And Every Single One Was Someone

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And Every Single One Was Someone is the title of a book published in 2013 by the Israeli Gefen Publishing House in memory of the Jews murdered during the Holocaust .

content

The book contains - apart from the title page - only the English word "Jew" ("Jude") repeated six million times on 1250 pages. For this purpose, 120 lines and 40 columns are printed on each side, i.e. the word "Jew" 4800 times. The font is Minion with a font size of 5.5 points . The cover of the approximately 3.3 kilogram heavy volume is designed like a tallit and bears no title or other information. The title page lists the name of the initiator Phil Chernofsky under the book title. This is followed by a handwritten consecutive numbering of the volume as one of 6,000,000 copies. Under the numbering there is the writing "THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED IN MEMORY OF" and space to enter a name with the place and date of the birth and death of the person honored. There the owner should be able to enter a dedication, usually the name of a murdered relative or that of another victim of the Holocaust such as Janusz Korczak .

history

The idea for this book was the rabbi Phil Chernofsky, who in the late 1970s in a yeshiva in Kew Garden Hills in New York City Quarter Queens young adults in mathematics, science and taught about Judaism and the Holocaust. He realized that his students were unable to infer the true dimension of the Holocaust from the abstract figures of six million murdered Jews. In a first attempt, he had his students write down the word "Jew" incessantly in an exercise lasting 30 minutes. As a result, the word was written down 40,000 times. Chernofsky hung the sheets on the walls of the classroom, pointing out that the size of the number and the area the sheets occupied were next to nothing compared to the dimensions of the Holocaust.

Years later, Chernofsky made a new attempt. He printed the word "Jew" multiple times on one page and photocopied that sheet of paper until it was repeated six million times. He had these copies bound in order to obtain a book. He kept this book at home and occasionally showed it to visitors. In 2013 he showed the book to an employee of the Gefen Publishing House in Jerusalem , who in turn informed the publisher's director, Ilan Greenfield. Greenfield, the son of Hana Greenfield , who had survived Auschwitz , Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps , was deeply impressed by the book and immediately decided that his publisher should publish it regardless of the prospect of making a profit.

Goal setting

The editors see the book not as a classic book edition, but as a work of art. It should appear in a "limited" total edition of six million copies in the long term. According to Ilan Greenfield, communities should be encouraged to use the book in education and to use it to visualize the incredible number of Holocaust victims. Positive feedback came from Abraham Foxman , then chairman of the American Anti-Defamation League , and from Jewish communities in Denver , Johannesburg and Sydney . Already in the year of publication, volumes were distributed to a number of Israeli and American politicians, with the intention of distributing them among the heads of state of the world. A goal of the project is to provide a book for presentation to their students for every teacher in the world who teaches about the Holocaust in class.

reception

The book was particularly welcomed by leading representatives of Judaism in the United States . However, it was also pejoratively referred to as a gimmick among Holocaust experts . Avner Shalev , director of the Israeli Yad Vashem memorial , compared the book with the performance of his institution, which by 2013 had succeeded in determining the names and, in many cases, the biographical details of 4.3 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Shalev explicitly referred to the monumental Book of Names , which was created with the support of Yad Vashem and which has been listing the previously known names of the murdered at a height of more than two meters and a circumference of more than two meters in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum since 2013 . Finally, Shalev stated that more than 6,000 books on the Holocaust are published annually.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Marion Fischel: Publisher Hana Greenfield dies at 87 , Jerusalem Post, January 28, 2014, accessed October 23, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b c Jodi Rudoren: Holocaust Told in One Word, 6 Million Times , The New York Times , January 25, 2014, accessed October 23, 2018.