Shimon Redlich

Shimon Redlich was born to a Jewish family in Lwów, Poland (present-day Lviv, Ukraine). His parents were Chana Bomze and Solomon Redlich. When he was a baby, his family moved to Brzezany (now Berezhany, Ukraine), where he grew up. After Nazi Germany invaded in World War II, the family was confined to a ghetto. Solomon Redlich was shot dead during a round-up of Jews in 1943 and the rest of the family went into hiding. Shimon and his mother survived with the help of a Polish and then a Ukrainian family. After liberation, he participated in the 1948 semi-documentary film Unzere Kinder (Our Children). In 1950, he emigrated to Israel. He earned a B.A. at Hebrew University, an M.A, from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. from New York University. In 1967, he married Judith Tamar Blumberg, with whom he had two children. Redlich began his academic career in 1972 as a lecturer at Ben Gurion University. He rose through the ranks to become full professor in 1996, and held the Solly Yellin Chair in Lithuanian and East European Jewry. He retired as professor emeritus in 2003. As an internationally renowned historian and professor of history, his specialty was the Holocaust and the modern history of Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He is the author of several books, including the acclaimed Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 (2002), his best-known work. In it, he drew on the historical record, his own childhood memories, and interviews with Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians who lived in the small town to construct an account of the changing relationships among the town's three ethnic groups. In the sequel, Life in Transit: Jews in Postwar Łodz, 1945-1950 (2011), Redlich places his personal memories within the wider historical context of Jewish life in Poland and in Lodz during the immediate postwar years. The last book in the trilogy, A New Life in Israel: 1950-1954 (2018) focused on the adjustment of one young immigrant among thousands to the realities of life in the new Jewish state. Redlich was also the editor of the collection War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (1995).