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Response to Holocaust from Soviet Jews is Focus of Lecture

(WORCESTER – February 14, 2005)  Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA and an Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, will explore the dimensions of the Holocaust on German-occupied Soviet territory and the response by well-known Soviet Jewish cultural figures at 7 p.m., Monday, March 7, 2005, in the Ghosh Center of Science and Technology multimedia auditorium (Room 102) at Worcester State College. His lecture, “The Holocaust on German-Occupied Soviet Territory and the Response by Soviet Jewish Intellectuals,” is being sponsored by The Center for the Study of Human Rights at Worcester State College.

More than one out of every three Jews murdered during the Holocaust had been living on Soviet territory on the eve of the German invasion in June 1941.  Throughout the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and into Russia itself, the Germans carried out open-air massacres, killing entire Jewish communities before being driven out by the Red Army.  At the same time, well-known Soviet Jewish cultural figures, living in Moscow, were learning about the fate of their relatives and the destruction of their hometowns.  Journalists like Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman; poets like Itsik Fefer and David Hofshteyn; even military officers like David Dragunsky--working in concert with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee--actively tried to document the massacres, commemorate the victims, and look for ways to assist survivors.  This activity, in turn, helped make the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee vulnerable to reprisals from the Kremlin after the war.

Rubenstein is the author of Soviet Dissidents, Their Struggle for Human Rights and Tangled Loyalties:  the Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg.  He is also the co-editor of Stalin's Secret Pogrom:  the Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.  Published by Yale University Press (in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) as part of its Annals of Communism Series, Stalin's Secret Pogrom was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for East European Studies in 2001-2002.  His latest book, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, is schedule for publication in May 2005.

This event is free and open to the general public.  For more information, please contact Henry Theriault at 508-929-8612.

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