This lecture is based on original, rare documentary films presenting Jewish communities in Poland, shortly before their annihilation by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust.
Some months before the outbreak of World War II, two famous Jewish-Polish film producers, the brothers Shaul and Yitzhak Goskind from Warsaw, produced six short films about the most important Jewish communities in six big Polish cities: Warsaw, Lvov (Lemberg), Cracow (Krakow), Vilna (Vilnius), Bialystok and Lodz.
The films show the cultural, religious, economic and social life of the Jews and describe their integration in the general, non-Jewish society and their significant contribution to the Polish society. The brothers Goskind tried to present a characteristic picture of the Jewish life in the biggest Jewish communities in Poland and depict the variety of life patterns within the Jewish existence in Poland.
By pure chance, five of those films – all but film on Lodz – have survived the war and were discovered in New York around 1943, a time when most of the Jews appearing in the films had already been murdered. These films thus provide the possibility to gain an authentic, visual insight into a vanished and never-reappearing world, three months before the beginning of the catastrophe of Polish Jewry.
The lecture is accompanied by the presentation of the five films, and supplies background information on the flourishing Jewish film industry and the Jewish film productions between the two world wars.
Prof. Gideon Greif is the Chief Historian and Researcher at the "Shem Olam" Institute for Education, Documentation and Research on Faith and the Holocaust, Israel, and Chief Historian and Researcher at the Foundation for Holocaust Education Projects in Miami, Florida. Since August 2011 he is Professor for Jewish and Israeli History at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. Considered one of the world renowned historian-experts on the history of Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. His most famous contribution to the history of Auschwitz is his pioneer, groundbreaking research on the “Sonderkommando”, a special Jewish prisoner squad in Auschwitz-Birkenau.