Russian

“Jews in the Great Patriotic War” Exhibition — A Collection of Unique Documents

The exhibition Jews in the Great Patriotic War is opening at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. Authentic documents, letters and photographs were provided not only by archives but also by descendants of front-line soldiers.

Above all, they were Soviet people and shared the fate of the Soviet nation. During the Great Patriotic War, 501,000 Jews served at the front; 150,000 were killed or went missing. The exhibition at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center is small but impressive. It has several sections: rare diaries, the participation of Jewish women in the Great Patriotic War, and the war through the eyes of Jewish photojournalists.

The curator gives a tour to Sergei Ivanov, head of the Russian Presidential Administration and a member of the museum’s board of trustees. Many documents on display have never previously been exhibited or published. The exhibition is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory. “I think that such materials and photographs clearly show how the peoples of the Soviet Union stood shoulder to shoulder to defend their homeland regardless of nationality. Practically every nationality living in the USSR at that time fought fascism,” Sergei Ivanov emphasized.

It is a miracle that Vladimir Gelfand managed to keep a diary throughout the war. He wrote truthfully, concealing nothing, and only once crossed out a passage that could have cost him his freedom. Vitaly Gelfand discovered the diary only after his father’s death. It could not have been published in Soviet times. The Gelfands emigrated to Germany; the diary was published there several times, and only now has it appeared in Russia. This prompted Vitaly to donate his father’s archive, two photograph albums and personal belongings that had accompanied him during the war to the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.

Lieutenant Gelfand reached Berlin and survived terrible experiences, including breaking out of encirclement. For a Jew, being encircled was even more frightening than for members of other peoples: capture meant certain death. The Nazis immediately shot captured Jews, just as they shot political officers, so soldiers caught in encirclement destroyed their documents and tore off their insignia. Even that did not always help.

Alexander Boroda, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, recalled: “They were Jews by nationality, and perhaps an aggravating circumstance was that they had no alternative. They had no option of captivity, no option of retreat, because Hitler gave them no other option — they would have been shot immediately. But they did not think about other options. They were citizens of their country, loved the Soviet Union and fought courageously.”

From the photographs look out both famous people about whom books have been written and little-known heroes. Polina Gelman was a navigator and later a pilot, one of the “Night Witches.” She is the only Jewish woman to have been awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. She dreamed of aviation, but because of her short stature she was initially not admitted to flight school.

Elena Deichman went to the front hoping to help her father, who was imprisoned in Stalin’s camps. She was killed in Czechoslovakia in 1945. For many years her family knew nothing of her fate because of a clerical error.

IFLI student Pavel Kogan was killed at Malaya Zemlya. His poems were published only after the war, including Brigantine, the anthem of the Sixties generation. Pavel’s wife, front-line soldier Elena Kagan, later became the writer Elena Rzhevskaya and wrote about carrying out the secret mission to search for and identify Hitler’s body.

At the exhibition opening Alexander Boroda said that the museum would continue with similar exhibitions and would tell about the participation of other peoples of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War.