A Community under Siege The Jews of Breslau under Nazism [Hardcover]

This is a study of how the Jewish community of Breslauthe third largest and one of the most affluent in Germanycoped with Nazi persecution. Ascher has included the experiences of his immediate family, although the book is based mainly on archival sources, numerous personal reminiscences, as well as publications by the Jewish community in the 1930s. It is the first comprehensive study of a local Jewish community in Germany under Nazi rule.Until the very end, the Breslau Jews maintained a stance of defiance and sought to persevere as a cohesive group with its own institutions. They categorically denied the Nazi claim that they were not genuine Germans, but at the same time they also refused to abandon their Jewish heritage. They created a new school for the children evicted from public schools, established a variety of new cultural institutions, placed new emphasis on religious observance, maintained the Jewish hospital against all odds, and, perhaps most remarkably, increased the range of welfare services, which were desperately needed as more and more of their number lost their livelihood. In short, the Jews of Breslau refused to abandon either their institutions or the values that they had nurtured for decades. In the end, it was of no avail as the Nazis used their overwhelming power to liquidate the community by force.Abraham Ascher is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Graduate Center, City University of New York. His recent works includeP. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia(Stanford, 2000) andThe Revolution of 1905: A Short History(Stanford, 2004). We have no other study which records how a single community dealt with the Nazi onslaught and so this book can and should be an archetype of what happened in those years throughout Germany... No one can say for sure what the morrow will bring, but meantime we have this fascinating, carefully documented, and yet immensely moving, account of what Jewish Breslau was like inlCÅ