Jewish time in the Holocaust

Alan Rosen’s The Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars: Keeping Time Sacred, Making Time Holy is an important and estimable addition to the investigation of Jewish time during the Holocaust as well as to the research on Orthodoxy under Nazi rule. Under the extreme conditions of the Holocaust era, cresting in the concentration camps and in the lives of Jews in hiding, the very act of continuing to track time generally, and following the Jewish calendar particularly, was nearly impossible. Jews coped with this threat in diverse ways, as Rosen documents comprehensively.Rosen’s research appears to be powered by a clear worldview; repeatedly he strives to set the Jewish calendars within the broader setting of encouraging individual and collective observance of the commandments. While there is nothing wrong with a worldview that leads a researcher along, Rosen’s argumentation sometimes takes a tendentious turn. Rosen’s study on Jewish calendars in the Holocaust benefits most from his impressive and pioneering compilation and documentation work.