified various anti-Semitic attitudes with different predictive elements. Individuals with extreme anti-Semitic attitudes differ significantly from those without anti-Semitic attitudes with regard to the extent of authoritarianism, readiness for violence, approval of the repetition of National Socialism, and political orientation. The comparison between the two general concepts, authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, demonstrated that authoritarianism has greater utility in explaining separate aspects of old and new anti-Semitic attitudes. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Abstract: As one of the most visited museums in Germany’s capital city, the Jewish Museum Berlin is a key site for understanding not only German-Jewish history, but also German identity in an era of unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity. Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. How do modern students relate to the museum’s evocative architecture, its cultural-political context, and its narrative of Jewish history? By accompanying a range of high school history students before, during, and after their visits to the museum, this book offers an illuminating exploration of political education, affect, remembrance, and belonging.
Abstract: Why Do People Discriminate against Jews? provides a data-rich analysis of the causes of discrimination against Jews across the globe. Using the tools of comparative political science, Jonathan Fox and Lev Topor examine the causes of both government-based and societal discrimination against Jews in 76 countries. As they stress, anti-Semitism is an attitude, but discrimination is an action. In examining anti-Jewish discrimination, they combine ideas and theories from classic studies of anti-Semitism with social science theories on the causes of discrimination. On the one hand, conspiracy theories, a major topic in the anti-Semitism literature, are relatively unexplored in the social science literature as a potential instigator of discrimination. On the other, social science theories developed to explain how governments justify discrimination against Muslims are rarely formally applied to the processes that lead to discrimination against Jews. Fox and Topor conclude by identifying three potential causes of discrimination: religious causes, anti-Zionism, and belief in conspiracy theories about Jewish power and world domination. They conclude that while all three influence discrimination against Jews, belief in conspiracy theories is the strongest determinant. The most rigorous and geographically wide-ranging analysis of discrimination against Jews to date, this book reshapes our understanding of the persecution of religious minorities in general and the Jewish people in particular.
Contents:
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Patterns of Discrimination
Chapter 3: Religious Anti-Semitism
Chapter 4: Anti-Zionism and Anti-Israel Behavior and Sentiment
Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theories
Chapter 6: The British Example
Chapter 7: Conclusions
Appendix
Bibliography
Abstract: The historiography and the memory of the Holocaust, of the Romanians, and of Romanian Jews can be understood only through knowledge of the peculiarities of the Holocaust in Romania within the wider context of Holocaust Studies. Certain characteristic features of the history of the modernization of Romania in the twentieth century turned the “Jewish problem” into an ideologically active element, present on a large scale in the public sphere. Unquestionably, the tragedy of the Romanian Jewry was bound up with the European context, but it also had its own manifestations because of the political regime in Romania from 1938 to 1944. Six decades ago, Lucretiu Pătrăşcanu accurately remarked that “anti-Semitism in Romania still remains a Romanian phenomenon, which should be examined in its specific nature, and not only in what it imitates” (1944, 171). Romanians never embraced this research project; instead, they explained the Romanian Holocaust by blaming it on imported Fascism. One of the most frequently invoked reasons for this neglect is the ideology of national Communism; in this view, everything Romanian was good, while the origin of evil was always from outside. According to this preconception, risen to the rank of a “theory” of history, atrocities either did not occur in Romania from 1938 to 1944 or, if they happened, were caused by external forces.
Abstract: First International Resources was commissioned by the AntiDefamation League to research attitudes and opinions toward Jews, the Middle East and the global financial crisis in sevenEuropean countries.
¾ Our research focused on the attitudes of the general public in
Austria, France, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Spain and the
United Kingdom.
¾ Data results for each individual country were weighted based
on age and gender. The completed interview data underwent
minor weighting to national population data using official
government information on age and gender.
¾ In addition to the individual country results, we have compiled
overall statistics which take into account the findings from the
seven countries surveyed as a whole. These figures are
combined results from our surveys, with each country’s
findings being weighted equally as one-seventh of the whole.
¾ Fieldwork was done by Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), which
conducted a total of 3,500 telephone interviews -- 500 in each of
the seven countries -- among the general public between
December 1, 2008 – January 13, 2009.
¾ Interviews were conducted in the native language of each of the
countries and were completed by TNS.
¾ The margin of error for each country is +/- 4 at 95% level of
confidence.
Abstract: First International Resources was commissioned by the AntiDefamation League to research attitudes and opinions toward Jews in twelve European countries.
• Our research focused on the prevalent attitudes of the general public
in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and for the first time,
Poland and Hungary.
• Data results for each individual country were weighted based on age
and gender. The completed interview data underwent minor weighting
to national population data using official government information on
age and gender.
• In addition to the individual country results, we have compiled overall
“European” statistics which take into account the findings from the
twelve countries surveyed as a whole. These “European” figures are
combined results from our surveys, with each country’s findings being
weighted equally as one-twelfth of the whole.
• Fieldwork was done by Taylor Nelson Sofres, which conducted a total
of 6,000 telephone interviews -- 500 in each of the twelve countries --
among the general public between April 11 -- May 6, 2005.
• Interviews were conducted in the native language of each of the
countries and were completed by TNS.
• The margin of error for each country is +/- 4.5 at 95% level of
confidence.
Abstract: First International Resources was commissioned by the AntiDefamation League to research attitudes and opinions in ten European countries toward Jews, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
• Our research focused on the prevalent attitudes of the general public
in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.
• Data results for each individual country were weighted based on age
and gender. The completed interview data underwent minor weighting
to national population data using official government information on
age and gender.
• Fieldwork was done by Taylor Nelson Sofres, which conducted a total
of 5,000 telephone interviews -- 500 in each of the ten countries --
among the general public between March 16-April 8, 2004.
• Interviews were conducted in the native language of each of the
countries and were completed by TNS.
• The margin of error for each country is +/- 4.4 at 95% level of
confidence.
Abstract: On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, unleashing the fi rst Gulf crisis. When, by January, the United Nations’ economic sanctions had failed to force Iraqi withdrawal, the United States and a thirty-four nation coalition invaded. Although Israel did not participate, this brief war, over by February 28, could not help but intersect with the ongoing Arab-Israeli confl ict. Not only did the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, choose to drop missiles on Tel Aviv, touching off a secondary crisis over potential Israeli involvement, but calls to resolve the Palestinian question as part of a regional settlement circulated widely. For Muslims and Jews watching developments from afar, the First Gulf War thus became more than a conflict over Kuwaiti independence, oil rights or western imperialism. Rather it became a barometer of Muslim-Jewish relations around the world.
