Oyneg Shabes Archive

In 1940, the Warsaw Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum created the secret Warsaw ghetto archive, code-named Oyneg Shabes  (“Joy of the Sabbath,” marking the day of the week on which his contributors met). He brought together a group of more than sixty people, secular and religious, from the political right and the left, imbued by a national and moral mission of collecting documents, artifacts, and photographs to record Jewish life under Nazi occupation and to ensure that posterity and future historians would know the Jews on the basis of Jewish, not German, sources. Two caches of the archive, buried in August 1942 and February 1943, were discovered after the war. A third was lost. Of the sixty members of the Oyneg Shabes, only three survived the Holocaust. Because of ghetto archives like the Oyneg Shabes, historians can write about Jews in the Nazi ghettos not as faceless, anonymous victims but as individuals and members of a community that still reflected prewar values and culture.