Search Results

Home / Search Results

Recent Public Discourses on Anti-Jewish Violence in Moldovan History, 1991–2019

Author(s): Felcher, Anastasia

Date: 2020

Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust Memorials, Antisemitism, Jewish Community, Memory, Memorial, Jewish Organisations

Abstract: Efforts to commemorate the victims of the 1903 Chişinǎu (Kishinev) pogrom and the Holocaust in Bessarabia and Transnistria have achieved varying degrees of success in the Republic of Moldova. Gaining public recognition for these experiences has proven a convoluted process. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the local Community has led an enduring memorialization campaign, which has steadily evolved with the shifting political climate. Though Community representatives have at times had a fraught relationship with Moldovan officials, they have continuously sought official acknowledgment of their efforts. This article analyzes how both the government and the Jewish Community have handled memory in public spaces and the local media of Chişinǎu.

Holocaust Sites in Ukraine: Pechora and the Politics of Memorialization

Author(s): Golbert, Rebecca L.

Date: 2004

Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration, Memory, Memorial, Ethnography, Oral History and Biography, Holocaust Survivors

Abstract: This study of the Pechora camp, in Transnistria, examines the contributions of contemporary testimonies to our understanding of the Holocaust experience and the ways survivors and witnesses perceive and recount that experience over time. In the case of Transnistria, the testimonies of living witnesses may at times provide the only significant historical and social record of the ghetto and camp experience. While existing scholarship on the Holocaust in Romania and Transnistria has emerged primarily out of the Romanian Jewish experience of the war, this article highlights the wartime experiences and postwar memories of Ukrainian Jewish survivors, whose perspectives on Transnistria have until recently been overlooked. The author also offers a distinctly ethnographic dimension to the study of the Holocaust by examining memory and identity processes and by revealing substantial fissures in the way the Holocaust is remembered and memorialized.

Remembering Jasenovac: survivor testimonies and the cultural dimension of bearing witness

Author(s): Byford, Jovan

Date: 2014

Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, Memory, Oral History and Biography, Interviews

Abstract: This article examines testimonies of Jasenovac survivors recorded in Serbia between 1989 and 1997 for the oral history collections of the Fortunoff Archive and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The author highlights the differences between the assumptions about survivors and testimony underpinning the US-based interview projects, on the one hand, and the understanding of bearing witness that is apparent in testimonies recorded for projects in Serbia on the other. Contrasting the emotion-centered American approach to survivor testimony with the atrocity-centered Serbian approach, the author argues for a more explicit acknowledgment among scholars, as well as among those involved in recording testimonies, of witnessing as a socially, historically, and institutionally embedded practice.

Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators

Author(s): Pollin-Galay, Hannah

Date: 2016

Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Oral History and Biography, Yiddish, Holocaust Survivors, Holocaust, Interviews

Abstract: Psychoanalyst Dori Laub asserts that for camp inmates the Holocaust extinguished the possibility of “I-thou” interaction. Address and response, the basis of human subjectivity, became impossible for the prisoner to imagine. The author of this article uses victims’ descriptions of perpetrators to investigate this assertion. Do survivors at times conceive of a wartime assailant as “you”—as an addressable human agent? Comparing two clusters of testimony by Lithuanian Jews, the author finds that contemporary language and social context shape the victims’ stance toward Holocaust perpetration—that is, how they weigh human versus structural wrong. She also points out various ethical traps inherent in each of the two methods of remembering wartime aggressor