Solving the Mystery of a Pre-Holocaust Photo Album

In 2013, the photographer Richard Schofield discovered a collection of pre-World War II family photographs in a museum storage room in Kaunas, Lithuania, with no name attached to the album. Now he has uncovered the story behind his find. Uriel Heilman writes:

The photos, dating from about 1910 through 1940, were from a Lithuanian Jewish family’s album that had been smuggled out of the city’s wartime Jewish ghetto and entrusted to a non-Jewish Lithuanian family for safekeeping. But nobody knew what had happened to the people in the pictures. Presumably they had not survived the war to reclaim their photos.

Touched by the images and intrigued to learn what had happened to their subjects, Schofield set about trying to identify them. He scanned the 112 photos, set up a Facebook page to showcase them, and commissioned a piece of music to accompany an exhibition of the photographs that would mark the 75th anniversary of the ghetto in Kaunas, [also] known as Kovno. . . .

Then, . . . by a twist of serendipity, a non-Jewish archivist who worked at the Jewish museum in the Lithuanian capital city of Vilnius noticed something: after clicking through the photographs and doing a bit of sleuthing, Saule Valiunaite realized that one of the photos appeared in a Holocaust documentary film made in 1999.

It turns out the photos weren’t of some obscure Jewish family but that of two of America’s best-known Yiddish scholars: Ruth Wisse of Harvard and her brother David Roskies of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Roskies had written a memoir about his family, Yiddishlands, in 2008. A third sibling, Eva Roskies Raby, is a former director of the Montreal Jewish Public Library.

Read more at JTA

More about: History & Ideas, Holocaust, Lithuania, Ruth Wisse, Vilna

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society