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About the Project

Between 350,000 and 500,000 Jews served in various roles in the Red Army during the Soviet-German War of 1941–1945. In the first months after the German invasion, a large number of Jews, especially members of the intelligentsia and university students, joined the Narodnoe opolchenie (National Guard or militia), the irregular military units whose task was to slow and, hopefully, halt the Wehrmacht assaults on major Soviet cities. These units were poorly trained and poorly armed, and most of those who served in them were killed in the first months of the war. 

Data about the number of Jews in the Red Army, and their percentage at different stages of the war, are presented in the following table: 

Aleksei Bezugol’nyi, Natsional’nyi sostav Krasnoi armii 1918 – 1945: Istoriko-statisticheskoe issledovanie (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2021), p. 339.

On the whole, the percentage of Jews in the Red Army corresponded to their prewar percentage in the population as a whole – 1.78% in January 1939. The slight decrease in the last period of the war is directly attributable to the Holocaust. In 1944–1945, there was a massive conscription of the civilian population in the recently liberated western regions of the USSR, where most of the Jews had been murdered. The number of Jews who were killed in action has been estimated by the official Russian military historians at 142,500. However, this figure is calculated on the basis of the percentage of the Jews in the army as a whole, and it excludes the peculiar situation of the Soviet Jewish POWs, who numbered at least 50,000, and of whom only about 4,800 survived the Holocaust.

Jews were present in significant numbers in many branches of the Red Army that engaged in modern warfare – the armored forces, the artillery, the air force, and the submarine fleet. Many Jews served as military translators and correspondents, physicians, and political officers attached to units of various types. Moreover, the vast majority of Jewish officers in the army served in units that required specialized technical or other knowledge – i.e., units outside of the regular infantry. The high percentage of Jews with high-school and academic education also strongly affected the number of Jewish officers, with every second Jew in the army being an officer by the end of the war. Nevertheless, the percentage of Jewish officers declined as one went up in rank. This was particularly true of the last period of the war, with its pronounced russocentric ethnic policy. 

Within the framework of the Soviet policy of creating "ethnic" divisions named after titular nations, the most "Jewish" units of the Red Army were the 16th Lithuanian and the 201st (from October 1942 – the 43rd) Latvian Infantry Divisions, which were staffed mostly by former residents of those republics (a significant number of whom were Jews); at certain times, the percentage of Jews in these divisions was as high as 33 and 17, respectively. Another unit with a sizeable Jewish contingent (about twenty percent in early 1944) was the Polish Kościuszko Division, which later became part of Berling's Army. Nevertheless, all attempts to set up separate Jewish military formations failed, since such projects ran counter to the wartime Soviet propaganda aims. In 1943 and 1944, some Jewish partisans, along with young Jews who had survived the Holocaust by hiding or using false identification papers, joined the Red Army immediately after the liberation of the western Soviet territories.

Jewish women served in the Red Army in relatively large numbers. The majority of them were doctors, nurses, or translators. Some Jewish women also participated directly in combat – as pilots or navigators in the Soviet air force, or in artillery units.

Many Jews were decorated for their contribution to the war effort. According to official Soviet data, as of January 1944 more than 32,000 Jews had received military decorations. Jews were the fourth most decorated ethnic group in the USSR (after the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians), despite being only the seventh largest Soviet ethnicity in terms of overall population. More than 100 Jews were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest military honor. However, this is likely to be an underestimate – since, for various reasons, Jews were sometimes listed as Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Tatars, etc., in their identity documents.

Soviet Jews, both on the front lines and in the rear, attached great importance to the very fact of these awards, seeing them as an official validation of Jewish military prowess. The poet Alexander Gitovich noted: "When I read the lists of those honored, I always check to see if there are any Jewish names among them, and I am very happy to find some." Such knowledge helped Soviet Jews challenge antisemitism (which was growing during the war, both among the people and in the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy), including the perception of Jews as "bad soldiers."

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), which had begun to operate in the spring of 1942, played a particularly important role in disseminating the information about the Jewish contribution to the war effort and Jewish heroism. Approximately a third of all the publications prepared by the JAC (either alone or in collaboration with other bodies) dealt with frontline Jewish fighters. Some of these articles were published in the Committee's Yiddish newspaper, Eynikayt, the first issue of which came out in June 1942. Hundreds of other materials were sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Jewish newspapers abroad. These articles not only recounted the military exploits of Jews, but often placed the accounts in a more general ethnic context. They emphasized the ethnic origin of the heroes and their following in the footsteps of the ancient Jewish heroic tradition, as embodied by Samson, the Maccabees, Bar Kochba, etc. Many of the articles aimed to show that, in addition to the war that they shared with the other Soviet peoples, Soviet Jews had their own war to fight, their own score to settle with the Nazis. In 1942, the Soviet Yiddish prose writer Dovid Bergelson wrote that the Soviet Jews were fighting "Far zayn foterland un zayn yidishn folk" – i.e., for their [Soviet] homeland and their Jewish people. As the details of the Nazi mass murder of Jewish civilians became increasingly well-known during the war, the ethnic consciousness of a large percentage of Jewish soldiers grew, greatly contributing to their motivation to fight.

Many of the accounts included in the present project focus on those Jews in the Red Army whose military accomplishments were officially recognized by their superiors. However, there are also many biographies of individuals whose service did not win such a high level of recognition. Thus, the servicepersons presented on our website include generals, officers, and privates; tank crew members, submariners, pilots, translators, and doctors; men and women; youths and middle-aged people. These individuals saw action on different fronts: They defended Moscow, took part in the battle for Stalingrad, liberated Ukraine and Belorussia, fought against Axis troops in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, and participated in the Battle of Berlin. The stories tell of their prewar experiences and, for those who survived the war, of their postwar life. Such an approach enables us to better understand the impact of the war on Jewish Red Army personnel.

The biographies, which are presented in alphabetical order, often contain extracts from wartime articles and letters, and from postwar memoirs. These quotes shed light on the Jewish identity of these people, their response to the Holocaust, and manifestations of antisemitism in the Red Army and in the Soviet interior.

Sources

Archive Collections

• Yad Vashem Archives (YVA)
• The Blavatnik Archive Foundation
• USC Shoah Foundation Institute
• Geroi strany (Heroes of the Country) Database)
• State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow
• Elektronnaia kniga pamiati voinov-evreev, pavshikh v boiakh s natsizmom (Online Book of Memory of the Jewish Soldiers Who Fell in the Battles against Nazism) Database
• Memorial Database
• Podvig naroda (Heroic Deed of People) Database
• Posviashchaetsia evreiam Rossii XX veka, prinimavshim aktivnoe uchastie v boevykh deistviakh i stroitel'stve gosudarstva (Homage to the Jews of 20th Century Russia Who Took an Active Part in Warfare and State Building) Database
• The Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II, Israel
• Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina (The Great Patriotic War) Database

Books and Articles about the Jews in the Red Army

• Aron Abramovich, V reshaiushchei voine: Uchastie i rol' evreev SSSR v voine protiv natsizma (Tel Aviv, 1981), 2 vols. (Russian).
• Il'ia Al'tman, "O nekotorykh osobennostiakh pisem i dnevnikov sovetskikh evreev perioda voiny," in Il'ia Al'tman, Leonid Terushkin, and Irina Brodskaia, eds., Sokhrani moi pis'ma… Sbornik pisem i dnevnikov evreev perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, Issue 3 (Moscow: Tsentr and fond "Kholokost," "Polimed," 2013), pp. 6-20 (Russian).
• Mordechai Altshuler, "Jewish Combatants of the Red Army Confront the Holocaust," in Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds., Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014), pp. 16-35.
• Mordechai Altshuler, "Ha-mifgash lohamim yehudim ba-tsava ha-adom le-Shoah," Dapim le-heker ha-Shoah, 23 (2009), pp. 9-27 (Hebrew).
• Mordekhai Al'tshuler, Itskhak Arad, Shmuel Krakovskii, Sovetskie evrei pishut Il'e Erenburgu (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; Jerusalem: The Center for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993) (Russian).
• Yitzhak Arad, In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in War Against Nazi Germany (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010).
• Oleg Budnitskii, "Jews at War: Diaries from the Front," in Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds., Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014), pp. 57-84.
• Oleg Budnitskii, "The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 10, 3 (Summer 2009), pp. 629–682.
• Julie Chervinsky, Lives of the Great Patriotic War: the Untold Stories of Soviet Jewish Soldiers in the Red Army During WWII (New York: Blavatnik Archive Foundation), 2011.
• Gennady Estraikh, "Jews as a Cossacks: A Symbiosis in Literature and Life," in Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds., Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014), pp. 85-103.
• Kiril Feferman, "'The Jews' War': Attitudes of Soviet Jewish Soldiers and Officers Toward the USSR in 1940-41," The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 27:4, pp. 574-590.
• Zvi Gitelman, "Afterward: Soviet Jews in World War II: Experience, Perception and Interpretation," in Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds., Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014), pp. 251-263.
• Zvi Y. Gitelman, "Internationalism, Patriotism, and Disillusion," The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Symposium Presentations (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2005), pp. 95-125
• Yosef Guri (Podriachik), "Yehudei brit ha-mo'atsot be-milhama neged ha-natzim, in Marion Mushkat, ed., Lohamim yehudim be-milhama neged ha-natzim: yehudim be-kohot baalat-ha-brit be-milhemet ha-olam ha-shniya, 1971, pp. 20 – 75 (Hebrew).
• Kniga zhivykh: Vospominaniia evreiev-frontovikov, uznikov getto i natsistskikh kontslagerei, boitsov partizanskikh otriadov, zashchitnikov blokadnogo Leningrada, St. Petersburg, vol. 1, 1995; vol. 2, 2004 (Russian).
• Dov Levin, "Uvdot ve-haarakhot al ha-yehudim be-tsava ha-adom be-milhemet ha-olam ha-shniya," Massuah, vol.10 (1982), pp. 79-105 (Hebrew).
• Dov Levin, "Jews in the Soviet Lithuanian forces in World War II: the nationality factor," Soviet Jewish Affairs 3, 1 (1973), pp. 57-64.
• Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995).
• Gershon Shapiro and Semion Averbukh, Ocherki evreiskogo geroizma (Kiev, 1994), 3 vols. (Russian).
• Gershon Shapiro, Under Fire: The stories of Jewish Heroes of the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1988).
• Aron Shneer, Plen (Jerusalem: Noi, 2003), 2 vols. (Russian)
• David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
• Fedor Sverdlov, Evrei-generaly vooruzhennykh sil SSSR; Kratkie biografii (Moscow, 1993) (Russian).
• Fedor Sverdlov, Podvigi soldat evreev v boiakh (Moscow: Biograficheskii klub, 1994), 2 Vols. (Russian).
• Fedor Sverdlov and Efraim Grinberg, Entsiklopediia evreiskogo geroizma (Moscow: Dograf, 2002).
• Fedor Sverdlov, Voiny-evrei na poliakh Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Fond "Kholokost"), 1999 (Russian).
• Arkadi Zeltser, "How the Jewish Intelligentsia Created the Jewishness of the Jewish Hero," in Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds., Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014), pp. 104-129.
• Arkadi Zeltser, "Differing Views among Red Army Personnel on the Nazi Mass Murder of Jews," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 15, 3 (Summer 2014), pp. 563-590
• Arkadi Zeltser, "Jewish response to the non-Jewish Question: “Where Were the Jews during the Fighting?” 1941–5," East-European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2016, pp. 4-25.
• Polly M. Zavadivker, Blood and Ink: Russian and Soviet Jewish Chroniclers of Catastrophe from World War I to World War II, Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Crus, 2013.

Editorial Staff

Project Supervisors

• Prof. Dan Michman
• Prof. Dina Porat
• Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto

Project Director

• Dr. Arkadi Zeltser

The Blavatnik Archive Foundation

• Julie Chervinsky

Contributors

• Dr. Kiril Feferman
• Dina Katz
• Ilia Kazhdan
• Daniel Romanovsky
• Shlomit Shulchani
• Dr. Yisrael Elliot Cohen