Vocabulary: Holocaust

This vocabulary section is brand new and not yet complete. We appreciate your patience while definitions are continuously being added. In the meantime, please feel free to research any relevant information on your own.

Mordechai (sometimes spelled Mordecai) Anielewicz (1919-1942) refers to the young, Jewish commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1942. As head of the ŻOB (Jewish Fighting Organization), Anielewicz was a key decision-maker behind the planning and implementation of resistance fighting within the ghetto. He was killed alongside other fighters in their bunker when German troops gassed it on May 8, and the uprising ultimately failed to halt the Nazis’ Final Solution. However, that was never the real goal of Anielewicz and the other ghetto fighters, who were greatly outnumbered, trapped, and underequipped; their chief aim instead was to demonstrate to the world’s historical record that Jewish resistance can be formidable. In that, they succeeded. Anielewicz has continued to serve as a symbol of Jewish pride and of victims’ resistance against overwhelming odds.

Antisemitism refers to a term first coined in Germany in the nineteenth century.

In 2019 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) developed the following definition:

"Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."

The IHRA definition goes on to list examples:

"Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits. Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:

• Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a racial ideology or an extremist view of religion.
• Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective -- such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other society institutions.
• Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
• Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or inentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust)
• Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
• Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
• Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
• Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claiming Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Isarelis.
• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
• Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel."
  

Note: Today's scholars recommend the spelling as antisemitism, not as anti-Semitism.

Arrow Cross refers to the political party that governed Hungary from 1944-1945, having gained power when the Germans intervened to depose Miklós Horthy for attempting to negotiate a peace in WWII. Like their allies in Germany's Nazi party, Arrow Cross leaders espoused nationalism, anti-communism, and race theory. Under the direction of founder and leader Ferenc Szálasi, Arrow Cross instituted policies that were responsible for the mass murder of Jews and Roma. The January 1944 Soviet occupation of Budapest ended Arrow Cross rule, and Szálasi and some others in the party were executed.

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Ashkenazi refers to an ethnic designation assigned to most of the world's Jewish population. Ashkenazi culture begins with Jews who settled in The Rhineland and France during the Middle Ages, who eventually moved to Eastern Europe, where their numbers greatly increased, especially but not only in Poland. Because Yiddish became the common language for most Ashkenazi Jews, the terms "Yiddish culture" and "Ashkenazi culture" are almost synonymous. Ashkenazi Jews also developed a distinctive liturgy, rabbinical centers, customs, literature, and music, particularly klezmer. By modern times, most Ashkenazi Jews lived within the boundaries of the Russian Empire, where they were compelled to work and live in poverty in its western realm, known as the Pale of Settlement. Murderous pogroms against the Jews of czarist Russia drove many to turn to western liberal democracies, Zionism, secularism, or socialism as the solution.

By the late 19th century, most Jewish immigrants to the United States were Ashkenazi Jews looking for a better life and freedom. The violence of WWI and the Russian Revolution galvanized other Jews to head West. In Germany and Austria, Hitler and others in the Nazi leadership lamented the arrival of the "Ostjuden" (Eastern Jews), who were ridiculed and depicted as an enormous threat to German culture and the public health. The vast majority of men, women, and children murdered in the Holocaust were Ashkenazi Jews, and Yiddish culture was almost completely annihilated. Because of the enormous loss of life in the Holocaust and the postwar pogroms that compelled surviving Jews to immigrate, Ashkenazi culture is no longer centered in Eastern Europe, but in Israel, North America, and elsewhere. Recent history has seen some resurgence of Jewish life in places like Poland, though not nearly at the level of before the Holocaust.

Attack on the 20th Convoy refers to a particular 1943 event involving the rescue of Jews during a train transport from a transit camp in Belgium to Auschwitz. On April 19,  the 20th transport to leave Mechelin camp was attacked by merely three members (one Jew and two non-Jews) of the Belgian Resistance, which accomplished the unique feat of successfully freeing many of the Jewish prisoners aboard; the rescuers were aided by the conductor, who took a few opportunities to slow down the train, thus allowing  more prisoners to jump. Although more than 200 of the Jewish prisoners made it off the train, about half were shot during the escape or were recaptured and then murdered. This means that over 100 of the more than 1600 Jewish men, women, and children in the transport escaped. It also bears mentioning that the attack did not stop later convoys from Belgium from reaching Auschwitz, and other transports across Europe continued to move Jews to that killing center and others.

The youngest survivor of the convoy was Simon Gronowski, who was only 11 years old when his mother shoved him off the train. This would be his final memory of her, for she was murdered in Auschwitz. Her action to save her young son might be said to demonstrate an example of what Lawrence Langer calls the "choiceless choice" that confronted Jews in the Nazi camp system.  In this instance, the Jewish mother faces the daunting decision to risk her child's life through a dangerous escape, and also never to see him again, as the only way of possibly saving him.

This NYT article gives an update on Gronkowski during the 2020 Pandemic.

In this video clip, Gronowski recounts his experience. 

This second video clip shows the final number in a 2020 lockdown performance of an opera about Gronowski's experience.

Rachel Auerbach (also spelled Rokhl Auerbakh, 1903-1976) refers to the survivor of the Warsaw ghetto who, during her time there, played a key role in assisting Emanuel Ringelbaum's Oneg Shabes project of preserving artifacts and a record of Nazi atrocities from a Jewish perspective. These materials were buried in secrecy in the hopes that the world would one day uncover them. Auerbach later helped in the search for the Ringelbaum Archive, and the parts that have been found  are now housed in Warsaw at the Jewish Historical Institute. As a scholar, she worked at Yad Vashem, where she devoted her postwar life to gathering survivor testimonies.

Auerbach and her work are described in historian Samuel Kassow's 2007 book, Who Will Write Our History?, and Roberta Grossman's 2018 documentary film of the same name.

Who Will Write Our History film trailer

Oyneg Shabbes catalog and guide

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Samuel Bak refers to the artist, whose paintings explore themes from his experiences as a child survivor of the Vilna Ghetto. Some of his most frequent motifs are chess pieces, pears, and teddy bears. He resides in the United States. His paintings are exhibited at Boston's Pucker Gallery, Holocaust Museum Houston, and elsewhere.

Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer is among those who have written books about Bak's art and its use of symbolism to depict the Holocaust.

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Besa refers to the principle of a binding promise or pledge of honor that is esteemed in Albanian culture. In the Holocaust over 2000 Jews were rescued by Albanians, who were motivated by besa's tenet that people in dire need are owed protection.

The 2012 documentary film, Besa: The Promise (Rachel Goslins), examines the Holocaust in Albania.

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Blood libel refers to the persistent, widespread, false accusation that Jews kidnap and drain the blood from non-Jewish children for diabolical use in holiday food recipes, such as Passover matzoh. The first blood libel in Europe was made against the Jews of Norwich, England in 1144, and other Jewish communities have been similarly accused across the centuries in Europe and the Middle East. (The 19th-century "Damascus Affair" is but one of the modern-day examples.) By associating the Jewish people with this terrible alleged practice, the blood libel characterizes them as the worst of humanity and even the non-human. It is thus no surprise that the blood libel has fed violence and other persecutions against Jews. Many examples of medieval art illustrate the false notion that Jews engage in the practice of murdering to consume blood, when in fact their adherence to their religion's dietary laws means that blood is the last thing they would ever consume, and human sacrifice is also expressly forbidden. Christians typically viewed the alleged victims as child martyrs who suffered due to inherent Jewish depravity. Before and during the Holocaust, Nazi efforts to portray Jews as essentially evil, dangerous, and non-human, often disseminated traditional accusations of blood libel. More recently, the ubiquitous lie that Israel harvests the organs of its non-Jewish victims also draws on the blood libel. The blood libel's depiction of the Jewish people as a race of Satan-worshippers, child-murderers, and blood-consumers remains one of the most longstanding images in contemporary antisemitism.

The blood libel is invoked in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Prioress's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales in the late fourteenth century, by which time the libel would already have been familiar to readers. 

Joshua Trachtenberg's 1943 book, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism, provides a detailed outline and history of the libel and its effects on helping to make the Holocaust possible.

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Circumcision refers to removal of the foreskin of a man or boy. Because Judaism requires circumcision, or brit milah, typically when a male infant is 8 days old, it has been widely viewed as a marker of Jewish identity, particularly in Europe, where the practice has traditionally been far less common among non-Jews than in North America. As scholars like Sander Gilman and Daniel Boyarin have described in their research, popular myths have been attached to Jewish males because of the stigma that was attached to circumcision. These include outlandish beliefs that Jewish men menstruate and are more likely to suffer from neuroses because of being subjected to the practice. During the Holocaust, Nazi propaganda depicted circumcision as a sign of Jewish barbarity and cruelty, and in an effort to locate Jews, Nazi authorities, such as the SS and the Gestapo, would command males just about anywhere, even in public, to lower their pants at a moment's notice. This made hiding especially challenging for Jewish men and boys, as neighbors were often even less willing to take them in for fear of being caught. This is a theme that is greatly explored in Europa Europa, Solomon Perel's 1990 Holocaust memoir, as well as Agnieszka Holland's film adaptation of the book from the same year.

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Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979) refers to the American Catholic priest and leader of the Christian Front who spread antisemitic conspiracy theories through his radio broadcasts, live speeches in large stadiums, establishment of the National Union for Social Justice, and publication of the weekly magazine, Social Justice. Coughlin's influence was extensive, though not without opponents, and his efforts to shut down or censor the American film industry was a factor in the creation of the Hollywood Production Code, which went into effect in 1934. Like Henry Ford, Coughlin disseminated the antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the United States. Coughlin's rhetoric was frequently heard and discussed in the childhood home of Sister Rose Thering, who later campaigned to eradicate from Catholic school textbooks the teaching of contempt against the Jews. The 1965 passage of Nostra aetate by the Church signaled a new direction for Catholic-Jewish relations and, while never naming Coughlin, made plain that teachings such as his ran counter to Catholic theology.

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Charlotte Delbo (1913-1985) refers to the French literary critic and memoirist whose experience as a non-Jewish inmate in the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück camps are described in the acclaimed trilogy, Auschwitz and After. The memoir's three parts are None of Us Will Return (1965), Useless Knowledge (1970), and The Measure of Our Days (1985). Arrested for her work in the Resistance, Delbo was in the camp system from 1942 until 1945. Auschwitz and After is written with the objective of making the reader "see" the horrors Nazism inflicted, and thus presents detailed descriptions of events and their human toll. By employing both poetic and prosaic formats, Delbo influenced the parameters of Holocaust memoir writing. Many scholars place her work at the top of the genre, alongside those of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel.

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Georg Duckwitz (1904-1973) refers to the German diplomat who secretly warned Danish leaders about the impending roundup of Denmark's Jews. This warning gave the nation's non-Jews sufficient time to evacuate most of the Jewish community to unoccupied Sweden, amounting to the rescue of some 7,000 men, women, and children. For his action Duckwitz was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 1971. 

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Herschel Grynszpan (1921-1945?) refers to the German Jew who assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, in Paris in November, 1938. Grynszpan was upset at Nazi antisemitism and the deportation of his family from Germany, which at the time was part of a larger policy of expelling Eastern Jews from Germany; Grynszpan's parents were born in Poland before moving to Germany, where he was born. The Nazis used the assassination as a pretext to implement the November Pogrom ("Kristallnacht") against the Jewish people, though in reality the pogrom had already been planned. Grynszpan was arrested and imprisoned, but his fate remains unknown.

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The Holocaust refers to the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. 

Note: In ancient times, holocaust (with a lowercase H) was a Greek word that referred to the practice of completely burning an animal sacrifice. However, no respectable scholar would suggest that the modern-day Holocaust that the Nazis orchestrated was any sort of a holy sacrifice.

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Kielce Pogrom refers to the attacks on and murders of dozens of Holocaust survivors in Kielce, Poland on July 4, 1946.

The vast majority of Poland's 3 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The defeat and withdrawal of German forces by the end of WWII in 1945, along with the "liberation" of Nazi camps that held Jews and others, did not see the eradication of antisemitism or its canard that all Jews were sympathetic to communism and the Soviet occupation of Poland. Many Jews were attacked when they attempted to return to their homes, which the Nazis had given away during the war. In Kilece, many Jewish survivors were housed at 7 Planty Street, where most awaited emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine. When a gentile child fabricated a story of being kidnapped and chained in a basement there (though the building had no basement), rumors of blood libel spread. As Jewish residents called for help from authorities, an angry mob of townspeople broke into the house. Over the course of approximately nine hours, victims were assaulted and killed in numerous ways, including shooting, beating, stoning, and being dropped from the building, which was ransacked and looted. Local police, military, and political leaders did virtually nothing to stop the violence, and some accounts describe them as participating in or at least watching the pogrom. The attacks were not limited to 7 Planty Street; trains running through Kielce were also searched for Jews and saw additional assaults and murders. The pogrom ended when troops arrived from other cities. By then, the dead at 7 Planty Street numbered 42 Jews and three non-Jews. Most of the attackers were never held accountable, though nine Poles were eventually found guilty in the courts and hanged.

The Kielce Pogrom was the largest of several post-Holocaust pogroms and received attention in the international press. Most Holocaust survivors in Poland were prompted to flee the country, believing they could never be safe there. Even today, there are efforts to deny the pogrom or to blame it on the Soviets.

Michal Jaskulski and Lawrence Loewinger's 2016 documentary film, Bogdan's Journey, recounts the pogrom, features interviews with survivors, and explores recent, controversial efforts to memorialize the event in Kielce.

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Gerda Weissmann Klein (1924-) refers to the Holocaust survivor who became a famous author and speaker, and who is the subject of a documentary film that won an Academy Award. Klein, her parents, and her brother lived in Poland when Germany invaded in 1939, and the family soon saw their rights stripped away. The Nazis eventually separated Klein from her loved ones, who did not survive. She was sent to labor camps, where she suffered greatly. After being forced to participate in a brutal death march that killed the vast majority of the other women prisoners, including her best friends, Klein was liberated on the day before her 21st birthday. The first American soldier to approach her, Kurt Klein, was fluent in German and, to her surprise, was a fellow Jew. They married, and she moved to The United States to be with him and raise a family. Her first memoir, All But My Life, was published in 1957, and she was featured in Kary Antholis's documentary film, One Survivor Remembers, for which she gave a memorable acceptance speech at the Oscars ceremony.

Since the death of Elie Wiesel, Klein is arguably the most famous Holocaust survivor in the United States. She has been actively involved in the work of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has published several books. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

Gerda Weissmann Klein Oscar® Acceptance Speech

Klezmer refers to the musical genre that is traditionally performed and composed by and popular with Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jewry. A person who performs this music is also called a klezmer. As a recognizable feature of Ashkenazi culture, klezmer music was part of the Jewish culture that came under assault during the Holocaust. While klezmorim (plural of klezmer) continue to compose and perform today, older klezmer music is also frequently used to invoke memories of what was lost during the Holocaust.

Sample:

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Olga Lengyel [1908-2001] refers to the Hungarian Jew who survived and wrote about her experiences as a nurse in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust, where she worked in an infirmary without necessary medications, supplies, or sanitation.  Her 1947 memoir, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz, is among the earliest, most graphic, and most chilling of survivor accounts. Lengyel emigrated to the United States after the war.

Dr. Gisella Perl, Lengyel's coreligionist, countryman, and fellow memoirist, describes her bravery and selflessness in her 1948 publication, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz.

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Karl Lueger (1844-1910) refers to the Christian Social Party politician who served as mayor of Vienna, Austria from 1897-1910. Lueger was controversial for his antisemitic platform and policies. He is widely recognized as an influence on fellow Austrian, Adolf Hitler, and other Nazis.

The Madagascar Plan refers to a proposal that the Nazi leadership allegedly considered during the early part of WWII. Jews would be forcibly deported from Eastern Europe, especially Poland, and then resettled in the French colony of Madagascar. Historians have not reached consensus regarding how many Jews would be resettled, or even the extent to which Nazi leaders gave the plan serious consideration. If it was indeed seen at one time as a viable option for helping to make Poland judenfrei, this hope was dashed by the projected cost of the program during wartime, Germany's unanticipated difficulty defeating the Allies, the strength of the British naval presence, and most importantly, the adoption by the Nazis of their program for the Final Solution to "the Jewish Problem," meaning that all European Jews were to be murdered, not just sent away.

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Maria Mandel [also spelled Mandl] refers to the Nazi war criminal who was one of the few women to be executed after being captured and tried by the Allies. Appointed SS-Lagerführerin at Auschwitz in 1942, Mandel was the camp's highest ranked woman and had authority over its female inmates and sub-camps. Numerous instances of abuse of prisoners earned her the epithet, "The Beast." She was hanged in 1947.

Mandel is responsible for the creation of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. She is described in Fania Fénelon's 1976 memoir, Playing for Time, and is portrayed by Shirley Knight in its 1980 television adaptation.

Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) refers to the German activist and writer who popularized the use of the term, antisemitism, advocated for the expulsion of the Jews, and founded the League of Antisemites as a means of campaigning against Jewish assimilation and alleged influence. Marr argued that Germany's problems stemmed from the basic incompatibility of Jewish and German ideals, which he ascribed to inherent racial differences. Germany's survival, he contended, would depend on its people's willingness to remove Jews, who constituted an existential threat to the nation. While there is little evidence to suggest that many German intellectuals embraced Marr's movement during his lifetime, its effect on the later rise of Nazi racial theory and antisemitic policies seems evident.

Although some have recently suggested that antisemitism refers to a hatred of both Jews and Arabs (as people whose traditional cultures include Semitic languages), Marr and his contemporaries made clear that their term specifically referred to the Jews.

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Zsuzsanna Ozsváth refers to the child Holocaust survivor who became a prominent academic, translator, and author in Holocaust Studies. Ozsváth, born Zsuzsanna Abonyi, trained to be a concert pianist from an early age. She and her immediate family survived the Holocaust in Hungary with help from her gentile babysitter, Erzsebet "Erzsi" Fájó. While hiding alone in an abandoned Budapest apartment as a little girl, Ozsváth witnessed the shooting into the Danube of Jewish men, women, and children. After the war, she married and moved to Hamburg, Germany and then to Richardson, Texas. As a professor of literature and history at the University of Texas at Dallas, she founded and directed the school's graduate program in Holocaust Studies and oversaw the establishment of its Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies. She was named the Leah and Paul Lewis Endowed Chair in Holocaust Studies and served as a founding member of the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission. Much of her scholarship concerns the life and poetry of Miklós Radnóti, who was murdered in the Holocaust. Ozsváth has published two memoirs: When the Danube Ran Red (2010) and My Journey Home: Life After the Holocaust (2019).

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Shoah refers to the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. It is biblical term that denotes destruction. It has gained widespread usage not just among Hebrew speakers, but also among scholars and others who consider Holocaust to be a problematic label for the historical event in which 6 million Jews were systematically persecuted and murdered. Holocaust is an ancient Greek term referring to a holy sacrifice that is entirely consumed by flames, as sometimes commanded in the Bible. Although burning of the Jewish dead and even the living was an infamous component of the horror inflicted at Auschwitz and elsewhere, any implications that the mass murder and cremation of Jews was divinely ordained or amounts to a holy sacrifice are thoroughly rejected by Jews and others. For this reason Shoah has found increased usage. In some places outside of Israel, such as France, Shoah is a more common term than Holocaust. For his critically acclaimed 1985 documentary film on the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann's chose the title, Shoah.

Shoes on the Danube Bank refers to sculptor Gyula Pauer's 2005 Budapest memorial to Jewish and other victims of the Arrow Cross who were murdered in late 1944 and early 1945. By that time, Hungarian Jewry outside of Budapest had almost entirely been murdered or deported to Auschwitz. Budapest's Jews were confined to a ghetto, and over hundreds of these men, women, and children were then marched to the river, told to remove their shoes, and shot to death into the water. Hundreds of non-Jewish victims of the Arrow Cross were soon thereafter shot into the Danube. Adding to the victims' suffering was the fact that the Arrow Cross perpetrators were fellow Hungarians.

The sculpture consists of stone and iron.

Child Holocaust survivor Zsuzsanna Ozsváth witnessed these killings from her temporary hiding place in a nearby apartment, as described in her 2010 memoir, When the Danube Ran Red.

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The stab-in-the-back myth refers to the lie that Jews conspired to orchestrate the German surrender in WWI, despite Germany's likelihood of winning the war. This charge against the Jews relies on classic antisemitic tropes, including that Jews naturally operate as a fifth column with murderous, evil intentions for any country where they reside and thus cannot be trusted. In the years up to and during the Holocaust, Hitler and other Nazi leaders promulgated the stab-in-the-back myth to gain support for the systematic, state-sponsored destruction of European Jewry. Historians today recognize that the once widespread acceptance of the stab-in-the-back myth was chiefly a function of Nazi propaganda, and that the charge against the Jews was unfounded. Many disgruntled, nationalistic WWI veterans in Germany, including Hitler, refused to accept that their country had not been strong enough to win the war.

The term also calls to mind composer Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung, in which the hero is stabbed in the back. Wagner, who stridently opposed the notion of Jewish and German compatibility during his lifetime, was a favorite of Hitler.

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Chiune Sugihara (1900-1986) refers to the Japanese diplomat who helped rescue approximately 6,000 European Jews during the Holocaust. As Japanese vice-consul in Lithuania, Sugihara was approached by desperate Jews who knew their lives were in danger and sought exit visas. Although he was aware that most of the Jews requesting help did not meet the visa application criteria set by the Japanese government, Sugihara provided the necessary assistance as quickly as possible before being reassigned elsewhere due to the closing of the embassy. At war's end, he and his family were held for over a year in a Soviet POW camp. Returning to Japan, he was forced to resign from his position, allegedly due to his disregard for instructions when he helped Jews. Israel named Sugihara one of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1985.

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Sister Rose Thering (1920-2006) refers to the American nun who famously campaigned to eliminate antisemitism from the Catholic Church and its teachings. Her research on antisemitism within Catholic school textbooks is known to have shaped the writing of Pope John XXIII's Second Vatican Council 1965 document, "Nostra Aetate," which revised the Church's relationship to the Jewish people. Thering also fought antisemitism elsewhere in society and taught at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

The 2004 documentary film, Sister Rose's Passion (Oren Jacoby), tells her story.

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Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) refers to the influential American journalist whose 1932 book, I Saw Hitler, attacked the Nazi leader's character and antisemitism and led to her 1934 expulsion from the Reich, thus making her the first American journalist to enjoy this distinction. She continued to speak out against Nazi Germany, including her defense of Herschel Grynszpan's 1938 assassination of a Nazi diplomat.

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Richard Wagner (1813-1883) refers to the popular German composer who wrote in support of antisemitic race theories. He is especially known for his operas, which typically romanticize German legends and are among the most easily recognizable and widely performed operas in history. His 1850 essay, Das Judenthum in der Musik [Jewishness in Music], which he revised and expanded in 1869, argues that Jews lack the ability to make good music and pose a great danger to German culture and well-being. Although Wagner never called for the physical annihilation of the Jewish population,  and although he died decades before the rise of Nazism,  he has been accused of inspiring and influencing the movement. Hitler publicly admired Wagner's work for its celebration of the German character. Performances of Wagner's music in Israel remain controversial, and many Jews around the world have refused to have his "Bridal Chorus" ("Here Comes the Bride") played at their weddings.

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Yad Vashem refers to the museum/memorial to Holocaust victims in Jerusalem, Israel. It is the largest Holocaust museum in the world, maintaining exhibits, artwork, a database of victims, educational programs, scholarly materials, award programs, and official recognition of the Righteous Among the Nations (individuals and groups recognized for risking their lives and receiving no compensation for rescuing Jews during the Shoah).

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Yiddish, literally meaning "Jewish," refers to the Judeo-Germanic language and culture of Eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jews, who comprised the vast majority of Holocaust victims. The Nazi leadership especially hated and demonized what they called Ostjuden (Jews of the East) for whom Yiddish was the vernacular. Before WWII, numerous Yiddish newspapers, books, short stories, poems, and plays were published; Yiddish live theater was widely attended; Yiddish cinema was prolific; and the world's greatest venues of rabbinic study were mostly found in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. The great centers of Yiddish learning, arts, and entertainment in Eastern Europe were wiped out in the Holocaust, as were most people who spoke the language. The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen efforts to revive Yiddish culture where it once thrived, though most speakers of the language today are members of Hasidic communities or Jewish Studies academia. (Ruth Wisse of Harvard University is a noted contemporary scholar in the field of Yiddish literature.) What was once the native or daily language of over 10 million is now spoken by a much smaller number. However, a handful of Yiddish terms have entered the English lexicon.

Yom HaShoah, more formally known as Yom HaZikaron laShoah v’laGevurah (Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust and Heroism), is the day officially designated by Israel for Holocaust remembrance. It is also observed by some Jews outside of Israel, including several communities and synagogues in Texas. Coinciding with the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on the Jewish calendar, Yom HaShoah falls in April or early May. The Israeli government chose this date in 1951, just a few years after the end of the Holocaust. Certain traditions mark the observance; in Israel, perhaps the best-known is the blaring of a siren, during which commuters emerge from their vehicles to stand in place and all movement comes to a halt: Yom HaShoah, Tel Aviv 2021

Yugoslavia refers to the multi-ethnic country that saw the almost total destruction of its Jewish population during the 1940s in the Holocaust, along with the persecution and mass murders of other groups, particularly the Serbs and the Roma. Chief perpetrators were not just the Nazis, but also the Ustase regime of Croatia, which established camps to murder over 90% of Croatian Jewry.

Mala Zimetbaum (full name Malka Zimetbaum, 1918-1944) refers to the Jewish woman who served as a translator at Auschwitz and became a protector of and an inspirational figure to her fellow inmates. She was the first woman known to have escaped from Auschwitz, though the SS captured her and her Polish boyfriend. Her subsequent execution is the subject of several sometimes conflicting eyewitness accounts, including the memoir by Fania Fénelon.

Zyklon B refers to the cyanide poisonous gas that was utilized to murder over a million people at Nazi camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most victims were stripped of clothing and belongings and were herded into a crowded chamber, into which SS doctors dropped Zyklon B pellets. Most victims died within 20 minutes. According to accounts by surviving members of the Sonderkommando, which was assigned the duty of removing and destroying the bodies, death in the gas chambers was characterized by great physical pain (including burning in the throats and lungs) and emotional desperation, as victims desperately and unsuccessfully struggled to escape.