holocaustinthebaltics.com

This website is dedicated to the memory of Professor Meir Shub (1924-2009), pictured at right teaching a class at Vilnius University in the early 2000s. A historian and philosopher, he dedicated the last decades of his life to rebuilding Jewish studies in Vilnius, despite severe health issues deriving from his World War II wounds inflicted during the struggle against Nazism. He was determined to inspire and train students of all back-grounds who would freely research Judaic topics, including the Holocaust. He was convinced that the success of these studies depended on the reten-tion of a robust and intellectually free-feeling Jewish community component in such projects in Eastern Europe. His booming voice (which grew louder as his deafness worsened), straight talk, and high Litvak expectations of his students were trademarks. He is sorely missed. He played a pivotal role in achieving the first Oxford-Vilnius agreement in Judaic studies, and, in 1991-1992, was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University. His works include a study of the Gaon of Vilna.

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THE SITE is edited by Professor Dovid Katz (www.dovidkatz.net). Views expressed or implied are strictly those of the editor, or those of authors whose work is cited.

The site's editor came to this topic after nearly two decades of expeditions in Eastern Europe to explore the Yiddish dialectology, folklore and oral history of survivors in the region. One result is a linguistic atlas in progress, called Litvish: An Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish, based on several thousand hours of tape (all in Yiddish), that await wider cultural and documentary use. He has also published portraits of survivors discovered, in Yiddish and English. A selection appears at his Lithuania page, which also includes research papers on the cultural and linguistic history of Lithuanian Jewry. He hopes soon to bring out volume one of Back to the Old Country, a memoir of expeditions in Lithuania and Belarus.

Dovid Katz's Events. Recent publications. Books (on Facebook). Periodicals edited. Works in Litvak Studies. Works in Yiddish Linguistics (including the Atlas), and Stylistics. Yiddish fiction.