Rabbinic Responsa Of The Holocaust Era

A translation of 14 rabbinic responsa (halakhic rulings) issued during and immediately after the Holocaust, which "reveal the tragic situations occurring daily at this time." The issues discussed include: whether one is obliged to object to the sterilization of a mentally ill woman, whether it is permissible to stun an animal before ritual slaughter, the status of Jewish prisoners' ashes which were returned to their families (after "Kristallnacht"), whether one must repent for inadvertently suffocating a crying infant while hiding from the Nazis, the status of Jews who converted to Christianity in order to avoid deportation, whether one may ransom a family member at the expense of another's life, and whether one may volunteer to die in order to save a Torah scholar.

This breathtakingly moving book documents the remarkable continuity of religious life under the horrendous conditions of Nazi-occupied Lithuania. The Jews of the Kovno ghetto went to Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, one of the remaining religious authorities in the ghetto, and posed their questions to him. He answered their questions and recorded each and every query by copying it onto scraps that he tore off of cement sacks. He then buried these scraps of papers in cans in the soil around the ghetto. This book brings to light these unearthed questions and answers, and bears witness to the power of faith to survive in the most dire of circumstances.

In February 1945, Israele Zolli, chief rabbi of Rome's ancient Jewish community, shocked his co-religionists in Italy and throughout the Jewish world by converting to Catholicism and taking as his baptismal name, Eugenio, to honor Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) for what Zolli saw as his great humanitarianism toward the Jews during the Holocaust. Almost a half a century after his conversion, Zolli still evokes anger and embarrassment in Italy's Jewish community. This book is the first authoritative treatment of this astonishing story. What induced Zolli to embrace Catholicism will probably never be known. Nonetheless, by painstaking scholarly detective work, through interviews in Italy and elsewhere, through the unearthing of private papers not previous known to exist, and through the study of previous inaccessible archival materials, the authors have succeeded in explaining why Zolli left the Jewish fold and joined the Catholic Church. Like Zolli's rabbinical career, Pius XII's long pontificate tells us much about the Church of Rome and its relationship to the Jewish people, particularly with reference to the issue of conversion. The authors focus on the pontiff's World War II policies vis-A-vis the Jews, a subject that has been heatedly debated since Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy was performed in the early 1960s. What Pacelli knew abut the extermination of the Jews and when he knew it, what he said and failed to say, are given special attention in this book. Through the examination of previous scholarship and primary materials (including Pius XI's encyclical on race and anti-Semitism, Pacelli's behavior is evaluated to determine if Zolli accurately gauged the Holy Father's efforts to save Jews. This saga of the two Eugenios will interest historians of the Second World War and the Holocaust and students of history alike.

Victims of the Holocaust were faced with moral dilemmas for which no one could prepare. Yet many of the life-and-death situations forced upon them required immediate actions and nearly impossible choices. In Problems Unique to the Holocaust, today's leading Holocaust scholars examine the difficult questions surrounding this terrible chapter in world history. Is it ever legitimate to betray others to save yourself? If a group of Jews is hiding behind a wall and a baby begins to cry, should an adult smother the child to protect the safety of the others? How guilty are the bystanders who saw what was happening but did nothing to aid the victims of persecution? In addition to these questions, one contributor considers whether commentators can be objective in analyzing the Holocaust or if this is a topic to be left only to Jews. In the final essay, another scholar assesses the challenge of ethics in a post-Holocaust world. This singular collection of essays, which closes with a meditation on Daniel Goldhagen's controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners, asks bold questions and encourages readers to look at the tragedy of the Holocaust in a new light.

The last several years have seen a sharpening of debate in the United States regarding the problem of steadily increasing medical expenditures, as well as inflation in health care costs, a scarcity of health care resources, and a lack of access for a growing number of people in the national health care system. Some observers suggest that we in fact face two crises: the crisis of scarce resources and the crisis of inadequate language in the discourse of ethics for framing a response. Laurie Zoloth offers a bold claim: to renew our chances of achieving social justice, she argues, we must turn to the Jewish tradition. That tradition envisions an ethics of conversational encounter that is deeply social and profoundly public, as well as offering resources for recovering a language of community that addresses the issues raised by the health care allocation debate. Constructing her argument around a careful analysis of selected classic and postmodern Jewish texts and a thoughtful examination of the Oregon health care reform plan, Zoloth encourages a radical rethinking of what has become familiar ground in debates on social justice.

Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler’s regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.