Nazi Germany, its allies and collaborators murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust, also called the Shoah. The people killed included children and adults, observant and secular Jews, and members of communities with different languages and traditions. The genocide destroyed families and institutions through which Jewish life had been passed on. Its effects on Jewish religious life and memory can be traced in specific records, including a question asked during morning prayer in the Kaunas ghetto and the work of recording the names of people who were murdered. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, introduction to the Holocaust
What happened to European Jewish communities
The Nazi regime began systematically excluding and persecuting Jews after taking power in Germany in 1933. During World War II, German occupation brought millions more Jews under Nazi control. German authorities forced many into ghettos and deported them. German forces and their collaborators carried out mass shootings, and Nazi Germany built killing centers, including Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Jews also died as a result of deliberately imposed deprivation and brutal treatment. The six million murdered amounted to about two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe before the war. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, persecution and mass murder
What people in the ghettos recorded
In German-occupied Warsaw, historian Emanuel Ringelblum and the underground group Oneg Shabbat collected records of Jewish life and persecution. The archive includes correspondence, diaries and accounts of clandestine education. Nineteen-year-old Dawid Graber helped bury the first part while the Germans were deporting Jews from the ghetto. His testament records the urgency of the work as nearby streets were being blocked. Two parts of the archive were recovered after the war. The Jewish Historical Institute preserves one of the milk cans that held the second part. Jewish Historical Institute, permanent exhibition on the archive · Ringelblum Archive book series
Preserving evidence was one response to persecution. Armed resistance took another form. On April 19, 1943, German SS and police entered the Warsaw ghetto to deport its remaining inhabitants. Jewish fighters resisted, and many other residents hid. Both the archive and the uprising have a place in Jewish remembrance, with the records showing what people had been trying to document before the final destruction of the ghetto. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
A religious question under forced labor
Rabbi Ephraim Oshry’s Responsa from the Holocaust preserves a question from the ghetto in Kaunas, also known as Kovno, in Lithuania. A prayer leader reached the morning blessing thanking God for having been spared enslavement. He asked how he could say those words when the Germans held Jews captive and forced them to work. Oshry ruled that the blessing should still be recited. He understood it to refer to spiritual freedom and held that physical captivity made the affirmation particularly urgent. The question and the ruling preserve two voices in the same record. One person objected that the words collided with what he lived through. The other gave a reason for keeping them. Excerpt from Ephraim Oshry’s Responsa from the Holocaust
Rebuilding religious and family life after liberation
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee supplied ritual objects to displaced persons camps in the American occupation zone after the war. Among them were wedding canopies, Passover Haggadot and prayer shawls. The committee’s archive describes a surviving blue and white wedding canopy with gold fringe and words from the wedding blessings around a Star of David. A canopy was something a couple and a community could gather under to hold a Jewish wedding, even while living in temporary accommodation. It gives a specific example of what was needed to resume an ordinary part of religious and family life. JDC Archives, wedding canopies for displaced persons camps
Remembering through prayer and by name
Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day, is associated with 27 Nisan in the Hebrew calendar. At the state opening ceremony at Yad Vashem, six torches represent the six million murdered Jews. The 2022 ceremony included the recitation of Kaddish and the memorial prayer El Maleh Rahamim. The ceremony brings Jewish forms of mourning into public remembrance. Yad Vashem on Yom HaShoah · Yad Vashem’s record of the 2022 ceremony
Yad Vashem’s Pages of Testimony preserve individual identities in a different way. The form provides space for a victim’s name, place of birth or residence, relatives, occupation and photograph, when known. A separate page is used for each person, including each child. The fields make it possible to preserve details of how someone lived alongside whatever is known of how they died. Yad Vashem’s Page of Testimony and instructions
Conclusion
The Shoah took six million Jewish lives and destroyed communities that had sustained religious, family and cultural life across generations. The records from Warsaw and Kaunas preserve choices and disagreements made by particular people under persecution. A wedding canopy made for a displaced persons camp documents a different moment, when survivors were making lives after liberation. Remembering the dead by name keeps those individual lives visible within the history of the genocide.
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