Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Plates
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and note on spelling and dates
- Introduction
- 1 The occupation of Germany and the survivors: an overview
- 2 The formation of She'erith Hapleitah: November 1944 – July 1945
- 3 She'erith Hapleitah enters the international arena: July–October 1945
- 4 Hopes of Zion: September 1945 – January 1946
- 5 In search of a new politics: unity versus division
- 6 The Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in Bavaria
- 7 The politics of education
- 8 Two voices from Landsberg: Rudolf Valsonok and Samuel Gringauz
- 9 Destruction and remembrance
- 10 The survivors confront Germany
- 11 She'erith Hapleitah towards 1947
- Concluding remarks
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Plates
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and note on spelling and dates
- Introduction
- 1 The occupation of Germany and the survivors: an overview
- 2 The formation of She'erith Hapleitah: November 1944 – July 1945
- 3 She'erith Hapleitah enters the international arena: July–October 1945
- 4 Hopes of Zion: September 1945 – January 1946
- 5 In search of a new politics: unity versus division
- 6 The Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in Bavaria
- 7 The politics of education
- 8 Two voices from Landsberg: Rudolf Valsonok and Samuel Gringauz
- 9 Destruction and remembrance
- 10 The survivors confront Germany
- 11 She'erith Hapleitah towards 1947
- Concluding remarks
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare
Summary
This study sets out to examine the initial responses of Holocaust survivors to the tragedy that overtook them. It focuses on the history of She'erith Hapleitah – the Surviving Remnant – in the American Zone of Occupied Germany which, despite its inherent limitations as a group in transit, rose to temporary prominence in the immediate post-war years. While the term She'erith Hapleitah refers to all surviving Jews in Europe, it designates most particularly those who converged on Germany between 1945 and 1949.
As the impending defeat of Nazi Germany grew closer and the hope of possible liberation more tangible, the thoughts of the concentration camp inmates in Germany increasingly turned to the fate of those who would be lucky enough to survive. It is in this context that the term She'erith Hapleitah, the biblical concept of the saved or surviving remnant, comes to describe those who would survive to see the Allied victory. Apparently the first recorded reference to She'erith Hapleitah appears in the Channukah 5705 (November–December 1944) number of Nitzotz (The Spark), the underground organ of the Irgun Brith Zion in the Kovno Ghetto, which began to appear in Kaufering, a sub-camp of Dachau, to which the last remnants of the Ghetto had been deported five months earlier. In the five extant issues of the paper (two were lost) the term She'erith Hapleitah is freely used to describe those who would hopefully survive, suggesting that it was already an integral part of shared language in Kaufering even before Nitzotz was reissued.
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- Life between Memory and HopeThe Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002