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Rumkowski, Chaim   Cerca

Definizione

Chaim Rumkowski was the head of the Judenrat in the Lódz ghetto. He was born in 1877 in Ilino, Russian Empire, and moved to Lódz in the early 1900s. He worked as a businessman and as an insurance agent before creating and running a Jewish orphanage. He was also active in the General Zionist Party in Lódz. Rumkowski represented the party on the Jewish community council (kehillah), and in September 1939 the members of the committee elected him deputy chairman. One month later, the Germans, who had occupied Lódz, selected him Ältester der Juden. In his role as head of the Jewish Council (Judenrat) and later of the ghetto's Council of Elders (Beirat), he was responsible for the security and administration of the ghetto, including the provision of social and economic necessities. He developed committees and departments to manage food supply and rationing, health care, housing, labor, security, welfare, and ghetto services and maintenance. At its peak, his administration employed 10,000 ghetto inhabitants. He supplied names of ghetto inhabitants to be deported to the camps, believing that his cooperation with the Germans' requests would minimize the number of people who would be deported. Rumkowski also believed that cooperating with the Germans would minimize the severity and violence inflicted on the Jews in the Lódz ghetto. His goal was to keep the peace in the ghetto and to keep as many Jews as possible working so that they would become "essential" to the German operation and thereby be saved. He served as head of the Judenrat until the Germans deported him and his relatives on August 30, 1944, on the last transport from the ghetto. Rumkowski was killed in Auschwitz a few days later. Though the number of survivors of the Lódz ghetto is larger in relative terms than that of other ghettos under German control, Rumkowski's leadership of the ghetto still provokes controversy. Adelson, Alan, ed. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pages 9, 11. (en-US)

Fonte

Encyclopaedia Judaica. 16 vols. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House Ltd., 1971-1972. Vol. 14, p. 428-429

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