A Jewish New Year’s Card Sent from the Lodz Ghetto in 1940

Pictured here is a Jewish New Year’s Card sent from the Lodz Ghetto in 1940. The message on the card reads: “May you be inscribed for a good year.”  In the Lodz Ghetto, there were Youth movements ranging from Zionist groups (reflected in the greeting card to the left) to the Bund and the Communists with total membership in the thousands. The youth movement activities helped these young people forget, if only temporarily, the hunger and hardships that surrounded them.

On September 8, 1939, the Germans occupied Lodz and renamed the city Litzmannstadt (after the German general Karl Litzmann, who had conquered it in World War I); most of the German documents concerning the Lodz Ghetto refer to it as the "Litzmannstadt Ghetto." Brutal persecution of the Jews began as soon as the city was occupied. Lodz was home to 223,000 Jews on the eve of World War II. At the war’s end, no more than 7,000 Jews from the Lodz Ghetto had survived the camps. More about the Lodz Ghetto.

Jewish New Year celebration in the “Hashomer Hatzair”
local chapter in the Lodz Ghetto  25/09/1943