Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Project

Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Project

This article relates to We Must Not Think of Ourselves

Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves was inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Project, a World War II archive compiled and hidden by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Established and run by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive contained a wide variety of documents recording daily life in the Ghetto.

Ringelblum was born in Buczacz, Poland (now part of Ukraine) in 1900, and after graduating from Warsaw University he taught high school history. He was known as an expert on the history of Poland's Jewish community from the late Middle Ages onward and was a frequent contributor of scholarly articles on the subject.

He was also politically and socially active. As a young man he joined Po'alei Zion Left, a Marxist-Zionist group, and in 1930 became a part-time employee of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a Jewish humanitarian organization. In 1938 he was appointed by the JDC to lead a relief team to Zbaszyn, a small border town where some 6,000 Jewish refugees were residing after being expelled from Germany.

As WWII broke out, Ringelblum became a member of a Jewish self-help organization: the ZTOS (Zydowskie Towarzystwo Opieki Spoleczne, later known as the JSS, Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe). Although it was one of many other official and unofficial aid societies, the ZTOS was one of the few authorized by German authorities. As such they were able to act as a sort of intermediary between councils that represented Jewish residents and the ruling regime. This status enabled ZTOS staff to determine the most pressing needs and to negotiate with the Germans to obtain supplies. The need for aid became more urgent after the Ghetto was sealed in 1940, and Ringelblum was one of the group's main leaders, involved in organizing housing, jobs and food for its impoverished residents.

Ever the historian, Ringelblum had begun a record of what was happening to Jews in Warsaw in 1939. He decided to expand this project in 1940, recruiting a wide variety of individuals across the Ghetto to contribute. Called the Oneg Shabbat Project—a reference to a traditional gathering of the Jewish community on the Sabbath—the group met covertly on Saturday afternoons to support one another and share their recent documentations. The project was so secret that most people in the Ghetto were unaware of its existence.

According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the group compiled all sorts of information:

"[I]tems from the underground press, documents, drawings, candy wrappers, tram tickets, ration cards and theater posters. It saved literature: poems, plays, songs, and stories. It filed away invitations to concerts and lectures, copies of the convoluted doorbell codes for apartments that often contained dozens of tenants, and restaurant menus from the "ghetto cabarets" that advertised roast goose and fine wines. Carefully gathered were hundreds of postcards from Jews in the provinces about to be deported to an 'unknown destination.'"

Amazingly, the Germans never became aware of Oneg Shabbat. As it became clear those imprisoned in the Ghetto were being deported to death camps, the archives were buried to preserve them for future generations. The first group of documents was placed in 10 tin boxes, which were subsequently interred in a bunker beneath a school. Later, another set was hidden in two large milk cans and secreted at the same location. The third and final part of the archive was placed in a cylindrical metal box and buried beneath another building—just one day before the Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943.

Ringelblum, his wife Yehudis and son Uri were able to escape the Ghetto in March 1943, but Ringelblum returned during the midst of the uprising. He was captured and sent to the Trawniki labor camp but was able to escape again, and returned to his family, hiding in Warsaw. On March 7, 1944, they were discovered in a bunker with approximately 40 other Jews. All were taken to the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, along with the Polish couple who'd been assisting them, and executed there on March 10, 1944.

Two of the three archives (the ones buried under the school) were recovered after the war when two surviving members of the Oneg Shabbat led officials from the Jewish Historical Commission of Poland to the site. The third archive has never been located, although there's some speculation that it's somewhere on the grounds of the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw. The recovered documents are housed at the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw) and the entire archive can be found in digital format at the Main Judaic Library website. The existing portions of the Oneg Shabbat Project remain one of the most important records of Jewish life during the Holocaust, information that would have been lost if not for the efforts of Ringelblum and his collaborators.

Milk can that held part of the Oneg Shabbat Archive, courtesy of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to We Must Not Think of Ourselves. It originally ran in January 2024 and has been updated for the October 2024 paperback edition. Go to magazine.