Understanding Jewish life in Belarus before, during and after World War II

Jeff Koerber, a former architect for 15 years, is currently a third-year graduate student in Clark's Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is preparing for his comprehensive exams and his forthcoming year of dissertation research. To do his research, he will need to travel to archives in the United States, Eastern Europe and Israel, and he has had to learn multiple languages. Here he discusses the impact research stipends and fellowships have on his research goals.

As a graduate student at the Strassler Center I'm fortunate to get a research stipend each year. However, as I begin to lay the groundwork for my dissertation research, I know I will need additional funding to travel to archives in Belarus, New York, Washington, D.C., and most probably Israel and Poland. So, I'm applying for fellowships.

Visits to Belarus are my number-one priority since my research focuses on a borderland region in that country. Belarus is really untouched territory. I have former Distinguished Visiting Professor Yehuda Bauer to thank for piquing my interest in this region. We talked in his class about the geographic area I'm looking at now in Belarus. When he said, "You know, there's not much that has been looked at in this area, so it's fertile ground for research," I got interested.

In my research, I'm going to look at Jewish life in two Belarusian towns, examining what Jews understood was going on in the world around them before World War II. Then I'll look at how that mindset influenced their reaction to the drastic and dramatic changes to their situation-changes that included first, the Soviet Union's occupation of the Eastern Polish Republic in 1939 and their annexation as the new Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic. And then, the German invasion in 1941 followed by the Holocaust.

To find out what Jews were thinking pre-World War II and after, I will go to the Belarus State Archives to find materials on Jews under communism. That's the brass ring and most important thing I could contribute with my research. But there are a lot of challenges that I'll have to meet to do this research.

First is language. The primary sources I'll be looking at are historical documents, newspapers, and letters written in Yiddish. I've used past research stipend money to study Yiddish in the summers after my first and second years in the program, and I'm still going to Brandeis every week to work with a professor there. When I started working with her, she me, "It's like that scene in 'The Wizard of Oz' when it goes from black-and-white to color. Once you understand the language, you can read all the sources and things start to shine bright." And it's true. It really has helped a lot. Now I can read, for example, newspapers, which are fascinating since they provide a day-by-day look at what writers were thinking about at the time. So at a minimum, my dissertation will encompass Yiddish sources.

But if I want to take my research to the next level, which is my hope, I really need to know Russian and, ideally, Polish. Because Belarus is a borderland area, it is multilingual, which means that archival sources exist in several languages. This past summer I used some of my research money to study Russian, but I could use a lot more lessons. I haven't had the funds to begin Polish lessons.

My second big challenge is gaining access to the Belarus State Archives. And to make matters more difficult, 60 percent of these archive documents from before 1944 were destroyed during the German invasion and the Soviet liberation of the area. The goal of my trip to Belarus in November 2006 is to work out this access issue. I have to go to the source itself. I have money for that trip, but I know I'll have to go back to actually spend much more time in the archives, and I'll need funding for that important step.

Finally, I need to examine archival sources not just in Belarus, but also in New York's YIVO Institute, Israel's Yad Vashem Museum as well as archives in Washington, D.C. All of that requires travel, which requires money. Just staying a few days in New York City can eat up a lot of that funding.

I'm confident that I can do this research using Yiddish sources in Belarus-and with the help of supplemental funds, expand it to use multilingual sources in other archives in the United States and around the world. I'm confident because I've been inspired by my professors and colleagues in the Strassler Center program. I hope I can get the extra funding to make a difference with my research.

Give to the Clark Fund now and help more graduate students like Jeff Koerber pursue the cutting-edge research that will change our understanding of the world. Please give today.

Top