In the Wake of the Holocaust: Soviet Jewish Responses to Anti-Semitism

• In Event: Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union after the Second World War

Abstract

Both state-sponsored and popular anti-Semitism flared in the Soviet Union after World War II, fueled by a resurgent Russian nationalism, widespread ruin, material difficulties, and tension between non-Jews who remained under occupation and Jews who returned after liberation. Surviving Jews grappled with the trauma of Nazi occupation: the murder of their families, the sheer scale of the killing, and the almost total annihilation of Jewish communal life. The newly-liberated areas, in the words of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, had become “a mass cemetery.” This paper explores the range of responses among ordinary people to popular and state sponsored anti-Semitism, from physical violence to active protest to communal forms of reorganization and rebuilding. Using both state documents and oral histories, it looks at Jewish reactions to both new discriminatory policies and popular anti-Semitism amid the trauma of overwhelming loss.

Author

• Wendy Goldman