Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940-1943

Jews in Nazi-oppupied Warsaw during the 1940s were under increasing

threat as they were stripped of their rights and forced to live in a guarded

ghetto away from the non- Jewish Polish population. Within the ghettos,

a small but distinct group existed: the assimilated, acculturated, and baptized

Jews. Unwilling to integrate into the Jewish community and unable to

merge with the Polish one, they formed a group of their own, remaining

in a state of suspension throughout the interwar period. In 1940, with the

closure of the Jewish Residential Quarter in Warsaw, their identity was

chosen for them.

Person looks at what it meant for assimilated Jews to leave their prewar

neighborhoods, understood as both a physical environment and a mixed

Polish Jewish community, and enter a new, Jewish one. She reveals the

diversity of this group and how its members' identity shaped their involvement

in and contribution to ghetto life. In the first English-language study

of this small but influential group, Person illuminates the important role of

the acculturated and assimilated Jews to the history and memory of the

Warsaw ghetto.