Beyond Oneg Shabbat - Groundbreaking Research in the Jewish Historical Institute – 11.12.22

Beyond Oneg Shabbat: Groundbreaking Research and Findings in the Jewish Historical Institute – December 11, 2022.

The mission of the Jewish Historical Institute is to care for the Jewish legacy preserved in the archives of the Institute. The institute's collections consist of seven million pages of varied documents. The most significant part of the collections is the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, also known as the Ringelblum Archive, but other collections are also preserved and documented. In this third and final program, our speakers presented their research and findings in the Jewish Historical Institute that goes beyond the Warsaw ghetto.

Dr. Ewa Wiatr discussed one of the most interesting and unique collections that can be found at the Jewish Historical Institute. Some of the Lodz documents became a part of the Ringelblum Archive, and were brought to Warsaw during the war. This collection is part of the archival legacy of the Łódź ghetto.

The fate of the library of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin, or, Academy of the Sages of Lublin, is one of the greatest mysteries from the postwar history of Jewish heritage in Poland. Piotr Nazaruk from the “Grodzka Gate–NN Theater” Center talked about how the center is reconstructing the postwar history of this unique book collection, show documents proving its survival, and, most of all, showing nearly three hundred books, held mainly in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the National Library of Israel, that were part of the Yeshiva Library.

This program is in partnership with the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Polish Institute in Tel-Aviv, the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre in Lublin, the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Center, Liberation 75, Classrooms without Borders, and the Rabin Chair Forum at George Washington University.