Remembering influential Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer

Prominent Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer died on Friday, aged 98.

Born in 1926 in Prague, Bauer and his family fled to Mandatory Palestine in 1939, on the day Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.

After spending his teenage years in Haifa, Bauer studied at Cardiff University on a scholarship, but was interrupted by the 1948 War of Independence, returning to Israel to fight.

He joined Kibbutz Shoval in his mid-20s, affiliating with the socialist-Zionist HaShomer HaTzair movement and its Knesset party, Mapam.

Bauer published over 40 books on the Holocaust and antisemitism.

His early research focused on Jewish-organised resistance to the Nazi regime. At a time when many Israelis viewed Holocaust survivors as passive “sheep to the slaughter” who had not left Europe in time, Bauer collected oral histories from survivors who told a very different story. He challenged the idea that resistance to Nazi Germany consisted only of physical violence.

Bauer played an important role in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance since its inception in 1998, and helped draft its controversial yet popular Working Definition of Antisemitism.

He advocated for ending conflict with Palestine. During the British Mandate, he supported a binational state, but by 1948, concluded the prospect to be unrealistic.

In 2011, Bauer joined other public figures in signing a “declaration of independence from the occupation”, calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state and asserting such a state’s importance in maintaining Israel’s independence.

“We are occupying people who hate us, and that’s not a good thing. As long as the kind of nationalist government that we have is in power, there’s no possibility of a solution,” he said.

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Yehuda Bauer, influential Holocaust scholar, dies at age 98 (Times of Israel)

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