The Impact of World War I and the Russian Revolution on the World of Russian and East European Jewry

Wednesday, February 19, 2014 | 7pm
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Lecture
Richard Pipes, Baird Professor of History, Emeritus, Harvard University
The events that transpired in Eastern Europe between 1914 and 1917 were a direct prelude to the Holocaust. To right-wing Germans, the Jews were Bolsheviks; to the Bolsheviks they were pro-German bourgeois. In reality, the majority of East European Jews professed Zionism, but the charges leveled at them provided justification for persecutions that exceeded anything seen since the first century of the Christian era when the Romans destroyed the Temple and scattered the Jews worldwide. In consequence, Eastern Europe, which a century ago was home to the largest Jewish population, is today a more minor center of the Jewish population.