The Holocaust's Jewish Calendars

Keeping Time Sacred, Making Time Holy

Alan Rosen

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780253038272
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253038302
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Holocaust History

"The most comprehensive to date treatment of these precious artifacts of the Holocaust's Jewish efforts to maintain religious observations and identity." — 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 produced—from 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 calendar—the ultimate symbol of continuity, as weekday follows weekday and Sabbath follows Sabbath—sheds 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." —David Patterson, author of Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary

Appendix 1: Inventory of Wartime Jewish Calendars

Copies of calendars highlighted in bold survived the war and are in my possession; those listed in regular script indicate calendars brought to my attention but that I have not seen a copy of.

Ghettos

Rabbi Tzvi Elimelekh Talmud (Lublin) 5703

Zvi Liberman (Zurawno, Poland) 5702–3

Lodz 5701–5704

Lvov (Lemberg) 1942a

Lvov (Lemberg) 1942b

Shimon Pinkesfeld (Lvov) 5702

Warsaw (“tiny flawed calendars”; Rabbi Huberband) 5702

Kovno Jewish Police 1943

Labor Camps

Rabbi David Kahane (Janowska)

Golda Finkler (Hasag-Leipzig) 5705

“Rabbi’s Daughter” (Parschnitz)

Yosef Meir Wenrov / Shalom Weinrov (Vologda) Adar 5701–Tishrei 5702

Moshe Mendel Herstik (Aninoasa, Romania)

Shifra Yudasin (Leipzig)

Theresienstadt

Rabbi Asher Berlinger 5704, 5705

Luach Katan 5703

Hilde Zadikow 1943

Concentration Camps

Sophie Lowenstein Sohlberg (Auschwitz) 5704, 5705

Anneliese Borinski (Auschwitz) 5705

Rabbi Tzvi Elimelekh Talmud (Maidanek) 5704

Rabbi Yitzchak Avigdor (Buchenwald) 5705

Emil Neumann (Bergen-Belsen) 5705

Anonymous (Bergen-Belsen) 5705

Rabbi Yisrael Simcha Zelmann (Westerbork) 5704

Simon Azaria Colthof (Bergen-Belsen) 5705

Holland

Rabbi Yehoshua Neuwirth 5703, 5704

Rabbi Shimon Hammelburg 5703

Rabbi Avrohom Prins 5704

Tsewie Herschel 1942

Adela Levisson 5705

Belgium

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Kirschboim 5702

Jacqui Israel Offen 5704

France

Nephtali Grunewald (with prefaces by Rabbis Hirschler and Deutsch) 5702, 5703, 5704, 5705

A. Jacobsen (Gurs) 5702

Poland

Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Scheiner 5703, 5704

“Kodak” 5704

Leyb Rochman

Appendix 2: Months of the Jewish Calendar Year, with Their Holidays and Fast Days

Regular year (353–55 days)

Leap Year with an Added Month of Adar II (383–85 days)

Appendix 3: English-Language Rendering of Rabbi Scheiner Calendar

Fig. A3.1: The first page of Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Scheiner’s calendar for 5703 (1942–43; see fig. 4.1), composed in hiding in Debowk...

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 Rebbes’ 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