Yad Vashem Publications

Editors: Bella Gutterman and Nina Springer-Aharoni

Head Curator: Vivian Uria

Curator: Haviva Peled-Carmeli, Deputy Curators: Michael Tal, Sara Shor

The Yad Vashem Synagogue catalogue - The artifacts displayed in the Yad Vashem Synagogue are a few of the thousands of items preserved in Yad Vashem's collections that tell the story of the Jewish people – a panoramic mosaic of memories depicting the fate of individuals, families and communities during the Holocaust.  The artifacts in our collections tell stories interwoven with flashes of fear, despair and loss, but also moments of determination, pity, hope, courage and love.  These stories evoke empathy with the fate of the victims, and place the Jewish individual at the heart of the narrative that unfolds in the Holocaust History Museum.  The significance of these artifacts is hoin ned by their integration the vast, complex fabric that shapes collective memory from countless fragments of personal recollection.  The display area and the space currently used as the Synagogue combine to depict the lost Jewish life in the face of its continuity today.  These artifacts bear mute testimony to the history and legacy of individuals and communities during the Holocaust that we seek to commemorate and to impart to future generations.

Edited by Christoph Dieckmann and Arkadi Zeltser

Rika Benveniste

Edited by Dan Michman and Robert Rozett

The Holocaust unquestionably shattered most normative frameworks and cast the struggle for survival in its starkest form. Yet despite this, the Holocaust did not necessarily lead Jews to act as lone wolves, caring only about their own survival. This volume demonstrates that Jewish solidarity during the Holocaust is a multifaceted, multilayered issue, replete with complexities and shadings that reflect the diversity of Jewishness and Jewish existence, as well as the unprecedented dire situations that challenged it, and while solidarity was not a given and may not have predominated, it did not cease to exist.

Edited by: Eliyana R. Adler and Natalia Aleksiun

The Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews of Europe led to the atomization of the social relationships of the victims. Families were ripped apart. Entire communities were ghettoized and isolated from the outside world. The forced removal of the Jews from the midst of the non-Jewish population facilitated the crimes committed against them, significantly limited the assistance they could rely on, and restricted the number of witnesses to their persecution and murder. However, despite the devastation, disruption, and loss brought by the Holocaust, prewar patterns and lationships continued to shape decisions and actions by Jews and non-Jews both during and after the war. Even in extremis, they often relied on established networks of support that had been forged in very different circumstances. Jewish victims as well as bystanders and perpetrators relied on the already familiar cohort of relatives, neighbors, peers, and colleagues to support and assist them during this time. Just as these networks brought people with various backgrounds together, Entanglements of War compiles a broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives to reveal invaluable findings about the relationships, choices, and actions that shaped these complex connections, and their impact on Jewish lives during the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath.

Christoph Schminck-Gustavus

Moral Dilemmas among Jews in the Reality of the Holocaust

By Yitzhak Arad

It Happened on Our Planet offers a brutally honest insight into the horrifying decisions that the Jews had to make and the unbearable situations in which the Jews found themselves during this time. The publication of this important work presents generations to come with a better understanding of the complex reality of the Holocaust.

On Duty - The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust

By Jan Grabowski

The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews.

Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943

Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this police force was responsible for enforcing many anti-Jewish regulations issued by the Nazis. Who were these policemen, and how did they transform from ordinary policemen to murderous executioners? And what was the role of the Germans in this horrifying picture?

Barbara Engelking

Emunah Nachmany Gafny

David Silberklang

Bella Gutterman

Editors: Sara Bender and Pearl Weiss

Editors: Sara Bender and Pearl Weiss

Avraham Milgram

Rezső Kasztner | Editors: László Karsai and Judit Molnár