The International Institute for Holocaust Research

Situated in Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, the Center seeks to initiate, coordinate and support research relating to the consequences and implications of the Shoah.

The impetus and endowment for the Center came from Mr. Eli Zborowski, Chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem.

The Center’s Research Agenda will focus on:

• The fate of She’erith Hapleitah in post-war Europe, the trials and travails of returning home; life in the Displaced Persons camps, the exodus from Europe, grappling with the past while starting life anew in their chosen lands of settlement.
• Political responses to the consequences of the Shoah in the State of Israel and Jewish communities worldwide.
• Acts of revenge and retribution, the trials of Nazi war criminals and their accomplices, bringing Jewish collaborators, so-called, to justice.
• The struggle to repossess Jewish property, private and public, restitution and reparations from Germany, the great Jewish debate.
• Memorialization – historical committees, collecting and publishing survivor testimonies, monuments in memoria, building institutions to commemorate, study and teach the Shoah, community efforts to publish Yizkor books.
• The multi-disciplined academic study of the Shoah in all its dimensions, philosophical and theological reflection, its artistic representation in literature, art, theatre and film.

In Process:

The following projects will stand at the center of our research activities over the next year and beyond:

Europe in the Eyes of the Shoah Survivors

Many Jews believed that Europe was the redeeming force of human culture. This conviction and its wider ramifications were shaken to the core in the aftermath of the Shoah. This profound crisis is variously reflected in the writings of Abba Kovner, Shmuel Gringauz, Rudolph Valsonok, Paul Celan, Imré Kertész, Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, Jean Améry, Sem Dresden and others. The objective of the project is to present and analyze the ideas expressed in the writings of these public figures and to do so in the context of the Shoah in general and their personal histories in particular including an attempt to assess the impact of their views on developing Jewish responses to the Shoah.

Studies in Shoah Commemoration

Human memory is known for its long-term frailty so that even the most significant events fade as the years go by and eventually all but disappear. Scholars estimate that it is rare for memories in any fullness to survive beyond 80 years. Even the memory of cataclysmic events can only be preserved where it goes beyond the recall of the individual, where people come together to remember. The goal of the project is to document and analyze attempts at collective remembrance in the first decades after the Shoah. The goal of the project is to conduct a comparative survey of diverse Jewish communities worldwide that will enable us to record the development and shape of early attempts at seeking to promote the collective remembrance of the Shoah through memorial days, commemorative plaques, monuments and the publication of yizkor books, personal memoirs and the recording of survivor testimonies.

Early and Later Survivor Testimonies as a Key to Changing Perspectives on the Shoah

The tremendous number of archived interviews with Shoah survivors presents researchers with a valuable opportunity not only to make known the disaster of the Shoah, but also to better understand the process of talking about the past. With a vast amount of testimony having been collected over the past 60 years, it is vital that we make sense of the material that has been gathered by looking at its content, structure and form. Since the liberation of the camps, survivors of the Shoah have aged, have experienced new and varied life experiences, and encountered new ways of understanding the Shoah and its effects. Have these new experiences shaped the way that survivors tell and interpret their lives? Or, has their understanding of the past remained, more or less, consistent? Are the stories of survivors faithful to previous tellings? Or, are testimonies reshaped as survivors grow older in a changing society?

One way of measuring or understanding the effect of the context on the individual's narrative is to compare survivors’ testimonies, which were given at different times. In this way we can decipher what is consistent and what has changed in the way they present their past and the meanings they have made of their traumatic years.

We believe that a comparative analysis of these testimonies that would allow us to better understand the shaping of the memory of the Shoah, both personal and public.
The life story reflects past experience, the situation of telling, time in development, and culture. It incorporates all of these elements into the flow of conversation. It is also a story of the past that needs to be told. But, deciphering the effects of the broader socio-cultural context - collective memory - on the shaping of the testimony is critical in understanding what survivors are saying .

The Bibliographical Guide to the Aftermath of the Shoah

The Bibliographical Guide to the Aftermath of the Shoah, collated by Ms Nadia Kahan, was generated in partnership with the Library of Yad Vashem and includes some 25,000 volumes divided into 25 categories.

For the Bibliographical Guide to the Aftermath of the Shoah click here.
For the Yad Vashem Library click here.
For the International Institute for Shoah Research click here.

Director – Dr. Zeev Mankowitz

Administrative Assistant – Ms. Einat Roth

Steering Committee
Prof. David Bankier
Prof. Dan Michman
Dr. Bella Gutterman
Mr. Avner Shalev
Mr. Eli Zborowski
Dr. Lilian C. Zborowski
Mr. Murray Zborowski

Academic Committee
Prof. David Bankier
Prof. Judith Baumel-Schwartz
Prof. Israel Gutman
Prof. Dan Michman
Prof. Dalia Ofer
Prof. Hanna Yablonka

For research proposals, comments or further information please contact us at:

The Diana Zborowski Center for the Study of the Aftermath of the Holocaust,
Yad Vashem,
P.O.B. 3477,
Jerusalem 91034,
Israel.

E-Mail address: zborowski.center@yadvashem.org.il