- 272 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
"The most comprehensive to date treatment of these precious artifacts of the Holocaust's Jewish efforts to maintain religious observations and identity." ā Choice Calendars map time, shaping and delineating our experience of it. While the challenges to tracking Jewish conceptions of time during the Holocaust were substantial, Alan Rosen reveals that many took great risks to mark time within that vast upheaval. Rosen inventories and organizes Jewish calendars according to the wartime settings in which they were producedāfrom Jewish communities to ghettos and concentration camps. The calendars he considers reorient views of Jewish circumstances during the war and show how Jews were committed to fashioning traditional guides to daily life, even in the most extreme conditions. In a separate chapter, moreover, he elucidates how Holocaust-era diaries sometimes served as surrogate Jewish calendars. All in all, Rosen presents a revised idea of time, continuity, the sacred and the mundane, the ordinary and the extraordinary even when death and destruction were the order of the day. Rosen's focus on the Jewish calendarāthe ultimate symbol of continuity, as weekday follows weekday and Sabbath follows Sabbathāsheds new light on how Jews maintained connections to their way of conceiving time even within the cauldron of the Holocaust. "Rosen demonstrates the relationship between time and meaning, between meaning and holiness, between holy days and the divine presence?all of which came under assault in the Nazis' effort to kill Jewish souls before destroying Jewish bodies." āDavid Patterson, author of Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- I. Time at the End of a Jewish Century
- II. Tracking Time in the New Jewish Century: Calendars in Wartime Ghettos
- III. Concentration Camps, Endless Time, and Jewish Time
- IV. While in Hiding: Calendar Consciousness on the Edge of Destruction
- V. At the Top of the Page: Calendar Dates in Holocaust Diaries
- VI. The Holocaust as a Revolution in Jewish Time: The Lubavitcher Rebbesā Wartime Calendar Book
- Epilogue
- Appendix 1: Inventory of Wartime Jewish Calendars
- Appendix 2: Months of the Jewish Calendar Year, with Their Holidays and Fast Days
- Appendix 3: English-Language Rendering of Rabbi Scheiner Calendar
- Glossary
- Selective Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author