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Date: 2024
Abstract: The Sixth Survey of European Jewish Community Leaders and Professionals, 2024, presents the results of an online survey offered in 10 languages and administered to 879 respondents in 31 countries. Conducted every three years using the same format, the survey seeks to identify trends and their evolution over time. The 2024 survey came during a historically fraught moment for the Jewish people globally. The impact of the horrific October 7th attacks and the subsequent war in Israel cannot be understated. How is this affecting Jewish leadership and Jewish communal life? Therefore, in addition to the regular topics covered by the survey (community priorities, threats, security concerns, attitudes towards Europe and Israel), this edition included a special section designed to understand the impact of October 7th on Jewish life in Europe. That October 7th has profoundly affected Jewish Europe is evident across multiple sections throughout the survey. Concern about antisemitism and the threat of physical attack has intensified. A large majority of 78% feel less safe living as Jews in their cities than they did before the Hamas attack, and respondents are more cautious about how they identify themselves as Jews. They are also more distant from their wider environments, with 38% reporting they have become more distant from non-Jewish friends. The respondents were comprised of presidents and chairpersons of nationwide “umbrella organizations” or Federations; presidents and executive directors of private Jewish foundations, charities, and other privately funded initiatives; presidents and main representatives of Jewish communities that are organized at a city level; executive directors and programme coordinators, as well as current and former board members of Jewish organizations; among others
Date: 2020
Abstract: The present report provides an overview of data on antisemitism as recorded by international organisations and by official and unofficial sources in the European Union (EU) Member States. Furthermore, the report includes data concerning the United Kingdom, which in 2019 was still a Member State of the EU. For the first time, the report also presents available statistics and other information with respect to North Macedonia and Serbia, as countries with an observer status to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). All data presented in the report are based on the respective countries’ own definitions and categorisations of antisemitic behaviour. At the same time, an increasing number of countries are using the working definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and there are efforts to further improve hate crime data collection in the EU, including through the work of the Working Group on hate crime recording, data collection and encouraging reporting (2019–2021), which FRA facilitates. ‘Official data’ are understood in the context of this report as those collected by law enforcement agencies, other authorities that are part of criminal justice systems and relevant state ministries at national level. ‘Unofficial data’ refers to data collected by civil society organisations.

This annual overview provides an update on the most recent figures on antisemitic incidents, covering the period 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2019, across the EU Member States, where data are available. It includes a section that presents the legal framework and evidence from international organisations. The report also provides an overview of national action plans and other measures to prevent and combat antisemitism, as well as information on how countries have adopted or endorsed the non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) (2016) as well as how they use or intend to use it.

This is the 16th edition of FRA’s report on the situation of data collection on antisemitism in the EU (including reports published by FRA’s predecessor, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia).
Author(s): Reches, Ruth
Date: 2019
Abstract: Mokslininkai sutinka, kad tapatumas yra kintantis pagal situaciją darinys, priklausomas nuo aplinkos. Kai aplinka yra traumuojanti, ji nutraukia stabilią individo gyvenimo tėkmę, pakeičia prisiimtus vaidmenis, nusistovėjusias vertybes, gyvenimo tikslus. Holokaustas buvo trauma, sutrikdžiusi žmonių kasdienį gyvenimą, privertusi iš naujo įvertinti save ir aplinką. Šiame darbe buvo nagrinėjama, kaip Holokausto sukelta trauma skatino keistis išgyvenusiųjų tapatumą karo metu, ir kokios yra ilgalaikės Holokausto pasekmės tapatumui. Atsakymams į šiuos klausimus atrasti buvo pasitelkta kokybinio tyrimo strategija ir teminės analizės metodas. 11 tyrimo dalyvių, išgyvenusių Holokaustą, interviu medžiaga atskleidė tapatumo pokyčius, sukeltus Holokausto karo metu - pakito išgyvenusiųjų savęs kaip visuomenės nario suvokimas dėl atskirties, susijusios su tautybe; pakito savo žydiškos kilmės suvokimas; pakito savo vaidmens šeimoje suvokimas, šeimos narių praradimas sustiprino šeiminius ryšius tarp išlikusiųjų; pakito gyvenimo tikslai, pagrindiniu tikslu tapo išgyvenimas; pakito savęs vertinimas. Holokaustas sukėlė ilgalaikes pasekmes tapatumui: Holokaustas suformavo savęs kaip „išgyvenusiojo“ suvokimą, kuris įgijo skirtingą vertę Lietuvos ir Izraelio visuomenių kontekste; išgyvenusieji save suvokia kaip vertinančius gyvybę, suprantančius materialių vertybių laikinumą; jie suvokia save kaip priimančius Dievą arba kaip neigiančius jo egzistavimą. Išgyvenusieji atskleidžia dvejopą savo santykį su Holokaustu: save suvokia kaip pasisėmusius stiprybės, gyvenimiškos patirties, Holokauste atradusius prasmę arba kaip netekusius gyvenimo tęstinumo, neradusius prasmės trauminiuose išgyvenimuose.
Date: 2012
Abstract: Collective disasters such as the Holocaust, war, repressions and ethnic violence are man-made political and social disasters. Not only they shock the wider (or future) public strongly, but result in serious trauma to the survived. A psychological trauma is an intense emotional experience with which human beings’ “I” (self) strive. The psychological effects of trauma is the phenomenon of in ability to adapt caused by psychological trauma. The identity is a dynamic system which defines a personality throughout interpersonal relations and emotional experiences. Traumatic memories disrupt conventional processes between of an individual and the community relationships based on trust, care and giving people a sense of control, purpose and interconnectivity since the sense of identity is formed by the relationship with others. Traumas destroy or diminish the victim’s earlier formed structure of self-perception and distort an individual’s sense of reality, warping meanings of real events. In our research we tried to analyze how trauma affected a person’s self-perception in the Holocaust. A biographical narrative interview was used to collect the data. One informant participated in the pilot research. The thematic analysis procedures were employed in order to achieve the goal. Themes were generated to delineate the descriptions of traumatic experiences and understandings of how they affect the informant’s life. Thematic analysis of the interview with the Holocaust survivor paved the way for better understanding of how traumatic memories are involved in the identity experience revealing the prevailing patterns such as self-perception as a weak physiological being, the relationship with the family, relationship with God, gratefulness for being alive.
Author(s): Reches, Ruth
Date: 2020
Abstract: The book "Survival of the Identity of Holocaust Survivors" was prepared on the basis of a doctoral dissertation. It examines how the trauma of the Holocaust led to a shift in identity among survivors during the war, and the long-term consequences of the Holocaust for identity.

The interview material of 11 research participants who survived the Holocaust revealed identity changes caused during the Holocaust war - the survivors' self-perception as a member of society changed due to the exclusion related to nationality; the perception of one's Jewish origin has changed; the perception of one's role in the family has changed, the loss of family members has strengthened family ties among the survivors; life goals changed, survival became the main goal; self-esteem has changed.

The Holocaust caused long-term consequences for identity: the Holocaust shaped the perception of oneself as a "survivor", which acquired a different value in the context of Lithuanian and Israeli societies; survivors perceive themselves as valuing life, understanding the transience of material values; they perceive themselves as accepting God or as denying his existence. Survivors reveals his dual relationship with the Holocaust: he perceives himself as having gained strength, life experience, having found meaning in the Holocaust, or as having lost the continuity of life.

The book has important lasting value because the research participants interviewed in the book were 80 years old or older at the time of the study, and now, several years after the study, some of them are no longer alive.
Date: 2014
Abstract: Acknowledging that legislation and policy are technologies of power used to organize societies and influence how individuals construct themselves as subjects, this study examines the intersections of transnational discourses, the politics of memory, and post-Soviet reforms for tolerance and Holocaust education in contemporary Lithuania. Using a multi-sited, anthropological approach based on 2 years of fieldwork, the central focus of this study is how policies, programs, and discourses adopted for EU and NATO accession were appropriated by individuals on the ground. What this study finds is that while the historical facts of the Holocaust are generally not in debate, what tolerance and Holocaust education mean in contemporary Lithuanian identity and collective memory is still widely debated. The implications of these findings suggest that, even in resistance, Holocaust and tolerance education have been incorporated into local discourses about how Lithuanians view themselves as democratic citizens. Furthermore, while many studies about post-Soviet educational policies for tolerance and Holocaust education focus on local attitudes, pedagogical methods, or regional historical circumstances, this study takes the intersections of transnational policy discourses and national educational reforms as its starting point to examine not only what tolerance and Holocaust education mean to individuals in the local context, but what they mean in western policy conversations as well. The aim of this dissertation is to contribute comprehensive qualitative research to better understand how international policy conversations about education, memory, and politics are representative of international and transnational negotiations of power.
Author(s): Radonić, Ljiljana
Date: 2018
Abstract: Eastern European EU accession candidates have used memorial museums and installed new permanent exhibitions to communicate with “Europe” in view of the Holocaust's “universalization” and “Europeanization.” One group demands that “Europe” acknowledge its suffering under Communism, while the other group tries to demonstrate its compatibility with Europe by invoking “Europe” in their exhibition texts and publications and referencing western Holocaust museums in their aesthetics. This article focuses on two countries from each group: Latvia and Lithuania, which highlight their victimhood under “double occupation,” on the one hand; and the current successor states of the “Slovak Republic” and the “Independent State of Croatia,” two Nazi satellite states, on the other. I begin by analysing how the terms “Holocaust,” “genocide,” and “mass violence” are used in the respective Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak and Croatian memorial museums. I argue that both groups share an awkwardness in dealing with the term “Holocaust,” and a tendency to present “our” victims with the help of individual stories and private photographs designed to evoke empathy, while presenting “their” victims – Jews and, even more so, Roma – with the help of often humiliating photos shot by the perpetrators. I then show that the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s – in contrast to the peaceful transitions in the other countries – had a distinctive effect on debates concerning the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence. Moving beyond the realm of museum analysis, I pinpoint the broader cultural phenomenon of Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks portraying themselves as “the new Jews,” before focusing specifically on the new permanent exhibition at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial, which I discuss as a best practice example for the universalization of the Holocaust.
Date: 2021
Abstract: The Fifth Survey of European Jewish Community Leaders and Professionals, 2021 presents the results of an online survey offered in 10 languages and administered to 1054 respondents in 31 countries. Conducted every three years using the same format, the survey seeks to identify trends and their evolution in time.

Even if European Jewish leaders and community professionals rank antisemitism and combatting it among their first concerns and priorities, they are similarly committed to expanding Jewish communities and fostering future sustainability by engaging more young people and unaffiliated Jews.

The survey covers a wide variety of topics including the toll of COVID-19 on European Jewish communities and a widening generational gap around pivotal issues. Conducted every three years since 2008, the study is part of JDC’s wider work in Europe, which includes its partnerships with local Jewish communities and programs aiding needy Jews, fostering Jewish life and leaders, resilience training.

The respondents were comprised of presidents and chairpersons of nationwide “umbrella organizations” or Federations; presidents and executive directors of private Jewish foundations, charities, and other privately funded initiatives; presidents and main representatives of Jewish communities that are organized at a city level; executive directors and programme coordinators, as well as current and former board members of Jewish organizations; among others.

The JDC International Centre for Community Development established the survey as a means to identify the priorities, sensibilities and concerns of Europe’s top Jewish leaders and professionals working in Jewish institutions, taking into account the changes that European Jewry has gone through since 1989, and the current political challenges and uncertainties in the continent. In a landscape with few mechanisms that can truly gauge these phenomena, the European Jewish Community Leaders Survey is an essential tool for analysis and applied research in the field of community development.
Date: 2019
Author(s): Barth, Theodor
Date: 2010
Abstract: Travelogue – On the Contemporary Understandings of Citizenship among European Jews – title and subject of Theodor Barth’s thesis – encompasses six books with ethnography based on a multi-sited fieldwork, in Central- & Eastern European Jewish communities.


The books are concerned with aspects of their own conditions of production, from fieldwork research to writing, alongside the ethnographic subject of the Travelogue: the conditions of Jewish communities (mainly in cities of Central and Eastern Europe) in the last half of the 1990s (1995-99).

The books root the model experiments developed throughout the Travelogue in different ethnographic contexts.

Book 1 (Spanning the Fringes – Vagrancy to Prague) is a traveller’s tale with quite contingent, serendipitous, and very short-term trips to sample Jewish life in St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Warsaw, Kiev, Bucharest, Sofia, and Budapest.

Book 2 (The Minutes of the ECJC) is a commentary and analysis around a conference which the candidate attended in Prague in 1995 of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC). It focuses on the political work and changing strategies of the ECJC. This book establishes some of the terms of the problems of community-Jews in Europe.

Book 3 (The Zagreb Almanach) is a description and analysis of the candidate’s stay with the Jewish community of Zagreb, focusing on a place, a green room, the community centre itself—this is the closest to a traditional site of community living in his ethnographic research.

Book 4 (The Books of Zagreb and Sarajevo) provides a contemporary and contextualized reading of a key Jewish ritual complex—the Passover Seder and its text, the Haggadah. This is a cultural object for systematic iteration and commentary, on which to articulate in depth a number of his insights gained more diffusely from observation. Among all the books, book 4 is the one intensive piece in which the textual analysis defines a process through which the candidate intends to sensitise the reader to how pattern can emerge from details.

Book 5 (Thirteen Kisses—a Manual of Survival From Sarajevo) relates a testimonial account of how the activist group La Benevolencija functioned in Sarajevo humanitarian relief during the Bosnian War of 1992-95. The candidate hopes to demonstrate a slow transition from wartime testimonials in the presence of an anthropologist, to recognition in the urban commonwealth in the aftermath of the war. He also invites the reader to consider the particularities of survivor testimonies and contrast these to how the war-zone was perceived from the outside.

Book 6 (The Account of the Lifeline) provides an understanding of a search and accountability model developed by La Benevolencija—in co-operation with the Joint—during the war in Bosnia (1992-95). It consolidates and expands the account of the Jews in Sarajevo and their humanitarian actions, through the candidate’s work on archives of the Joint (American Joint Distribution Committee) in Paris.

The six books of the Travelogue are rounded up in three concluding sections, containing 1) a synopsis of the findings across the books (Frames – Modeling Disordered Systems), 2) an account for the process of visual modeling throughout the books (Design – Choices and Aggregates), 3) a bibliographic presentation in which various sources influenced the conceptual choices and experiments that are made throughout the manuscript are discussed (Bibliography: Reflective Readings). In this way, the candidate hopes to retrace his steps from the findings, via the crafting of the volume back to the ranks of colleagues and readers.
Date: 2020
Abstract: This detailed and thorough report is rapidly becoming the ‘must-read’ study on European Jews, taking the reader on an extraordinary journey through one thousand years of European Jewish history before arriving at the most comprehensive analysis of European Jewish demography today.

Written by leading Jewish demographers Professor Sergio DellaPergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky, the Chair and Director of JPR’s European Jewish Demography Unit respectively, it explores how the European Jewish population has ebbed and flowed over time. It begins as far back as the twelfth century, travelling through many years of population stability, until the tremendous growth of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by the dramatic decline prompted by a combination of mass migration and the horrors of the Shoah. Extraordinarily, after all this time, the proportion of world Jewry living in Europe today is almost identical to the proportion living in Europe 900 years ago.

Using multiple definitions of Jewishness and a vast array of sources to determine the size of the contemporary population, the study proceeds to measure it in multiple ways, looking at the major blocs of the European Union and the European countries of the Former Soviet Union, as well as providing country-by-country analyses, ranging from major centres such as France, the UK, Germany and Hungary, to tiny territories such as Gibraltar, Monaco and even the Holy See.

The report also contains the most up-to-date analysis we have on the key mechanisms of demographic change in Europe, touching variously on patterns of migration in and out of Europe, fertility, intermarriage, conversion and age compositions. While the report itself is a fascinating and important read, the underlying data are essential tools for the JPR team to utilise as it supports Jewish organisations across the continent to plan for the future.
Author(s): Subotic, Jelena
Date: 2019
Abstract: Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled—ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated—throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Jelena Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.

Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"—insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.
Author(s): Verschik, Anna
Date: 2020
Abstract: Aims and Objectives/Purposes/Research Questions:
Studies on incomplete first language(L1) acquisition emphasize restricted input, the low prestige of heritage/immigrant/minority lan-guages, and age of acquisition as significant factors contributing to changes in L1. However, it is notalways clear whether it is possible to distinguish results of incomplete acquisition and contact-induced language change. This article deals with two Yiddish–Lithuanian bilinguals who acquiredboth languages at home (recorded in 2010 and 2011). The focus of the article is the absence of theYiddish past tense auxiliary in both informants and the replacement of Yiddish discourse-pragmaticwords by their Lithuanian or English equivalents in the speech of the second informant.
Design/Methodology/Approach:
Qualitative analysis of the speech of two Yiddish–Lithuanianbilinguals.
Data and Analysis:
Two sets of recordings analyzed for the past tense use and other featuresmentioned in Yiddish attrition studies.
Findings/Conclusions:
Restricted input is to be considered as a factor inany case. However, it isargued that phenomena reported in the heritage language literature are often the same as in thecontact linguistic literature: impact on non-core morphosyntax, prosody, and word order areusually mentioned as primary candidates of contact-induced structural change. Based on purelylinguistic phenomena, it is not possible to distinguish between the results of acquisition under theconditions of limited input and in other contact situations where limited input is not necessarily thecase. Many features of the informants’ Yiddish are a result of Lithuanian impact.
Originality:
Yiddish–Lithuanian early bilingualism is extremely rare nowadays. The data andanalysis contribute to a general understanding of the interplay between contact-induced languagechange and limited input.
Significance/Implications:
Unlike what is often presumed, it is not always possible to makecomparisons to monolinguals or balanced bilinguals because monolingual speakers of Yiddish donot exist
Author(s): Katz, Dovid
Date: 2017
Abstract: The paper argues that the recent history of Holocaust Studies in Lithuania is characterized by major provision (for research, teaching and publishing) coming from state-sponsored agencies, particularly a state commission on both Nazi and Soviet crimes. Problematically, the commission is itself simultaneously active in revising the narrative per se of the Holocaust, principally according to the ‘Double Genocide’ theories of the 2008 Prague Declaration that insists on ‘equalization’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes. Lithuanian agencies have played a disproportionate role in that declaration, in attempts at legislating some of its components in the European Parliament and other EU bodies, and ‘export’ of the revisionist model to the West. Much international support for solid independent Lithuanian Holocaust researchers and NGOs was cut off as the state commission set out determinedly to dominate the field, which is perceived to have increasing political implications in East-West politics. But this history must not obscure an
impressive list of local accomplishments. A tenaciously devoted group of Holocaust survivors themselves, trained as academics or professionals in other fields, educated themselves to publish books, build a mini-museum (that has defied the revisionists) within the larger state-sponsored Jewish museum, and worked to educate both pupils and the wider public. Second, a continuing stream of non-Jewish Lithuanian scholars, educators, documentary
film makers and others have at various points valiantly defied state pressures and contributed significantly and selflessly. The wider picture is that Holocaust Studies has been built most successfully by older Holocaust survivors and younger non-Jews, in both groups often by those coming to work in it from other specialties out of a passion for justice and truth in history, while lavishly financed state initiatives have been anchored in the inertia of nationalist regional politics.
Author(s): Katz, Dovid
Date: 2017