From The Holocaust To A New Dawn

This emotionally riveting book traces the travails of three young Polish Jewish women attempting to resurrect their lives in the bitter aftermath of World War II. After years in a concentration camp, they must first fend off the lusty Russian soldiers who free them. Then comes the arduous trek home. Other people live in their houses now, and the village is hostile. Where will they go? How will they survive? Is anyone they knew and loved still alive? Traveling far, often passing as non-Jews, they learn to cope and endure. Finally, their search for freedom bears fruit in the promise of a Jewish homeland. But pioneering Israel means new hardships: housing shortages, scant medicine, food rationing, political conflict. And enemies everywhere, from harsh British rulers to warrior Arab neighbors. New Dawn is a book of many miracles. As history, it thrillingly recounts how Jews from vastly different cultures joined forces to fight for Israel. As Holocaust literature, it is significant. A half-century after the fact, time is running out for survivors, and the need for testimony is pressing. This book makes a major contribution to that growing genre.

The memories of David Shachar are a journey through the tunnel of time: from wanderings in Poland to the life of a refugee in World War II, and on to a soldier's life fighting the Nazis. After the war, while studying radio electronics in Paris, David cut his studies short and came to Israel to fight in the War of Independence. A few years later, David and his wife, Chaya, answered Ben-Gurion's call to settle the country "from the city to the frontier," and they moved to the development town of Kiryat Shmona. He worked tirelessly to advance the developing city, using his qualifications and abilities to build up technology in the border area. Years later, David Shachar served as a senior representative of the Israel Aircraft Industries with the Ministry of Defense and did much to develop and advance Israel's defense industry. David never lost sight of his memories of World War II and devoted himself to memorializing the bravery of the 30,000 Jewish soldiers who fell in the Polish army. On his initiative, the outstanding monument in their memory was established at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In the words of Ephraim Kaye of Yad Vashem, David's story of rebirth "is one of unprecedented creativity, courage and self-sacrifice that is the essence of Israel today." This inspiring autobiography is a must-read. "Through tragedy and war and a desire for peace, the life story of David Shachar serves as a model for our times.

"The Jewish people, argues Rabbi Friedlander, have to move out of the shadow of the Holocaust. But what the world has not understood is that the Jewish emphasis upon the Holocaust is not a plea for sympathy; rather, as George Steiner has said, "We are our own remembrancers." What Jews want the world to remember is the evil that caused those deaths and which is still endemic in the world." "Now there is a new generation, living in the time after the Holocaust, entering the twenty-first century. Jews must move beyond the trauma of a suppressed past which endures within the dark corners of the psyche. But, argues Dr. Friedlander, we must listen to the messengers who come out of the darkness and are their own message even when they are silent. In this book he enters into a dialogue with the great Jewish thinkers and writers of our time - with Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim, Elie Wiesel - and tries in his exploration to move toward a concept of humanity which includes evil as a component of our makeup, which sees the glory of human existence in winning partial victories against darkness, and which celebrates the hope that even a journey moving into darkness has dimensions of hope within itself." "Riders Towards the Dawn is a highly original contribution toward a new understanding of Judaism and Jewish thought as we approach a new century. It will be read by Jews and non-Jews alike, and will create controversy and widespread debate."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The first book to thoroughly chronicle this pivotal event by presenting a wide array of eyewitness testimony, much of it previously unpublished, and to set the event firmly in historical context.

Many books on Holocaust survivors deal with their lives in the Displaced Persons camps, with memory and remembrance, and with the nature of their testimonies. Representing scholars from different countries and different disciplines such as history, sociology, demography, psychology, anthropology, and literature, this collection explores the survivors’ return to everyday life and how their experience of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust impacted their process of integration into various European countries, the United States, Argentina, Australia, and Israel. Thus, it offers a rich mix of perspectives, disciplines, and communities.

Centrist Orthodox theologians here reject the "God's judgment theory" of the Holocaust. Contributors include Rabbis J.B. Soloveitchik, Norman Lamm, Emanuel Rackman, Haskel Lookstein, Louis Bernstein, Reuven Bulka, Emanual Feldman and Eliezer Berkovits.

The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed to confront, the Holocaust. Fascist Italy was the model for Nazi Germany, and Mussolini was Hitler's prime ally in the Second World War. But Italy also became a theater of war and a victim of Nazi persecution after 1943, as resistance, collaboration, and civil war raged. Many thousands of Italians—Jews and others—were deported to concentration camps throughout Europe. After the war, Italian culture produced a vast array of stories, images, and debate through which it came to terms with the Holocaust's difficult legacy. Gordon probes a rich range of cultural material as he paints a picture of this shared encounter with the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. His book explores aspects of Italian national identity and memory, offering a new model for analyzing the interactions between national and international images of the Holocaust.

This collection of essays explores the character and quality of the Holocaust’s impact and the abiding legacy it has left for social theory. The premise which informs the contributions is that, ten years after its publication, Zygmunt Bauman’s claim that social theory has either failed to address the Holocaust or protected itself from its implications remains true.