Kupferberg Holocaust Center Exhibition: The Jacket from Dachau: Identity

Holocaust survivor Harry Gordon recalls in brutal detail the anguished years of his youth, a youth spent struggling to survive in a Lithuanian concentration camp.

If you are a Lithuanian or a Jew, after reading this book you have no other choice but to redefine your personal identity in order to answer the questions: What does it mean to be a Lithuanian? What does it mean to be a Lithuanian Jew?

Lithuania was home to the great yeshivot of Jewish learning, as well as nationalistic movements such as Hovevei Zion, the Bund, and the Mizrachi. This volume includes special features such as a bibliography in seven languages, a lexicon of place names in both official modern transcription and the traditional spelling used by Jewish residents; statistical tables; facsimiles of documents, and unique photographs many of which appear in print for the first time.

This volume lists the major Jewish communities that existed in Lithuania before World War II. The name of each community is accompanied by information about it: when it was founded, the Jewish population in different years, shops and synagogues, and the names of citizens. An appendix locates each town on a map of Lithuania.

Fighting Back chronicles the activities of those Jews who joined the Soviet Army and of those who during World War II fought the Nazis in the forests, in the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, Shavli, and Svencian, and in the concentration camps.

First hand account of Jewish life in Lithuania prior to the Holocaust.

Crossing boundaries in a journey to Poland enabled the author to rethink a relationship between Judaism and modernity, as well as to reflect on the painful histories between Poles and Jews.