You will learn about the little-known aspects of Nazi policy towards the Karaites, the survival strategies of this community during the occupation, and the role of representatives of Ukrainian nationalist organizations in shaping the occupation policy towards the local population.
The lecture is dedicated to the birthday of Philip Friedman, a Lviv historian who survived the Holocaust and made a significant contribution to the study of the Shoah. As a member of the Central Jewish Historical Commission, Friedman actively collected testimonies about the destroyed Jewish communities, making their voices part of history.
One of his works is devoted to the situation of the Karaites during the Nazi occupation. He was the only survivor of a group of Jewish scholars who were interviewed by the Nazis about the status of the Karaites, trying to decide whether this community should be considered a Jewish religious community.
Yurii (Amir) Radchenko will speak about the tragedy of the Karaite community under the Nazi occupation, the complex challenges it faced, and the peculiarities of the situation of the Karaite community in Melitopol, particularly against the background of the German administration’s policy and the activity of Ukrainian nationalist organizations. The event will be moderated by Anatolii Podolsky.
Yurii (Amir) Radchenko is a Ukrainian historian, PhD in History, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Oriental Philology at V.I. Vernadsky Taurida National University, Research Fellow at the Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History (Ukrainian Catholic University), Director of the Center for Interethnic Relations Research in Eastern Europe.
Anatolii Podolsky is a Ukrainian historian, PhD in History, Director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, Leading Researcher at the Department of Ethnopolitics, Head of the Center for Jewish History and Culture at the Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Philip Friedman (1901-1960) was a Jewish historian from Lviv, one of the first Holocaust scholars. After the war, he documented Nazi crimes and made a significant contribution to preserving the memory of the victims. He is the author of To jest Oświęcim (1945) about the Nazi concentration camp, Martyrs and Fighters: The Epic of the Warsaw Ghetto (1954) about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Roads of Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (1980, posthumously edited by the author’s wife), all on the Holocaust, as well as scholarly articles on the Holocaust and the history of the Jewish people.
