Sep

22 2019

Who Shall Live & Who Shall Die?: The High Holidays at Auschwitz in 1944

10:00AM - 11:00AM  

Jewish Studies Center 96 Wentworth Street

Contact Mark Swick
swickmn@cofc.edu

Description:During the high holidays in 1944, there was a selection of 2000 young boys. The boys were subjected to a height test and only 600 “passed”. The other 1400 were condemned by the Nazis to be gassed. This story became well known in Orthodox circles due to a rabbinical responsa by Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Miesels in which a Jew asks permission to pay a ransom to a kapo guarding his son who is among those selected to be gassed. In this talk based on her current book project, Professor Helene Sinnreich will discuss this group of boys and the selection they endured.

Helene Sinnreich is a scholar of Jewish experience during the Holocaust and European Jewry. Dr. Sinnreich serves as the editor in chief of the Journal of Jewish Identities (Johns Hopkins University Press), and has served as a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. in 2007 and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 2009. Dr. Sinnreich’s main research focus is on the experience of Jews in Nazi ghettos. She has a special focus on the Lodz and Krakow ghettos and recently published, A Story of Survival: The Lodz Ghetto Diary of Heinek Fogel (Yad Vashem Press, 2015). Dr. Sinnreich also examines hunger and Nazi food policy in ghettos. Her most well-known research is on sexual abuse of Jewish women during the Holocaust.

Sponsor: Jewish Studies