27 December 2004
Yad Vashem’s annual Buchman Memorial Prize will be awarded to Dr. Yithak Arad for his book, The History of the Holocaust: Soviet Union and the Annexed Territories, at a ceremony tomorrow at Yad Vashem.
The History of the Holocaust: Soviet Union and the Annexed Territories, published by Yad Vashem, covers, for the first time, the fate of the Jews under Nazi occupation in the Soviet Union and the Annexed Areas (including the Baltic States, Bessarabia and North Bukovina, West Belorussia and West Ukraine). An essential breakthrough in research on this topic occurred with the opening of the Soviet archives at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. In addition, many survivor testimonies have been collected from Russian immigrants to Israel over the past decade. The result is a two-volume work by Dr. Yitzhak Arad, emphasizing the unique aspects of the implementation of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ in these areas. The two-volume work has already appeared in Hebrew.
The Jacob Buchman Foundation was established in Paris in 1988 in the framework of the Jewish France Foundation. It was created in memory of Buchman’s wife, Esther, and his daughter, Hanaleh who perished in the Holocaust. The prize - presented by Yad Vashem in Israel as the “Buchman Memorial Prize”- is given to authors, artists, and researchers for exemplary work in the field of the Holocaust. Past recipients of the prize include Aharon Applefeld, Itamar Levine, and Dina Porat.
The ceremony will take place tomorrow, Tuesday, December 28, 2004 at the Lecture Hall of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem at 16:00. Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev, Head of the International Research Institute Prof. David Bankier, Yad Vashem Chief Historian Prof. Dan Michman, and Ms. Rosine Bron, a representative of the Jacob Buchman Foundation will participate in the ceremony. The ceremony will take place in Hebrew.
The event is open to the press in coordination with the Media Relations Department.
