The Ringleblum Archives: Virtual Tour and Teacher Training

The Ringelblum Archives: Virtual Tour and Teacher Training with Dr. Katarzyna Person and Helise Lieberman
Thursday, January 6, 2022
4:00pm-5:30pm

Join CWB as we explore this “Archive More Important Than Life” and prepare for a community wide Teach-In on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January 2022
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“What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground. . . . I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. So the world may know all. So the ones who did not live through it may be glad, and we may feel like veterans with medals on our chest. We would be the fathers, the teachers, and educators of the future…But no, we shall certainly not live to see it, . . . . ” – David Graber, 19 years old, Warsaw Ghetto in Kassow, Samuel, Who Will Write Our History, 3
Who writes history? The underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto was started by historian and high school history teacher, Emanuel Ringelblum, and created by a clandestine group who vowed to defeat Nazi propaganda by detailing everyday life in the ghetto from the voices of the Jewish inhabitants. Ringelblum enlisted people of all ages, occupations and classes to record their daily lives through words, photographs, receipts, tram tickets, candy wrappers, theater tickets and drawings. He hoped for the vivid, personal detail that could illuminate the human meaning of the moment. A social historian committed to telling the truth, the Oyneg Shabes (Yiddish for “joy of the Sabbath”) was a unique form of resistance. Burying the archives beneath the buildings of the ghetto in metal boxes and steel milk canisters, Ringelblum hoped and believed these pages would survive even if the writers did not.

This virtual tour and teacher training workshop will look closely at some of these documents and afford teachers the opportunity to include the Ringelblum Archive in their classes. Together we will consider how we can introduce these artifacts and guide our students towards a discussion about the different forms of resistance.

The Ringelblum Archives consist of a collection of 1680 archival units (approx. 25,000 pages) retrieved from the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Archives comprise government documents, materials concerning the ghetto resistance, testimonies of the fate of Jewish communities during the Holocaust, literature, works of art and private correspondence collected by victims of the Holocaust in order to pass on information about the Holocaust to future generations. This collection is absolutely unique, both in terms of its origin and its historic value. It mainly concerns the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe (approximately 500,000 inhabitants), but in fact it covers the whole of occupied Poland, documenting the Shoah, the fate of its Jewish community of 3.500,000 people. Nearly all the creators of the Ringelblum Archives perished, either in the ghetto or in the extermination camps.

Dr. Katarzyna Person

Katarzyna Person is a historian of Eastern European Jewish History working in the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where she leads the Ringelblum Archive publishing project. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of London in 2010, Dr. Person has held postdoctoral fellowships from the International Institute for Holocaust Research in Yad Vashem, the Center for Jewish History in New York City, and La Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. She was awarded habilitation (a post-doctoral degree) from the Polish Academy of Science. She has written a number of articles on the Holocaust and its aftermath in occupied Europe. Her most recent book, Warsaw Ghetto Police. The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation was published by the Cornell University Press 2021.

Helise Lieberman

Helise Lieberman is the director of the Taube Center for Jewish Life & Learning, a position she has held since 2009. A former Hillel director, she was the founding principal of the Lauder-Morasha Day School in Warsaw and has served as a consultant to the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe, the Westbury Group, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and to the JDC – Baltics. Ms. Lieberman was awarded the Bene Merito Medal by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2015. She is engaged in Pan-European and cross-communal Jewish heritage education and serves on the boards of Hillel Poland and the Lauder-Morasha School. A dual citizen (U.S. and Poland), Ms. Lieberman has lived in Warsaw since 1994.

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