The Ringelblum Archive

Emanuel Ringelblum

Historian Social Activist

GALLERY

Ringelblum and his son Uri.

Dr. Emaneul Ringelblum’s diploma to teach secondary school, issued by the State Examination Commission in Warsaw for candidates for teaching, dated 15 November 1928. Contains Ringelblum’s biography.

Invitation for Dr. Ringelblum to the celebration of the opening on 10 Jan 1942 of the “Dobra Wola” (“Good Will”) Boarding School Orphanage [ul. Dzielna 61]

Ticket of admission dated 26 August 1938 for Emanuel Ringelblum for the Casino Municipale di Venezia

Proof of payment for Emanuel Ringelblum for the Department of Payments for the benefit of the Hospital Management and the Health Service (ul. Ceglana 7), from the Jewish Council in Warsaw. Dated 14 November 1941 of Em. [Emanuel] Ringelblum (ul. Leszno 18, apt. 31).

Invitation to Emanuel Ringelblum to a play titled In reydl. [In the little circle] at the Eldorado Theater on 12 October 1940.

(Front) OBW, Certificate dated 4 August 1942 about transfer to SS of the registration card of Leon Ringelblum (ul. Dzika 25), employee of the workshop.

Telegram requesting information about family. From Jizia [Giza Eisenbach] (Buczacz), dated 19 September 1942, to Judyta Ringelblum (ul. Leszno 18, apt. 31).

Pass dated 2 November 1942 for Emanuel Ringelblum, authorizing entry into the grounds of the workshop. Hoffman German Textile Manufacturing [Deutsche Textil-Verarbeitung W. [Wilfried] Hoffmann]

Invitation for Emanuel Ringelblum (ul. Leszno 18) to the Passover seder celebration on 1 April 1942

ABOUT

Emanuel Ringelblum was a Polish-Jewish historian, educator, and political organizer whose leadership of the Oyneg Shabes Archive constitutes one of the most significant undertakings of intellectual resistance during the Holocaust. Combining scholarly rigor with political engagement, Ringelblum was committed to documenting Jewish life in extremis — not only to preserve evidence of Nazi crimes, but to affirm the cultural, social, and historical complexity of Polish Jewry at the moment of its destruction.

Born in Buczacz, Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1900, Ringelblum came of age in a region marked by the tensions of modernization, nationalism, and shifting imperial rule. His father, a grain merchant and self-identified maskil (proponent of Jewish Enlightenment), prioritized secular and Jewish education alike. Ringelblum attended a modern heder, followed by the local Polish gymnasium, before fleeing with his family to Nowy Sącz in western Galicia during World War I. There, he joined the Left Poale Zion (Workers of Zion), a Marxist-Zionist party whose synthesis of socialism, Yiddishism, and diasporic cultural autonomy would shape his intellectual and political commitments for the rest of his life.

In 1920, Ringelblum moved to Warsaw and enrolled in the University of Warsaw, where he earned a doctorate in history with a dissertation on the Jewish community of Warsaw in the early modern period. Barred from an academic post due to antisemitic restrictions on Jewish faculty, he instead taught history in Jewish secondary schools—including the Yehudiya girls’ gymnasium—and pursued research and publishing through extra-academic venues. Ringelblum became deeply involved in the activities of YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut), where he helped organize archival and ethnographic initiatives that aimed to reconstruct Jewish history from below.

This orientation toward the social and cultural life of ordinary Jews—artisans, laborers, refugees, and women—marked a distinctive departure from older historiographies centered on rabbinic elites or elite political figures. Inspired by figures such as Simon Dubnow and Isaac Schiper, Ringelblum emphasized the study of economic life, communal institutions, and everyday practices. Through YIVO and the Left Po‘alei Tsiyon, he helped organize zamler (collector) networks to gather local histories, folklore, ephemera, and documents from Jewish communities across Poland.

In tandem with his historical work, Ringelblum was a committed educator and social organizer. During the 1930s, he served as a leading figure in the Ovnt Kursn far Arbeter (Evening Courses for Workers), a network of adult education programs aimed at Jewish laborers excluded from formal schooling. He also became an important functionary of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), where he implemented self-help programs—including interest-free loan funds and vocational training—for small traders and artisans. His political commitments to proletarian Jewish culture, Yiddish language, and mutual aid were consistently integrated with his historiographical orientation.

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 marked a turning point in Ringelblum’s trajectory. He remained in Warsaw during the siege and, as conditions deteriorated, began informally collecting testimonies and documents on the destruction of Jewish communal life. By late 1940, shortly after the sealing of the Warsaw Ghetto, he had assembled a clandestine group of scholars, educators, rabbis, and activists under the code name Oyneg Shabes (Joy of the Sabbath). The group, which eventually included more than sixty contributors, undertook a systematic effort to document all aspects of ghetto life—material conditions, cultural activity, social fragmentation, religious practice, political debates, and Nazi persecution.

From the outset, Ringelblum envisioned the archive as a collective, interdisciplinary endeavor. He resisted attempts to impose ideological constraints on the material gathered, and he encouraged participation across political and religious divisions. The guiding principle was inclusivity: “Nothing is unimportant,” Ringelblum wrote. The archive included diaries, street songs, underground newspapers, survey data, ration cards, artworks, and testimonies from deportees and camp escapees. His methods drew heavily from YIVO’s research model, combining ethnographic detail with empirical rigor.

Beginning in 1941, Oyneg Shabes initiated a long-term project titled “Two and a Half Years,” intended as a comprehensive sociological study of ghetto life. Contributors circulated questionnaires on topics ranging from house committees and food smuggling to religious observance and Polish-Jewish relations. Ringelblum insisted on the importance of historical documentation conducted “from within the event” — with the immediacy and complexity that only contemporaneous observation could capture.

As the mass deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began in July 1942, Ringelblum and his closest associates, including Israel Lichtenstein and Hersz Wasser, buried the first cache of the archive in metal boxes beneath a school building. A second cache, buried in early 1943, was sealed in aluminum milk cans. A third cache, prepared on the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has never been found. These materials — together comprising over 35,000 pages — represent the most extensive Jewish-produced documentation of the Holocaust from within occupied Poland.

In the final year of his life, Ringelblum was briefly imprisoned in the Trawniki labor camp but was rescued in a covert operation orchestrated by the Jewish underground and Polish resistance. He returned to hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he continued writing, including a major unfinished manuscript on Polish-Jewish relations during the war. In March 1944, the underground bunker sheltering his family was betrayed. Emanuel, his wife Yehudis, and their 13-year-old son Uri were captured and executed by the Gestapo.

Ringelblum’s contributions are not reducible to the sheer volume of documents he helped produce or preserve. His significance lies equally in his ethical conception of history: a vision of the historian’s task as a public duty, inseparable from social solidarity. Even as he recorded atrocity, he refused to reduce Jewish life to victimhood. In his methodology, Ringelblum combined empirical attention to detail with an insistence on pluralism, moral accountability, and intellectual self-discipline. He understood the political dimensions of memory, yet he sought to ground testimony in documentation capable of withstanding future scrutiny.

The Ringelblum Archive, recovered in part in 1946 and 1950, remains one of the most vital sources for Holocaust historiography and for understanding the Warsaw Ghetto as a space not only of suffering, but also of cultural resistance. The archive embodies a conception of historical practice rooted in the belief that, even in extremity, it is possible — and necessary — to tell one’s own story. Through his work, Ringelblum ensured that the final chapter of Polish Jewry would not be written solely by its destroyers.

The Ringelblum Archive