The Holocaust's Jewish Calendars

The Holocaust's Jewish Calendars offers a major contribution to the understanding of the life Jews had to experience not only as human beings cast into dreadful circumstances, but most sensibly as people trying to survive under inhuman situations, chiefly designed to eradicate their own Jewishness. [Rosen's] book is a major opus to add to the library of any reader.

~Sylvie Anne Goldberg, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, Slavic Review

Alan Rosen shows how calendars provided a sacred territory to defy the Nazi attempt to impose a futureless existence of mundane time, religious time, and Jewish history over the centuries.

~Gershon Greenberg, author of Modern Jewish Thinkers

The routine of our lives brings us every day in contact with calendars: simple and illustrated, those hanging on the wall, on our table or in our pockets. And we treat them as taken-for-granted tools that organize our lives. Dr. Rosen reveals to us the meaning of the calendar as one of the most representative elements of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. . . . Dr. Rosen breathes life into the calendars' old pages and dry dates, placing them in their proper place of honor as an exhibit reflecting the world of Jews in the forests and in hiding, in labor and concentration camps. . . The book combines extensive information and fascinating investigations with sensitivity to the victims of the Holocaust and its survivors, and opens a new channel for understanding the heroic struggle of the Jewish soul during these terrible years..

~Esther Farbstein, author of Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah, and Leadership During the Holocaust

Dr. Rosen's pioneering, unique, and revealing study is the beautifully written result of original and profound research.

~The International Committee for the Yad Vashem Book Prize

Rosen's work is the most comprehensive to date treatment of these precious artifacts of the Holocaust's Jewish efforts to maintain religious observations and identity and should serve scholars and lay people interested in accessing this aspect of Jewish martyrology.

~Choice

This is an extraordinary book about the courage of Holocaust victims who, under circumstances of the greatest cruelty, imaginable and unimaginable, did not budge from their experience of the world as a sacred place, and in whose lives evil was given no sway over the dignity shaped by the holiness of time itself. The fashioners of Dr. Rosen's calendars, and the thousands whose lives, while in the fiery furnace, were guided by them, are offered in this work a faithful, vivid, deeply moral tribute.

It must be read by the expert and novice alike.

~Rabbi Joseph Polak, Chief Justice, Rabbinical Court of Massachusetts; child survivor of Bergen-Belsen; and author of the award-winning memoir After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring

The book offers a comprehensive overview as well as a detailed insight into everyday Jewish life during the Holocaust as well as into the techniques of survival and the preservation of one's own Jewish identity through the special access to the Jewish time. Rosen illustrates how the victims opposed the destruction of Jewish life when they wrote the Jewish calendar, and thus makes a fundamental contribution to it.

~Christin Zühlke, H-Soz-Kult

In addition to the richness of the calendrical artifacts surveyed, Rosen provides an evidence based argument against the erasure of Jewish time. Applying a fresh integration of historiography and hermeneutics, he forges a path that leads beyond Holocaust time by delving into its devestating details.

~the Lehrhaus

With penetrating acumen Alan Rosen demonstrates the relationship between time and meaning, between meaning and holiness, between holy days and the divine presence—all of which came under assault in the Nazis' effort to kill Jewish souls before destroying Jewish bodies.

~David Patterson, author of Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary

Rosen's important and very readable study raises and answers an array of significant questions concerning the concept and meaning of Jewish time as well as the value of a calendar's insistence on normalcy, regularity, and order during the hellishly disordered time of the Shoah.

~the arts fuse