–Yahad - In Unum News

No. 7June 2010


International workshop examines pre-war Soviet local administrations and the Holocaust

International workshop participants (around table, from left foreground): Andrej Umansky of Yahad; Father Desbois; Wendy Lower and Boris Neusius, Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich; Patrice Bensimon, Yahad; Kate Brown, University of Maryland – USA: Stephan Merl, Univeristy of Bielefeld – Germany; Lynne Viola, University of Toronto - Canada; Aleksandr Kruglov, Univeristy of Radio and Electronics of Kharkov – Ukraine: Valery Vasylyev, National V.I. Verdansky University, Ukraine; Olexander Melnyk, of Ukraine.

Leading experts from around the world took part in a special workshop held at Yahad – In Unum this month to examine the characteristics of pre-war local administrative structures in the Soviet Union and their role in the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. “The question before us is whether Stalinist policies of the 1930’s in any way facilitated the Nazi genocide,” said workshop co-chair, Wendy Lower, a professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

“The subject presents us with an enigma,” said Father Desbois, in his opening remarks to the conference. “From our research and our interviews, we know that the Nazis relied on an important human labor force to carry out their executions, mainly local people who had been requisitioned. But, they were not requisitioned by the Germans alone. In order to more fully understand what occurred, we needed to re-contextualize the wartime administrative structures in light of what existed before.”

Co-chair Dr. Wendy Lower, presents to the international workshop

To shed light on the subject, scholars from Russia, Germany, France, the U.S. and Canada presented research findings exploring topics including:
• The Soviet system of agricultural collectivization
• Requisition policies and administrative structures during the 1932-1933 Great Famine
• The functioning of and relationships between various organisms, administrative bodies and officials such as the starost, the mir, the desiatnik, the oblast, the kolkhoz, the Raikom, plenipotentiaries, the Communist Party, the polizei and the GPU
• Deportation, before, during and after the war
• Characteristics of rural villages, their hierarchies, practices and traditions

In concluding the conference, Father Desbois thanked the participants for their contributions, saying, “By proposing some possible answers and beginning to create a bibliography concerning this subject, we have made an important first step toward formulating an eventual hypothesis concerning the Nazi’s organization of the extermination process. It also will provide us with a better understanding comprehension of the details provided witnesses’ interviews in the field.”
A full list of participants and subjects presented is available at Soviet administrations workshop.

Presentation on opened Vatican Archives from the pre-war Third Reich

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Director of Visiting Scholar Programs, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

The actions and statements of the Catholic Church during the Third Reich prior to 1940 — and the context in which they occurred – was the subject of a special Yahad-In Unum sponsored Thursdays at CERRESE presentation by Suzanne Brown-Fleming this month at the College des Bernardins in Paris. Based on her studies, including archives from the period that have been opened by the Vatican, Dr. Fleming-Brown discussed how the Church’s decisions and responses to persecution of Catholics influenced and affected its response (or lack of response) to Nazi anti-Jewish policy. While noting that the subject presents difficult issues, she said that scholars were compelled to bring to light the full history of the period, heeding the words of Cardinal Vingt Trois that, “learning about the Shoah means, of course, studying it as thoroughly and scientifically as possible.” She noted the importance of studying the Holocaust to the Church as expressed by Cardinal Lustiger, “Because… the situation requires it. Because the Shoah is a historic phenomenon where the fate of humanity was at stake. And therefore, what was at stake was good and evil and therefore the life and death of humankind. If the Church is not interested in this, what else do you want it to be interested in?”

Rabbi Sacca and Association of Sephardic Jewish Community gives award to Yahad in Buenos Aires

Special recognition for Yahad’s work is presented to Father Desbois by Rabbi Sacca, grand rabbi of the Sephardic Jewish Community in Buenos Aires

At a recent meeting of the leadership of the Sephardic Jewish Community in Buenos Aires, Rabbi Sacca presented Father Desbois with a plaque honoring the continued work of Yahad – In Unum to bring to light the story of the Eastern Holocaust and to honor the victims of the Holocaust by bullets. The meeting was organized by Rabbi Sacca and marked the beginning of effort to organize a network in Argentina to build support for Yahad’s work. Another meeting is planned in Buenos Aires in the fall.

Yahad’s Scientific Council meets

The members of the Yahad scientific council met in Paris in June to review the Center’s work to date and set priorities for the coming months. Council members present included: Chairman Eduard Husson, France; Andreas Angrick, Germany; Pierre-Jérôme Biscarat, France; Jean-Marc Dreyfus, UK; Joël Kotek, Belgium; Alexander Kruglov, Ukraine; Deborah Lipstadt, United States; Wendy Lower, Germany; Dieter Pohl, Germany; Stéphane Simonnet, France; Nicolas Werth, France.

Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki welcomes Father Desbois to Dnepropetrovsk

Rabbi Kamineski and Father Desbois

Yahad – In Unum’s visit to the Yekaterinoslav-Dnepropetrovsk region of the Ukraine was featured in an article on the Jewish Community of Dnepropetrovsk web site. The article reports that Father Desbois, pictured here with Chief Rabbi of Dnepropetrovsk Shmuel Kaminezki thanked the Chabad- Lubavitch community’s for their support.
read full article

Yahad-donated artifacts added to Memorial and Tolerance Museum in Mexico

The permanent exhibition of the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia (Memorial and Tolerance Museum) of Mexico will soon include artifacts donated by Yahad – In Unum. The Museum was founded in 1999 with the purpose of fostering an understanding of the value of tolerance and diversity through exhibitions of significant historical examples of intolerance committed by mankind, such as acts of genocide. The Musuem’s formal Inauguration will occur in August-September of this year.
Museo Memoria y Tolerancia

Yahad rabbinical consultant, Rabbi Samama, profiled online

The newspaper Hamodia has just published an online account of a research trip by Rabbi Mendel Samama, appointed earlier this year as permanent consultant for rabbinical issues by Yahad - In Unum’s Board of Directors (see YIUN N°3). Responsible for overseeing, from the rabbinical perspective, Yahad’s research on the mass graves of Jewish victims of the Einsatszgruppen and establishing a Rabbinical Council, Rabbi Samama said the work “is one of the most important tasks for our generation and the most important gift that we can leave to the next.”
read article (in French)

Meet Team Yahad

Patrice Bensimon accompanying a witness to an execution site in Ukraine.

Each month, we profile one of the dedicated team members who help make the work of Yahad – In Unum possible.
Patrice Bensimon is the Coordinator of Yahad’s archive center and a Team Leader on research investigations into Eastern Europe. Patrice began his work with Yahad in 2006 as a translator, accompanying Father Desbois and research teams on field investigations. With a degree from the Sorbonne in Slavic language, Patrice is fluent in French, English, Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish. He also holds a Masters degree in applied Geopolitics and is working on his doctoral thesis on Jewish memorial sites in post-Sovient Ukraine and Belarus. A one-time interpreter for the theater, he says that his work at Yahad has taught him the meaning of “making dialogue real” as well as the importance during project and field work of “never neglecting seemingly secondary or minimal details.”

Upcoming public events

• Paris: European seminar for high school educations on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, July 5-6 at Yahad
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• Mexico City: Inauguration of permanent exhibition Memorial and Tolerance Museum, August-September 2010
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• Montreal: Keynote speech by Father Desbois at the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs, October 5
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