Jewish Ghettos

Jewish ghettos: The basic history of the formation of the Jewish ghettos, including the everyday life and economic hardships faced by the communities.

By definition, a ghetto is an area, usually characterized by poverty and poor living conditions, which houses many people of a similar religion, race or nationality. They served to confine these groups of people and isolate them from the rest of the community because of political or social differences. However, the Jewish ghettos established throughout Europe were more than just a way for the Germans to isolate the Jewish community. They were the first step in making Hitler’s final solution possible. The ghettos were the means of organizing all of the Jews together and preparing them to be shipped to concentration camps. However, these ghettos soon evolved into political, religious and social entities that served the community and began to resemble a form of self-ruling government. Furthermore, many of these ghettos were different from one another because of different internal structures of the Jewish community or the diversity of the personalities of the leaders of the council in the Jewish community. However, the ghettos must be analyzed as if they are all “one history.”(Holocaust) In fact, many of the communities were the same with regards to Jewish perceptions and reactions concerning life and the difficulties being faced by each community in its occupied territory. This research paper discusses the common everyday trials and tribulations faced by all the ghettos and looks at the ghettos from a political and socio-economic point of view. (Holocaust)

First, it is important to understand the history behind the ghettos and discuss their centralization in Poland. Hitler incorporated the western part of Poland into Germany according to race doctrine. He intended that Poles were to become the slaves of Germany and that the two million Jews therein were to be concentrated in ghettos in Poland's larger cities. Later this would simplify transport to the death camps. Nazi occupation authorities officially told the story that Jews were natural carriers of all types of diseases, especially typhus, and that it was necessary to isolate Jews from the Polish community. Jewish neighborhoods thus were transformed into prisons. The five major ghettos were located...

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... not go far enough to commit acts of terrorism simply because of Faith. Jihad, or holy war, is the sole emotion, not act, which strengthens the will to perform horrible crimes on humanity. Simply saying that a faith-based idea can go as far as the perpetrator is willing.

In conclusion, we have studied the history and present events surrounding the Holocaust. We have studied the ideology and the reasons behind both the Jewish and the German involvement. In the end, I found that I still feel the same way about the Holocaust that I did before taking this class. I think that it takes a certain kind of person to commit those murderous acts and the idea of “just following orders” is ridiculous because it assumes that free will is no longer considered strong enough to prevent the ordered killing of millions of people. The important aspects of today’s society in relation to the existence of God in our lives are disturbed by the lack of faith in God for not being around when his people are suffering the most. How can these acts, like the Holocaust and the genocidal feud in Rwanda, be analyzed without accepting the absence of God in relation to these events?