The Microhistory of Israeli Holocaust Research: Dov Levin and the Kovno Partisans Write Their Own Stories

Abstract

This paper traces the entry of partisan commemoration into academic research and the development of a young partisan, Dov Levin, into one of the foremost Israeli historians of the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance in the Baltic States.

During the 1948 War of Independence, Levin urged his partisan comrades to commemorate their activity in the partisans. This paper employs the microhistoric approach in discussing Levin’s historical research on the Kovna partisans. It describes the development of research on Jewish resistance from the early politically biased works to the academic approach and finally to the birth of an academic field with methodological tools. It analyzes the way the partisans’ documentation promoted the development of oral history in Israel, and focuses on the case of Levin and the Kovna partisans as an example of how Holocaust research and commemoration stemmed from the grass roots. The paper explains the openness in Israeli society and academia in the 1950s and 60s to the survivors as the bearers of the burden of commemoration. In this sense microhistory is linked to the direction of Holocaust research the early years of the state.