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JEWISH RELIGIOUS LIFE DURING THE HOLOCAUST THROUGH PRIMARY SOURCES
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The workshop will examine Jewish religious life during the Holocaust and in the first years after the war, with particular emphasis on primary sources created between 1939 and 1950. The organizers want to concentrate on documents that deepen our understanding of the religious, social and communal experiences of Jews subjected to persecution, ghettoization, deportation and mass murder.
Each participant is to present
a single document or a set of related sources and place the material in its historical context, explaining its religious, theological, linguistic or social significance.
Among the topics to be covered are rabbinic responsa written during the war, reactions to Nazi policies of persecution, spiritual resistance, questions of conversion, religious life in ghettos and concentration camps, how rabbinic networks operated, the religious identity of people living in so-called mixed marriages, and postwar questions about rituals of death and burial.
A key premise of the project is that religious experience during the Holocaust cannot be reduced to
a matter of keeping or losing faith. The sources reveal a far more complex picture: efforts to maintain religious practice in the face of extreme danger, the search for halakhic answers to unprecedented situations and the preservation of communal rituals, but also doubt, conflict and shifts in identity.
The Manchester workshop is part of
a broader Mandel Center research initiative on religion and the Holocaust. One planned outcome of the meeting is an academic sourcebook with explanatory essays, intended primarily for university teaching. Where necessary, the documents will also be published in translation so that the material can reach a wider readership.
Researchers at various stages of their careers, from doctoral students to professors, were invited to apply. The deadline for applications was October 20, 2026.
The workshop is one of the Mandel Center’s initiatives to advance research into lesser-studied aspects of Holocaust history and to strengthen international scholarly cooperation. Here the emphasis is on working directly with sources produced during the persecution and immediately after the war, so as to capture more fully the religious dimension of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust.
From May 18 to 20, 2027, the University of Manchester will host the international research workshop Jewish Religious Life During the Holocaust:
An Exploration of Essential Primary Sources, organized by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in cooperation with the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester.