Studies in the Shoah Series – serie

This volume is a collection of essays written over the last ten years within the framework of a post-Shoah Christian theology, outlined in Christian Theology After the Shoah (University Press of America, 1993). The essays take seriously the impact of the Shoah and the Jewish-Christian dialogue, covering fresh approaches to sacred texts, new visions for Jewish-Christian relations, and giving insight into significant global issues. Through this, a vision for the future with a theology rooted in dialogue is shaped. Author James F. Moore contends such a theology, with a unique sense of relationships and ethical vision, will produce a new, unified dialogical community, professing its own theology and moral vision.

The "Midrash Group" of the Scholar's Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches has met annually over the last decade to discuss ways for Christians and Jews to find meaning and direction in and from sacred texts after the Holocaust. Post Shoah Dialogues is a sample of four different dialogue sessions of the "Midrash Group." The idea for a Jewish-Christian dialogue on texts grew out of an ongoing conversation between the four scholars represented in this volume, due to the profound affect the Shoah had on the theological thinking of both groups. The essays, focusing on texts matched from Hebrew and Christian scriptures, allow Christians and Jews to read the texts together in such a way as to respect the authentic identity of each other, respect the deep questions arising from the Shoah, and to open avenues for more dialogue.

Murder Most Merciful is a collection of insightful essays that consider Sigi Ziering's play, The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff. In the play, Ziering tells the story of a loving father and his decision during the Holocaust to take the life of his beloved daughter to avoid her deportation. Scholars who have thought long and hard about the ethical implications of the Holocaust continue to grapple with the poignant questions Ziering raised. Commentary from the book's diverse contributors, including Holocaust survivors, scholars, rabbis, philosophers, and historians, results in an insightful and provocative moral and theological exchange. Murder Most Merciful will stimulate further debate on the crucial issues of martyrdom, euthanasia, and the guilt of the innocent. Ultimately, the judgment of Herbert Bierhoff is for the reader to make. The book appears in the Studies in the Shoah series as volume 28.

In Search of Yesterday is a distillation of the author's writings about the Holocaust / Shoah over the span of the last several years in three distinct areas: family stories, the quest for meaning in seemingly inexplicable events, and rethinking and reinterpreting biblical texts in light of the Holocaust / Shoah.

Our Only Hope is based on correspondence between Eddie Weisz, a German Jew who emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, and his family (father, mother, and brother) who remained behind, first in Berlin and then Prague. Like many German Jewish families, Eddie's parents sent their eldest child to America hoping that he could pave the way for the rest of the family to follow. The story is a deeply personal account of how the Nazi phenomenon affected a single family. It gives voice to victims of the Holocaust, people whose experiences are typically told through the eyes of survivors and perpetrators. Through this narrative, Our Only Hope illuminates an ironic and tragic dualism: the steady deterioration of life's circumstances for the Weisz family that is left behind, countered by the transformation of Eddie Weisz into an independent adult and American citizen.

Edith Stein's murder at Auschwitz is a topic of intense controversy among members of the Jewish and Catholic faiths. Some observers, both Jews and Christians, insist that Stein was sent to the gas chambers because of her Jewish heritage and faith, and that it would be inappropriate to declare her a saint in the Christian religious tradition. Yet, others of both faiths find in Stein a healing symbol for our time of the atrocities committed against Jews in Christian nations during World War II. In this volume, members of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions speak to this deeply divided debate.

Contemporary scholars in all disciplines have long recognized that the Shoah is a critical challenge to Christianity and Western civilization, as well as a watershed event in Jewish history. Steven L. Jacobs has completed two complementary works dealing with contemporary religious responses to the Shoah, one from the Christian perspective, the other from the Jewish perspective. This work focuses on the Christian responses to the Holocaust.Contents: Revisionism and Theology, Harry James Cargas; Evil and Existence: Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited in Light of the Shoah, Alan Davies; Suffering, Theology, and the Shoah, Alice Lyons Eckardt; Mysterium Tremendum: Catholic Grapplings with the Shoah and its Theological Implications, Eugene J. Fisher; In the Presence of Burning Children: The Reformation of Christianity after the Shoah, Douglas K. Huenke; How the Shoah Affects Christian Belief, Thomas A. Idinopulos; A Contemporary Religious Response to the Shoah: The Crisis of Prayer, Michael McGarry; The Shoah: Continuing Theological Challenge for Christianity, John T. Pawlikowski; Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Shoah: Getting Beyond the Victimizer Relationship, Rosemary Radford Reuther; and Asking and Listening, Understanding and Doing: Some Conditions for Responding to the Shoah Religiously, John K Roth.

This book describes the "Union" munition factory in Auschwitz through the eyes of 36 former prisoners. Unlike arbitrarily collected testimony, these stories are actual eyewitness accounts of persons who worked in the same factory. The accounts are especially beneficial because they look at many events from different angles. The book sheds light on the women's resistance movement in the camp and recounts how the gun-powder was smuggled to the Sonderkommando for the uprising which took place on October 7, 1944. The accounts found in this study pay homage to the four women who lost their lives in the preparation for the rebellion. Such testimonies give a voice to those who cannot have one—the prisoners who were murdered. This book helps to bring to light the true events that for half a century participants—including German industrialists, civil institutions, the greater population of the western world, and the public at large—have kept in the dark. The Union Kommando in Auschwitz is an excellent text for courses and seminars in Contemporary History, Judaic Studies, European History, Holocaust Studies, and Women's Studies. Anyone interested in a true look at Jewish history and women's roles in history will enjoy this thoughtfully edited collection of personal accounts. Contents: Foreword; Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; The Conveyor Belt Section; The Control Section; The Gun Powder Room; The Machine Shop; Miscellaneous Factory Sections; Eye Witness Accounts by Auschwitz Survivors Who Did Not Work at the Union; Appendices; Notes; Afterword; Bibliography; Index; About the Editor.

This book describes the 'Union' munition factory in Auschwitz through the eyes of 36 former prisoners. Unlike arbitrarily collected testimony, these stories are actual eyewitness accounts of persons who worked in the same factory. The accounts are especially beneficial because they look at many events from different angles. The book sheds light on the women's resistance movement in the camp and recounts how the gun-powder was smuggled to the Sonderkommando for the uprising which took place on October 7, 1944. The accounts found in this study pay homage to the four women who lost their lives in the preparation for the rebellion. Such testimonies give a voice to those who cannot have one—the prisoners who were murdered. This book helps to bring to light the true events that for half a century participants—including German industrialists, civil institutions, the greater population of the western world, and the public at large—have kept in the dark. The Union Kommando in Auschwitz is an excellent text for courses and seminars in Contemporary History, Judaic Studies, European History, Holocaust Studies, and Women's Studies. Anyone interested in a true look at Jewish history and women's roles in history will enjoy this thoughtfully edited collection of personal accounts. Contents: Foreword; Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; The Conveyor Belt Section; The Control Section; The Gun Powder Room; The Machine Shop; Miscellaneous Factory Sections; Eye Witness Accounts by Auschwitz Survivors Who Did Not Work at the Union; Appendices; Notes; Afterword; Bibliography; Index; About the Editor.

Women and the Holocaust brings together essays by leading scholars in the field of Shoah Studies that derive from disciplines such as literary criticism, religious studies, history, sociology, and film studies while focusing on the unique experiences of women in the Holocaust. These scholars analyze how these experiences are represented in cultural media, how these experiences are remembered, and how they differ from men's experiences. This collection seeks to redress the marginalization of women in the recounting of the devastation of European Jewry. It addresses the situation of women suffering for their Jewishness, and the memorialization of this suffering in which they found expression. The contributors search for the unique aspects of this expression by analyzing women's portrayals and texts, and by evaluating the unique voice of women as witnesses to the Holocaust.

Surviving the Camps is an intriguing study of life in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Paul R. Bartrop responds to earlier scholarly evaluations with the theory that the formation of a prisoner social system based on cooperation and mutual aid served as a positive force that, to a substantial degree, countered the structure imposed on the prisoners by the Nazis. Bartrop concludes that only group solidarity could alleviate the problems of living in a social environment as extreme as the concentration camp. Analyzing the testimonial accounts of many concentration camp survivors, Surviving the Camps will be an excellent source for academic historians, psychologists, and professors of Jewish and Holocaust studies.

This book takes up the challenge of providing a way to do Christian theology that is both sensitive to the questions arising in the Shoah and incorporates the advances of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Moore's approach also offers new thinking on the difficult texts of the Christian passion narratives as an example of the post-Shoah Christian theology. He expresses a hopeful outlook, that we are on the threshold of a new stage in theology and dialogue; a new generation of thinkers, both Jewish and Christian, are asking how we can move forward and apply the lessons learned from the events of the Shoah.

This book describes some non-Birkenau-based women's work details through eyewitness accounts. The women worked in camp offices, SS-enterprises, and workshops catering to the comfort of the SS personnel. Some of the perpetrators appear in the accounts also, of course through the eyes of the inmates. The perpetrators are both male and female, and some of the relationships between them, both hierarchically and within the same level, contain important insights—how they lived, how they managed to survive, what were the main problems they had to confront in their struggle for bare existence. Their testimonies together make up a mosaic which has historical as well as psychological interest of the first degree.