Soviet Jewish Responses to State-Sponsored and Popular Anti-Semitism in the Wake of the Holocaust

• In Event: Bitter Years: Soviet Antisemitism in the Wake of the Holocaust

Abstract

Both state-sponsored and popular anti-Semitism flared after the war, fueled by Russian nationalism, widespread ruin, material difficulties, and tension between non-Jews who remained under occupation and Jews who returned after liberation. Surviving Jews, including both ordinary people and those in leadership positions, grappled with the trauma of Nazi occupation: the murder of their families, the sheer scale of the killing, and the almost total annihilation of Jewish communal life. Leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee wrote that “native place” for most Jewish evacuees and refugees has lost all material and psychological meaning. The occupied areas had become “a mass cemetery.” This paper explores the complicated dynamic between state-sponsored and popular anti-Semitism and the range of Jewish efforts to preserve, revive, and defend the surviving remnants of Jewish community and identity.

Author

• Wendy Z. Goldman, Carnegie Mellon U