This Sunday, January 26th, 2020, at 3pm EST the Discovery Channel will air a film about the Oyneg Shabbos Archive, created by a group of community members in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw who were led by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum (“Ringelblum Archive,” Wikipedia). The story of this archive is available largely through the incredible and painstaking efforts of the members of the Oyneg Shabbos to document and preserve a collection (against great odds of willful destruction and wartime bombardment). The contents of that archive expose a great deal about the people of the Warsaw ghetto and the era of the Holocaust.
The film is based on a major historical work of the same name, Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), by Dr. Samuel Kassow, Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut). Both the documentary film and the scholarly monograph convey the history of early 20th-century community-based collecting, as well as a dramatic story of how this particular underground archives — and the stories of Polish Jewish experiences it tells — came to survive.
For more information from the Discovery Channel about the film’s history, see:
‘Who Will Write Our History?’ (film), on Discovery Channel.
Opportunity
The editors of Archival History News would like to publish a 750-1,500 word critical movie review (or two) of this Roberta Grossman-directed film. For more information, please contact the editors (archivalhistorynews at gmail.com).
Archival History News 