September 18, 2026 – February 14, 2027
Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
Edmond J. Safra Plaza, 36 Battery Place, New York, NY 10280

Tuesday, November 3 at 3:00pm—4:30pm
Spiritual Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto: Emanuel Ringelblum and the “Oyneg-Shabes” Archive
YIVO
This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Google Classroom. Students will be granted access to the class on Google Classroom after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in Yiddish.
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Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto examines one of the most significant acts of Jewish resistance and historical preservation during the Holocaust: the creation of the Oyneg Shabes Archive in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the Nazis sealed the ghetto in November 1940, more than 400,000 Jews were confined under brutal and dehumanizing conditions. Alongside mass starvation, disease, and violence, Jewish life faced cultural and historical annihilation. Within this environment, documenting daily experience became both a risk and a necessity.

Led by historian and activist Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, a clandestine group of Jewish scholars, educators, journalists, religious leaders, artists, and youth activists formed Oyneg Shabes, meaning “the joy of the Sabbath,” named for their secret Saturday meetings. United across political and ideological differences, the group committed itself to recording Jewish life as it unfolded under Nazi rule. Over three years, they gathered nearly 35,000 documents, including testimonies, diaries, letters, underground newspapers, artwork, ration cards, children’s writings, and cultural ephemera. Together, these materials form the most comprehensive contemporaneous Jewish record of life in the Warsaw Ghetto.

As deportations to concentration camps accelerated in the summer of 1942, the members of Oyneg Shabes understood that survival was increasingly unlikely. In a final act of moral courage, they buried the archive in metal milk containers and boxes beneath the ghetto, hoping it would be recovered after the war. Only three members survived, Hersh and Bluma Wasser and Rokhl Oyerbakh, who later helped locate and unearth the archive. The first cache was recovered on September 18, 1946, with additional materials found four years later.

Produced by the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Will These Words Reach You? commemorates the 80th anniversary of the archive’s recovery. Through original artifacts, including one of the burial containers, along with reproductions, maps, infographics, animated projections, and film footage of the postwar excavation, the exhibition intertwines Holocaust history with the lived responses of Oyneg Shabes. Central to Jewish heritage, the archive stands as a testament to Jewish agency, intellectual life, and the enduring commitment to memory. By preserving their voices in the midst of catastrophe, Oyneg Shabes ensured that Jews would continue to speak across generations.

Spiritual Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto: Emanuel Ringelblum and the “Oyneg-Shabes” Archive course is appropriate for Yiddish students at the high-intermediate level and above. Knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet is required.

In the fall of 1940, the Polish Jewish historian and communal organizer Emanuel Ringelblum convened a meeting to establish a secret archive in the Warsaw Ghetto. The archive bore the code name Oyneg-shabes, Yiddish for “Joy of the Sabbath.” Its members worked tirelessly and at tremendous personal risk to document both the brutality of the Warsaw Ghetto and the resilience of the Jews imprisoned there. Of the 60 people Ringelblum gathered for the project, only three survived.

In this Yiddish-language seminar, Samuel Kassow considers the Oyneg-shabes archive as an act of spiritual and cultural resistance through which the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto asserted their dignity and their right to author their own history.

The instructor, Samuel Kassow, will provide course materials digitally throughout the class via Google Classroom.

This course is held in conjunction with ‘Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto’, on view at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust from September 18, 2026, through February 14, 2027. The exhibition was created on the initiative of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, in partnership with the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, with the support of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The course is co-sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto is made possible, in part, thanks to generous support from George Klein and Family, the Goldie and David Blanksteen Foundation, the Charina Foundation, the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, Matthew F. and Terry Schwartz Breitenbach, Michael Eberstadt and Nina Beattie, Nancy Fisher, Patti Kenner, Stacey and Marc Saiontz, and the Nartel Family Foundation. The Museum of Jewish Heritage’s programs are also made possible by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. (As of July 2026. Subject to change.)