Miriam Offer
Dr. Miriam Offer is a senior lecturer at Western Galilee College, Akko, Israel and teaches the History of Medicine during the Holocaust in the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. Her book, White Coats Inside the Ghetto: Jewish Medicine in Poland During the Holocaust, was published in Hebrew in April 2015 by Yad Vashem, and the English edition is forthcoming. Dr. Offer's research expertise is in Jewish medical activity during the Holocaust, and she is a partner in research and educational initiatives in this field. Inter alia, she initiated and co-chaired a large-scale international conference on the Study of Medicine during the Holocaust and Beyond, at Western Galilee in 2017. She is a member of the organizational scientific committee of the annual Nahariya Conferences on Medicine and the Holocaust, and is a scientific committee member for “Witnesses in White”—organized guided tours to Poland for physicians—under the auspices of the Israel Medical Association. Dr. Offer was a scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI) during the summer semester of 2017, is currently a member of the HBI Academic Advisory Committee and a Research Associate. In this capacity, she is researching Jewish women's contribution to the medical services in the ghettos. Offer is co-editor of several forthcoming collections of articles on medicine during the Holocaust, including a book to be published by Berghahn, The Past in the Present: New Studies on Medicine Before, During and After the Holocaust and Legacies for the 21st Century (with S. Hildebrandt and M. Grodin). She is a guest co-editor of NASHIM journal 36, a special issue that will be devoted to Jewish Women Medical Practitioners in Europe Before, During, and After the Holocaust and guest co-editor of KOROT: The Israel Journal of the History of Medicine and Science No. 26, a special issue that will be devoted to Medical Education and the Shoah. She was one of the founders of the Hedva Eibschitz Institute for Holocaust Studies in Haifa, where she served as Director from 1988 to 1993, and has extensive experience in leading and developing Holocaust teaching programs and memorialization activities. Both in Israel and overseas, she lectures on Medicine and the Holocaust at international conferences and is a member of scientific committees dealing with the subject. Miriam is interviewed frequently on leading media channels in Israel.
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Papers by Miriam Offer
In the first two decades of the 21st century, research of the history of Jewish medicine during the Holocaust expanded. Studies were written on the medical activity in German-occupied areas, particularly the large and medium-sized ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia, in addition to Holland, Hungary, and Germany, and Jewish physicians' activity in the camps. Conspicuously absent is the study of Soviet Jewish medicine and physicians in areas occupied by the Germans in World War II with the German offensive against the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941.
This article sheds light on the fate of 36 Jewish physicians and scientists from Stavropol Medical Institute in the North Caucasus during the Holocaust—renowned professors, lecturers in all branches of medicine, of which one third were women of outstanding medical achievements.
The description draws on writings by researchers from the Commonwealth, including Stavropol, witness testimonies collected by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission to investigate Nazi atrocities (1943–1945), and the memoirs of Ludmila Schwartzman, daughter-in-law of Prof. Jacob Schwartzman, renowned cardiologist before the war and senior Medical Institute physician murdered with the rest.
The article describes the history of Caucasian Jews and thousands of Jewish refugees who sought shelter in the area, focusing on Stavropol's Jews, including numerous Medical Institute teachers, researchers and their families, either shot to death in forests outside the city or killed in gas vans.
Research of the history of Stavropol Medical Institute's Jewish staff both memorializes the Jewish physicians and scientists and opens a window into Jewish physicians' activity in Nazi-occupied Soviet regions; a research area in its infancy warranting deeper investigation.
Keywords: Jewish physicians, Holocaust, gas vans, Stavropol medical institute, World War II, Holocaust testimonies, Caucasian Jews during the Holocaust
In the first two decades of the 21st century, research of the history of Jewish medicine during the Holocaust expanded. Studies were written on the medical activity in German-occupied areas, particularly the large and medium-sized ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia, in addition to Holland, Hungary, and Germany, and Jewish physicians' activity in the camps. Conspicuously absent is the study of Soviet Jewish medicine and physicians in areas occupied by the Germans in World War II with the German offensive against the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941.
This article sheds light on the fate of 36 Jewish physicians and scientists from Stavropol Medical Institute in the North Caucasus during the Holocaust—renowned professors, lecturers in all branches of medicine, of which one third were women of outstanding medical achievements.
The description draws on writings by researchers from the Commonwealth, including Stavropol, witness testimonies collected by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission to investigate Nazi atrocities (1943–1945), and the memoirs of Ludmila Schwartzman, daughter-in-law of Prof. Jacob Schwartzman, renowned cardiologist before the war and senior Medical Institute physician murdered with the rest.
The article describes the history of Caucasian Jews and thousands of Jewish refugees who sought shelter in the area, focusing on Stavropol's Jews, including numerous Medical Institute teachers, researchers and their families, either shot to death in forests outside the city or killed in gas vans.
Research of the history of Stavropol Medical Institute's Jewish staff both memorializes the Jewish physicians and scientists and opens a window into Jewish physicians' activity in Nazi-occupied Soviet regions; a research area in its infancy warranting deeper investigation.
Keywords: Jewish physicians, Holocaust, gas vans, Stavropol medical institute, World War II, Holocaust testimonies, Caucasian Jews during the Holocaust
Before, During and After the Holocaust
NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues will devote its issue no. 35 (Fall 2019) to Jewish women medical practitioners (nurses and physicians) in Europe during the Holocaust and in the pre- and postwar years, under the consulting editorship of Miriam Offer of Western Galilee College (Israel) and Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, Director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.
Academic scholarship on the practice of medicine during the Holocaust has developed only since the 1980s. On one hand, early investigations of Jewish medical activities, which began in the ghettos and camps during the Holocaust itself and continued immediately afterwards, were shunted to the margins in favor of other, more apparently pressing topics (such as Jewish leadership, Jewish resistance and the roles of “bystanders”). On the other hand, German physicians who served under the Nazis and continued to hold senior medical positions after the war actively silenced this research, to conceal the German medical system's criminal activities and their personal involvement in them.
Studies of Nazi medicine resurged in the 1980s, preceding and influencing renewed research of Jewish medicine in the Holocaust, especially since 2000. However, little has been written on gender issues, and descriptions of women's central role in the formation of the medical systems that were established independently by the Jews during the Holocaust and in the pre- and postwar years are conspicuously absent.
Proposals for submissions to the issue may address but are not confined to the following subject areas:
• Methodological and theoretical aspects of the study of gender-related aspects of Jewish medical activities prior to, during, and immediately after the Holocaust.
• Female Jewish medical and nursing students in Europe during the interwar period.
• Jewish women's participation in and management of medical and health institutions throughout the study period.
• Biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and testimonies of or about the activities of Jewish women medical practitioners throughout the study period.
• Roles and activities of Jewish women in the medical services in ghettos, camps, forests and hideouts.
• Women medical practitioners’ roles in coping with gender-related medical decrees and female morbidity during the Holocaust.
• The absorption and contribution of women survivor-physicians and nurses to the formation of the medical and nursing systems in the early years of the State of Israel and in Jewish communities in the Diaspora.
Proposals of not more than one page, describing the research topic and the methodology and/or sources on which the study is based, should be sent to Deborah Greniman, Managing Editor of NASHIM, by September 20, 2018, at nashim@schechter.ac.il.
Final date for submission of articles: December 1, 2018. Submissions may be up to 12,000 words in length, not previously published or under consideration for publication elsewhere. All scholarly articles will be subject to double-blind peer review. Academic Editor of Nashim: Renée Levine Melammed.
Nashim is published jointly by the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and Indiana University Press.
Following the First International Scholars Workshop at the Center for Medicine after the Holocaust in Houston, in March 2015, there has been substantial collaboration and international cooperation for the development of the field
Jewish Medicine in Poland During the Holocaust
By Miriam Offer
Yad Vashem Publications
The conference organizers believe that the medical activity during the Nazi period poses a multidisciplinary challenge, which may contribute to a deeper understanding of core aspects of the Nazi Holocaust period as well as of its postwar implications right up to the present day. This applies to the medical and science professions as well as to additional levels of social and political dynamics in the 21st century.
The conference will include lectures presenting new findings and emphases and will re-examine grave issues that have previously been discussed. The program will include discussions of the role played by scientists and medical persons in strengthening the National Socialist ideology and how they contributed to the acceleration of the Final Solution. New research will be presented on the role of German nurses in service of the Nazi ideology. Other sessions will revisit issues related to crimes led by psychiatrists, dentists, roentgenologists, gynecologists, researchers of anatomy, and other professionals. New research will be discussed on the criminal medical experiments and exploitation of victims’ bodies for scientific research, not only during the Holocaust but also decades later!
In addition to deepening the discourse on the moral deterioration process of the medical systems and the physicians in Nazi Germany, we will discuss new studies on the activities of Jewish physicians in the various regions under Nazi occupation, as well as the uniqueness of the reaction of the Jewish physicians during the Holocaust: How, as persecuted victims, the Jews, independently, set up impressive, moral, professional medical systems under genocide conditions.
The aim of the conference is to present new, up-to-date research on all aspects of Medicine in the Holocaust and Beyond, to discuss the research agenda in the field, and to spur international collaboration to advance research, teaching, and the public discourse.
During the conference, a proposal will be made to include this important history of medicine period in the compulsory curriculum of medical faculties worldwide. Teaching programs and learning material will be presented. The conference organizers are convinced that learning about both the darker and brighter sides pertaining to the role of physicians and their organizations in medicine during the Holocaust can serve as a major tool for shaping the professional identity of present and future health care professionals.
The conference participants believe that the study of the history of medicine in the Holocaust and beyond poses an essential warning to novices in science and medicine and to patients, who are confronted with a world of technological and medical achievements that have the power to either improve or destroy humanity.