Elkhanan Elkes

Kaunas Jewish Council in 1943. Elkhanan Elkes is in the middle.

Elkhanan Elkes , Hebrew אלחנן אלקס, also Elchanan Elchis or Elkis , (born 1879 in Kalvarija , Lithuania ; died October 17, 1944 in Landsberg am Lech , Germany ) was a doctor who had to take over the management of the Judenrat in the Kauen concentration camp . He was murdered in the Shoah .

Life

Elkes was born in 1879 in the municipality of Kalvarija , 35 miles outside of Kaunas . He was the second of six children. His religious father Israel Meir Elkes ran a small shop for everyday needs with his wife Sara. According to his descendants, no precise information is available about Elke's school days, but it is known that he successfully completed his medical studies at the Albertus University in Königsberg in 1903 with a dissertation on the nature of the thyroid gland at the time of birth . He then began to work in the medical and surgical field at the Königsberg University Hospital and also gave Hebrew lessons, while he met his future wife Miriam Malbin. She was the daughter of the medium-sized grain trader Moses Malbin and his wife Esther.

When the First World War broke out , he was a military doctor of the Russian troops with the rank of officer and accompanied various units on their campaigns on the Oder and Urals . He experienced anti-Semitism in the army . The Russian Revolution occurred a long way from Orsha , where he was stationed at the time. In 1919 or 1920 Elkes decided to move to Kaunas, which had become the new capital of the First Lithuanian Republic .

There he opened a practice and gained an excellent reputation, as Antanas Smetona and other Lithuanian independence politicians and diplomats were among his patients. His practice was also open to destitute people. With his professional colleagues Berman and Brauns, he began to set up the department for internal medicine at the newly founded Jewish Hospital Bikkur Holim . He also got involved with Moshe Schwabe , who later became the rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , for the establishment of a Jewish secondary school in the city. He stayed away from political office.

On June 22, 1941, the population of Kaunas was alerted by the Soviet radio that German troops were about to invade Lithuanian territory. On the night of June 24, 1941, they reached Kaunas and established their reign of terror. Lithuanian fascists had already murdered the first Jews on June 23. 8,000 Jews were murdered in the city in the first three weeks. On their instructions, the chief rabbi of Kaunas, Avraham Kahane Shapiro, had to provide three community members on July 7, 1941, who were to be tasked with setting up an organization for the Jewish population that would serve the German war economy. His choice fell on the former Lithuanian parliamentarian Leib Garfunkel , member of Poale Zion , as well as the officer Jacob Goldberg and the German-speaking doctor Ephraim Rabinovitch, two rabbis accompanied them. They had to go to the Gestapo .

The occupying power gave instructions for the establishment of a ghetto in the Viljampole (Slobotka) district by August 15, 1941. On August 4, 1941, the leading members of the Jewish community met in a classroom. A so-called Head Jew had to be appointed. Several possible candidates were considered and rejected, whereupon one participant suggested Elkhanan Elkes. The proposal met with general approval. Elkes accepted the election. Then the community determined the other members of the Judenrat. According to the contemporary witness Herman Kruk, however , the decision-making power on the main issues lay with Hirsh Levin, Yankev Goldberg and Rabbi Dovid Icykowicz. The former is said to have had many supporters as the owner of two important properties and as a revisionist .

As a result, Elkes had to pass the decisions of the Nazi administration on to the Jewish population of Kaunas, always with the attempt to obtain small reliefs for his fellow sufferers. Various public institutions were created to supply the 30,000 Jews imprisoned in the ghetto, as well as a “ghetto police” and a court. The full extent of the impending crimes was still unknown to him at the time, but under the command of Helmut Raucas , the SS murdered 9,200 residents of the ghetto in a nearby fortress on October 28, 1941, on the instructions of the commandant of Einsatzgruppe Drei . As a senior Jew , Elkes had witnessed the selection in the ghetto. By December 1, 1941, 137,346 Jews had been murdered throughout Lithuania, including 11 members of Elke's own family. According to Yad Vashem , Elkes supported the Yidishe Algemeyne Kamf Organizatsye , and he also had contacts with the Polish resistance . In contrast to individual upper Jews in other ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, such as Chaim Rumkowski in Łódź , he did not claim any privileges for himself. His attitude is unanimously described by all survivors as selfless.

As the number of survivors fell, the area of the ghetto was reduced for the first time on May 1, 1942. On August 26th the schools and synagogues were closed. The production sector of the German occupying power demanded that the remaining workers be spared, while the SS wanted to accelerate the killing. Elkes saw his task in making the employers aware of the benefits of the survival of their workforce, knowing that the overall military situation had turned to the disadvantage of Nazi Germany. But in September 1943 the SS, under the new command of Wilhelm Gätze , prevailed. On July 13, 1944, the removal by train began. Elkes was brought to the Dachau concentration camp on July 15, 1944 . He died of exhaustion on October 17 in the Landsberg satellite camp . His wife survived in the Stutthof concentration camp .

Elkhanan Elkes had two children; Sara Elkes and Joel Elkes, who both also survived the war. It is known of his son that after his youth he lived in Switzerland and from 1931 in England. He was an internationally renowned psychiatry professor. Sara Elkes came to England in 1937, where she also began an academic career.

literature

Leib Garfunkel: Kovna ha-Yehudit be-Hurbana (The Destruction of Jewish Kovno) . Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1959.
Dennis B. Klein (editor): The Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto . United States Holocaust Museum / Bullfinch Press, New York 1997.
Avraham Tory: Surviving the Holocaust - The Kovno Ghetto Diary . Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1990.

Web links

Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team: Dr Elchanan Elkes chairman of the Kovno Judenrat. Letters to London.
Jewish Virtual Library: Elkes, Elhanan
JewishGen: Terrible Choice: Elchanan Elkes

Individual evidence

↑ Joel Elkes: Dr. Elkhanan Elkes of the Kovno Ghetto - A son's Holocaust memoir . Ed .: Aubrey Newman, University of Leicester. 10th edition. Paraclete Press, Brewster (Massachusetts) 1999, ISBN 1-55725-231-9 (Originally published at Vale Publishing in London, UK, as: Values, beliefs, and survival ).
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Herman Kruk: The last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania - Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the camps, 1939-1945 . Ed .: Benjamin Harshav. Yale University Press, New Haven 2002, ISBN 0-300-04494-1 , pp. 206 ff .

personal data
SURNAME	Elkes, Elkhanan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Elchis, Elchanan; Elkis, Elchanan; אלחנן אלקס (Hebrew)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Doctor, victim of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH	1879
PLACE OF BIRTH	Kalvarija , Lithuania
DATE OF DEATH	October 17, 1944
Place of death	Landsberg am Lech , Germany

[1] Joel Elkes: Dr. Elkhanan Elkes of the Kovno Ghetto - A son's Holocaust memoir . Ed .: Aubrey Newman, University of Leicester. 10th edition. Paraclete Press, Brewster (Massachusetts) 1999, ISBN 1-55725-231-9 (Originally published at Vale Publishing in London, UK, as: Values, beliefs, and survival ).

[:0-2] Herman Kruk: The last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania - Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the camps, 1939-1945 . Ed .: Benjamin Harshav. Yale University Press, New Haven 2002, ISBN 0-300-04494-1 , pp. 206 ff .