A two-volume set.

Seventy years after the outbreak of World War II, most of the European ghettos have still not been systematically researched. This pioneering two-volume encyclopedia gathers data from historical studies, testimonies, and documents dealing with more than 1,100 ghettos throughout Eastern Europe.

This encyclopedia offers detailed entries on the various ghettos into which the Jews of Eastern Europe were confined during the Holocaust. Entries on each ghetto are written by scholars and specialists on their topic and include location, wartime name, and geographical coordinates, and, for the larger ghettos, information on life before World War II and during the Soviet occupation era, German (Nazi) occupation, ghetto structure, institutional life and leadership, terror and killing operations, underground resistance, and the number of survivors at liberation. They also describe the differences between each ghetto and examine the difficulties of daily life in the ghetto, coping strategies, and different forms of resistance.

The first reference book of its kind, The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust is a valuable resource for diverse disciplines and is supplemented by a special DVD of wartime footage of ghettos filmed in real time during the Holocaust.

Former Dean of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Guy Miron is currently a lecturer at the Institute and has been a visiting professor at Rutgers University. He is the author of several books, including German Jews in Israel: Memories and Past Images.

Michael Berenbaum is the director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at American Jewish University, where he is also a professor of Jewish Studies. He is the author of several books, including A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors.

“The quality of the paper and illustrations here, as well as its more accessible organization and unquestionable scholarship, make it an invaluable reference tool for academic and large public libraries.”

“This is an outstanding piece of scholarship that fills a gap in reference collections dealing with the Holocaust. There have been general works such as The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (2000) and books about Warsaw and Lodz ghettos, but this is the first comprehensive source dealing with the ghettos created by the Nazis. It is an essential work for academic collections supporting history, Jewish Studies, and Holocaust studies.”

“ Presents scholars and laypersons for the first time with a comprehensive view of the ghetto phenomenon which was so central to Jewish life during the Holocaust.”

“This research tool makes a very high quality scholarly endeavor available to the scholars and general public.”

“In spite of more than six decades of extensive Holocaust research, scholars and laymen have not hitherto grasped the full extent and nature of the ghettos phenomenon of the Nazi era. This encyclopedia, which presents the full array of ghettos in a variety of countries under the yoke of Nazi Germany and its allies, urges the rethinking of common wisdom on both the ghettos as such and on antisemitic policies during the Holocaust in general.”