(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)April 26, 2012

Dr. David Fishman

(MAHWAH, NJ) – David Fishman, Professor of History at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York and director of Project Judaica, Moscow, spoke at Ramapo College of New Jersey on April 26 about how a dedicated group of Jewish intellectuals Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania, including the noted Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever and the cultural activist Szmerke Kaczerginski, rescued rare books and manuscripts in their city during the Holocaust.

Constituting a unique chapter in spiritual resistance in the Holocaust. the Nazi fascination with Jewish culture and the desire to destroy it made the accomplishment possible in the first place. As Professor Fishman described, the Nazi leadership sent a special unit, known as the Einsatzstab des Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg, or Rosenberg Squad, to hunt for treasures the Nazis hoped to use in a Frankfurt-based “Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question.” Vilna, long known as Jewish cultural center, was not only their primary target, but was also to serve as a collection point for treasures from throughout Lithuania.

Dr. Johannes Pohl, the Frankfurt Institute’s director, came to Vilna in January 1942, by which time his German colleagues had already murdered a third of the city’s Jewish population of 60,000. Requiring forced laborers to work on his project of selecting and gathering the books and manuscripts to be sent to Germany, he formed a group of Jewish intellectuals that became known as the Paper Brigade. It was the members of this group who hid many rare books and papers in the Jewish ghetto and in the homes of friendly non-Jews, concealing them under floorboards and in walls and burying them in secret underground bunkers. In the process, the Paper Brigade worked in close cooperation with the Vilna Ghetto’s Jewish resistance organization, to which some members already belonged.

After the war, survivors of the Paper Brigade smuggled many of the treasures out of Soviet Lithuania to the West. Together with the books and documents already brought to Frankfurt and saved by U.S. forces at the Offenbach Archival Depot, they eventually formed the nucleus of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research that, although originally based in Vilna, was re-constituted in New York during the war.

Dr. Fishman is the author of numerous books and articles on the history and culture of East European Jewry. His books include Russia’s First Modern Jews (New York University Press) and The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh University Press). Dr. Fishman is the coeditor (with Burton Visotzky) of From Mesopotamia to Modernity: Ten Introductions to Jewish History and Literature (Westview Press, 1999), which also appeared in a revised Russian edition called Ot Abrama do sovremenosti (Russian State University Press, 2002).

A native New Yorker, David Fishman received his bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University and his master’s degree and doctorate from Harvard. He has taught at Brandeis University, BarIlan University, Russian State University in Moscow, and Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies.

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