Warszawska Rada Żydowska w świetle dokumentów urzędowych z Archiwum Ringelbluma
Jewish Council in Warsaw in the Light of Official Documents from Ringelblum’s Archive

Summary/Abstract: The article bases mostly on the official documents produced by the Warsaw Jewish Council (Judenrat) during 1939–1942 which have survived in the Underground Warsaw Ghetto Archive (Ringelblum’s Archive, ARG). The materials collected by Ringelblum’s collaborators, who obtained them from the Jewish Council’s offices and stored them (mostly in the form of duplicates), do not show the Council only as an institution “caught” red-handed shaping its policy together with the Germans. For the materials also illustrate the Council’s contacts with the ghetto residents and present the internal life of the Council as an institution. The articles focuses only on the documents produced prior to 22 July 1942 (before the deportation campaign) which make it possible to reconstruct the organisation and the policy of that pseudo Jewish local government. Some of the documents provide deep insight into the important spheres of the Council’s activity, so far insufficiently described in literature. The article focuses on only four selected aspects: the Council as an instrument of terror, its charitable activity, its registration of the residents as an example of everyday official-bureaucratic activity, and the internal image of the Council as an institution. Particular attention should be paid to the Council’s documents which demonstrate how the Germans incorporated it into their terror apparatus and how the Council was forced to act as an intermediary in the fiscal oppression of the Jews, in the collection of social insurance fees, in requisitions (particularly in the “Fur Campaign”), in the organisation of popular compulsory labour, and in the establishment of handicraft workshops operating for the occupier. The said issues, illustrated with documents selected by the ARG, show the Warsaw Judenrat’s Janus-like countenance: on the one hand an instrument of German terror, on the other hand a shield doing its best to protect the Jewish community against the German authorities’ ruthlessness.

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