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“Mother Rachel and Her Children”: Artistic Expressions in Yiddish and Early Commemoration of the Holocaust in Finland

ABSTRACT The article explores a community that, in large part did not experience the atrocities of the Holocaust, but were nevertheless affected by it. The personal and communal impact of the Holocaust found its expression in a number of cultural ventures. Drawing on previously unused archival material from the Finnish Jewish Archives (found at the National Archives of Finland) and the YIVO Archives, I will demonstrate that, while avoiding the public eye, the Helsinki Jewish community sought and found many ways to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust within their own communal spaces. My focus will be on a Yiddish pageant called Mother Rachel and her children written by Helsinki-born Jac Weinstein (1883–1976). This play depicts the two-thousand-year-long suffering of the Jewish people culminating in the death camps of the Third Reich. Weinstein’s pageant draws attention to the early years of Holocaust commemoration, its significance and its evolution in a country that was de facto allied with Nazi Germany in 1941–1944 and after the war fell into the Soviet Union’s sphere of interest. This unknown chapter in the history of Finnish Jews and Finland in general, speaks also to wider issues of Holocaust remembrance in immediate post-war Jewish communities, to questions about when and how the commemoration should take place and who should be commemorated.