A Laboratory for Forced Labor: The Jews in East-European War Zones, 1914-1924

The Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship and the Natalie and Mendel Racolin Memorial Fellowship

Admission: Free

Civilian populations trapped in war zones during the First World War and the subsequent civil wars had to bear a huge and brutal part of military mobilization and forced labor, a matter that severely affected the large Jewish populations of the Pale of Settlement. In these cases, forced labor was used to humiliate and persecute Jews specifically. An integral component of how occupying armies treated the Jews of this area, the little discussed concept of forced labor is a new angle for approaching the experience of a decade of war in Eastern Europe as well as to compare the supervision of civilians by differing armies, from the Russian Tsarist army to the pro- and anti-Bolshevik armies.

Lecture by Thomas Chopard, recipient of the YIVO Fellowship in Eastern European Jewish Studies (The Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship and the Natalie and Mendel Racolin Memorial Fellowship).