“Ghetto Folklore”

Shimon Huberband was born in Checiny, Poland, into a rabbinic family. A religious Zionist, he founded the Society for Jewish Scholarship in Otwock and published widely on theological and historical topics. After his family was killed in a German air raid in 1939, Huberband went to Warsaw, where he became one of Emanuel Ringelblum’s most valued collaborators in the Oyneg Shabes archive. His unique work in Yiddish, later published in Hebrew and English under the title Kiddush Hashem, documents how Poland’s religious Jews responded to the Holocaust. Most of Huberband’s writings, discovered in the Oyneg Shabes archive, remain in manuscript or scattered in the prewar Yiddish and Orthodox Hebrew press.