New York, NY (September 19, 2003) - The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research today announced that Dr. Michal Jagiello, Director of the National Library (Biblioteka Narodowa) of Poland, has been chosen to receive the 2003 Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska Prize. Endowed by Professor Jan Karski at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1992, the $5,000 prize goes to authors of published works documenting Polish-Jewish relations and Jewish contributions to Polish culture. The award ceremony will be held on September 29, 2003 at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

Jagiello received this award in recognition of his support for Jewish cultural initiatives, and for his contributions to promote tolerance toward national minorities in present-day Poland.

Born in 1941, Michal Jagiello graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Until 1981 he held various posts in cultural institutions and in the government. With the introduction of marshal law in Poland in December 1981 he resigned from the government and joined the democratic opposition. As Communist rule unraveled, and the first Solidarity-led government was installed in 1989, Jagiello was named Deputy Minister for Culture, a post that he held until 1997. Since 1998 he has served as Director of the National Library of Poland.

Jagiello has been involved in setting the policies of the new democratic government in Poland as to national minorities, and was instrumental in supporting cultural work of Jewish organizations. With his encouragement, the National Library organized exhibitions on Jewish topics, promotions of new Jewish books and research projects on Jewish life in Poland during the interwar period. He lectures at Warsaw University on national minorities in contemporary Poland, and published a volume of essays on this topic entitled Partnership For the Future (Warsaw 1995, 2000).

He has helped promote Polish-Jewish dialogue, especially among the Catholic clergy, and has been active as a board member of the Ecumenical Foundation "Tolerance". Anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism have been the subject of Jagiello's recent work, An Attempt at Discourse (Próba rozmowy. Szkice o katolicyzmie odrodzeniowym i "Tygodniku Powszechnym," 1945-1953), published in Warsaw in 2001, in which he presents the history of several formations of Polish Catholic intelligentsia from the pre-war years until the 1950s. The book details the magnitude of the anti-Jewish attitudes that permeated the thinking of the political and intellectual Catholic circles in Poland prior to the Second World War.

He is also a well-known prose writer and an accomplished alpinist.

The 2003 award committee consisted of Prof. Jozef Gierowski, Jagellonian University, Cracow; Prof. Czeslaw Milosz, University of California at Berkeley; Prof. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Warsaw University; Prof. Feliks Tych, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw; and Marek Web, Senior Research Scholar, representing the YIVO Institute ex-officio.

The late Professor Jan Karski, who established the prize at YIVO, was the envoy of the Polish government-in-exile during World War II who brought to the West firsthand testimony about the conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto and in German death camps. The prize is also named in memory of Professor Karski's late wife, choreographer Pola Nirenska.

New York, New York (July 15, 2003)-- YIVO announced today the opening of LIGHT ONE CANDLE: A Child's Diary of the Holocaust, a striking exhibition based on the book Light One Candle: From Lithuania to Jerusalem, by Solly Ganor. It features the photographs of George Kadish [Zvi (Hirsh) Kadushin], one of the only Jewish photographers able to photograph life in the Kovno ghetto during the war. The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Cindy and David Stone of the Smart Family Foundation.

Solly Ganor, author of the ghetto memoir, stated, "George Kadish took every opportunity possible to document life in the ghetto. The result constitutes one of the most significant photographic records of ghetto life during the Holocaust. He is a very special hero." Other photographs were taken by the United States Army post-War.

The exhibit encompasses photos of children in the streets of the ghetto (including one of Ganor as a boy), one of the mass murders of Kovno Jews, and several images taken in Waakirchen, Bavaria, on May 2, 1945, of the Japanese-American troops who liberated Solly Ganor. "It was there that the Japanese-American 522 Artillery Battalion of the United States Third Army liberated us, the remnants of Lithuanian Jewry, while we were on a Death March from Dachau to the Tyrol Mountains," Ganor recalled.

Ganor summed up the importance of this exhibition: "It is the fulfillment of a promise I had made to my friends during the years of the Holocaust. We were a group of young boys and girls in the Kovno Ghetto, in Lithuania…The chances that anyone of us would survive were slim...we made a solemn promise to each other, a neder, that those who would survive the Holocaust would tell our story to the world. I kept my promise."

The exhibition also features photographs of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania (1939-1940), who issued thousands of life-saving visas, and whom Ganor met as a young boy.

Light One Candle is on display through September 27, 2003 in the Joan Constantiner Gallery at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street in New York City. The viewing hours are Monday to Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

George Kadish -- Photographer with a Hidden Camera in the Kovno Ghetto

Photographing daily life in the Kovno Ghetto was an extremely risky venture. The Germans strictly prohibited it. George Kadish was born Zvi (Hirsh) Kadushin in Raseiniai, Lithuania, in 1910. After attending the local Hebrew school, he moved with his family to Kovno. At the Aleksotas University, located in one of Kovno's suburbs he studied engineering and joined the rightist Zionist movement. Before the war, he taught mathematics, science, and electronics at a local Hebrew high school.

His hobby, however, would have the most significant impact on his and others' lives. He designed a hidden camera for use on his trouser belt. Acquiring and developing film secretly outside the ghetto was as perilous as using his hidden cameras inside. Kadish worked as an engineer repairing x-ray machines for the German occupation forces in the city of Kovno. Once in the city, he bartered for film and other photographic supplies. He developed his precious negatives at the German military hospital, using the same chemicals he used to develop x-ray film. He smuggled them out in sets of crutches. The subjects of Kadish's photographic portraits were varied, but he seemed especially interested in capturing the reality of the ghetto's daily life.

In June 1941, witnessing the brutality of the initial Nazi actions, he photographed the Yiddish word Nekome ("Revenge") found scrawled in blood on the door of a murdered Jew's apartment. Camera in hand, or whenever necessary, placed just so to record subjects through a buttonhole of his overcoat, he photographed Jews humiliated and tormented by Lithuanian and German guards in search for smuggled food, Jews dragging their belongings from one place to another on sleds or carts, Jews concentrated in forced work brigades. Kadish also recorded activities at the ghetto's food gardens and in schools, orphanages, and workshops. In addition to depicting the severe conditions of ghetto life, he had an artistic eye for portraiture, the desolation of deserted streets, and the intimacy of informal, improvised gatherings.

Kadish's last photographs taken inside the ghetto are those recording the deportation of ghetto prisoners to slave labor camps in Estonia. In July 1944, after escaping from the ghetto across the river, he photographed the ghetto's liquidation and burning. Once the Germans fled, he returned to photograph the ghetto in ruins and the small groups who had survived the final days in hiding.

Kadish recognized early on the danger of losing his precious collection, and enlisted the assistance of Yehuda Zupowitz, a high-ranking officer in the ghetto's Jewish police, to help hide his negatives and prints. Zupowitz never revealed his knowledge of Kadish's work or the location of his collection, even during the "Police Action" of March 27, 1944, when Zupowitz was tortured and killed at the Fort IX prison. Kadish retrieved his collection of negatives upon his return to the destroyed ghetto.

After Germany's surrender on May 8, 1945, Kadish left Lithuania for Germany with his extraordinary photographs. In the American Occupation Zone, he mounted exhibitions of them for survivors residing in displaced persons camps. Kadish later said that his photographs were his revenge.

George Kadish took the photographs of the Kovno Ghetto that appear in this exhibition. Many of these images were printed directly from Kadish's original 35mm negatives. Kadish died in 1999 in Florida. His photographs are a tribute to his heroism in telling the story of the Jews of Kovno.

New York, New York (July 10, 2003)--The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research announced today the opening of The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: On the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary, its new exhibition. The Kishinev pogrom and the hundreds of pogroms in Southern Russia, which followed from 1903 to 1906, marked a turning point in Jewish history, historian Simon Dubnow noted in his memoirs.

"Our exhibition explores the facts of this gruesome event and its aftermath using original documents, photographs, leaflets, books and posters of the time," Dr. Carl J. Rheins, YIVO Executive Director, commented. "All the exhibition materials are taken from the YIVO Archives and the YIVO Library. I urge everyone to view the exhibit in order to understand these events and their consequences."

"The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903" exhibition is open to the public through December 31, 2003, free of charge, at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, New York City. Hours: Monday to Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Background

On April 6, 1903, the last day of Passover, which coincided with Easter, there was a terrible pogrom in Kishinev, a city located in the Bessarabia region in the Southern part of the Russian Empire. What distinguished this pogrom from its predecessors, besides being the first one of the 20th century, was the fact that it took place with the implicit encouragement of the Tsarist regime. Rumors about the pogrom circulated in Kishinev a few days before Passover. A Jewish delegation approached Governor Von Raben asking him for increased police protection. The governor replied that he knew of nothing that would require special police attention.

Left to fend for themselves, the Jewish citizens of Kishinev did their best to hide or run away. After forty-eight hours forty-nine people were killed and more than five hundred injured or raped, dozens of houses, shops and synagogues were destroyed and looted.

The Kishinev pogrom marked a turning point in modern Jewish history, as the historian Simon Dubnow wrote in his memoirs. This and subsequent pogroms demonstrated beyond a doubt that Tsarist Russia could not and would not afford any protection for its Jews. Immediately after the Kishinev Pogrom a self-defense movement sprang up, with individual groups formed in communities throughout the Russian Empire. A sharp rise in emigration from Russia to America followed the pogrom, similar to the mass departures of the early 1880s.

The Zionist movement, as well, gained in impetus after the events of 1903 as many people came to the conclusion that Jews could only be secure in a homeland of their own, which led to the beginning of what became known as the second Aliyah. Finally, Jewish revolutionaries, especially those in the Jewish Labor Bund, became convinced that only the overthrow of the Tsarist government could prevent atrocities of the kind, which occurred in 1903.

We are pleased to announce that audio of the entire conference is now available on the web site of the Center for Jewish History at http://www.cjh.org/about/old_demons.html

These are difficult times. The terrorism of September 11 and the terrorism of the Palestinian Intifada, coupled with the war in Iraq, have unleashed a shocking number of anti-Jewish acts. Israel's torments have met a startling lack of sympathy in many quarters, with her right to exist again an acceptable topic for discussion.

Nowhere has the eruption of anti-Semitism been more disturbing than in Europe. In its politics, society and culture, Europe seems once again disfigured by its most ancient and most ignoble prejudice.

Is anti-Jewish prejudice really no longer a danger? Are the old demons back? The new debates have begun. And that's why the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is sponsoring this international conference.

Leading thinkers from Europe, Israel and North America will exchange information and opinions and they will debate. The participants are intellectuals, scholars and journalists internationally recognized for thinking broadly about the crucial issues of the day; collectively, they represent a wide variety of methods and approaches toward the understanding of the new anti-Semitism.

Visit the special Conference web site at www.antisemitism-debates.org for more information, including the complete list of participants and sessions.

YIVO Encyclopedia Awarded NEH Grant of More Than Half-a-Million Dollars

This multi-volume reference work, now being prepared by Editor-in-Chief Gershon Hundert, will include contributions from scholars in North America, Europe, and Israel, and will be published in 2008. Previous funding for the encyclopedia includes grants from the Charles H. Revson Foundation, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Motl Zelmanowicz Foundation, and the Slovin Foundation.

The project has previously received large grants from the Righteous Persons Foundation and the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.