Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research opened its Biennial International Conference Sunday on The Time Dimension During and Regarding the Holocaust: In Real Time and in Retrospect. The conference is being held until December 20 at the Yad Vashem Auditorium.
Leading Holocaust historians and experts have recently taken a closer look at the meaning and implications of time in different contexts, including the perception of time for Jews under Nazi occupation, and their efforts to keep track of Jewish holidays and annual events – as well as the “race against time” by the Nazis to murder as many Jewish individuals as possible before the end of WWII, and the efforts by survivors to memorialize significant dates of the Holocaust after the war.
The keynote session of the conference, “Analytical Aspects of Time during the Holocaust,” will include presentations by Dr. Guy Miron, director of the Research Center for the Study of the Holocaust in Germany at Yad Vashem’s Research Institute, on the problems and challenges faced by European Jews endeavoring to live under the Nazi regime; and Dr. David Silberklang, Yad Vashem senior historian and editor-in-chief of Yad Vashem Studies, whose lecture will focus on the concept of Jewish time in the shadow of Nazi persecution.
Lecturers from the United States, Germany, Hungary, France, Australia, Germany, Serbia and Israel are participating in the conference. Among them, Dr. Arkadi Zeltser, director of the Research Institute’s Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, will discuss the postwar efforts of Soviet Jewry to mark memorial days of mass murders in the USSR; Hungarian scholar Judit Molnár will present the acceleration of the murder of Hungarian Jewry; and Allison Somogyi of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill will be one of three lecturers on the marking of time in diaries during the Holocaust.
Conference sessions will take place in Yad Vashem’s Auditorium and will be conducted in Hebrew and in English, with simultaneous translation.