Russia’s Jews in World War I

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When World War I began, the Russian Empire was home to more than 5.7 million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population in the world. Thirty years later, by 1945, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, launched nearly all the forces that led to this epic destruction.

In A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, Polly Zavadivker tells how Jewish civilians experienced that war and its epicenter of violence on the Eastern Front. World War I transformed the lives of East European Jews in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. State violence and forced migration determined many aspects of Jewish wartime and revolutionary experience. These policies not only destroyed much of traditional Jewish life but also inadvertently compelled a transformation of Jewish civil society. The collapse of Russian imperialism enabled the growth of an empire-wide humanitarian campaign to rescue the “nation of refugees,” whose plight embodied that of the Jewish nation itself. By exploring this history of Jewish humanitarianism during World War I, Zavadivker provides the origin stories of key leaders and public institutions that served East European Jewry in the interwar years and during the Holocaust.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Zavadivker about this book, led by historian Eliyana Adler.

Buy the book.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. 

About the Speakers 

Polly Zavadivker is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the editor and translator from Russian of The 1915 Diary of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front. Her articles and essays have appeared in Jewish Social Studies, the Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, and the multi-volume series Russia's Great War and Revolution.

Eliyana Adler is a professor of East European Jewish history at Binghamton University, with a particular focus on Poland and the USSR. Her first book, In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (WSUP, 2011), examined the history of education and her second book, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union, followed the experiences of a group of Jewish refugees in the midst of the war and the Holocaust. Currently, she is working on a project about post-Holocaust Jewish memorial books.