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SUMMARY:Rachel Auerbach\, Cultural Genocide and a New Conception of Victim
 s’ Testimonies - Professor Leora Bilsky (Tel Aviv University)
DTSTART:20210608T170000Z
DTEND:20210608T180000Z
UID:TALK159403@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Julian Siebert
DESCRIPTION:Since the 1990s\, international criminal law has struggled to 
 find the proper role for victims in mass atrocities trials. It has gradual
 ly moved from viewing victims instrumentally\, as supplying eyewitness tes
 timonies for the prosecution\, towards recognizing the agency of victims a
 nd seeing them as active participants in such trials. In this lecture Prof
 . Bilsky returns to the forgotten contribution of a Jewish woman\, Rachel 
 Auerbach\, an historian\, writer and holocaust survivor\, to the developme
 nt of victim-centered trials in the wake of WWII. Auerbach developed her i
 deas on victims’ testimonies  and cultural genocide as part of a group o
 f Jewish activists in Warsaw ghetto who\, under the leadership of historia
 n Immanuel Ringelblum\, formed a secret archive\, known as The Oneg Shabbe
 s archive. After the war\, Aurebach who was one of three survivors of the 
 archive’s group\, went on to translate these ideas into a new praxis of 
 collecting victims’ testimonies\, first in the Central Jewish Historical
  Commission in Poland (CZKH)\, and later after her emigration to Israel\, 
 as director of the testimony unit of Yad Vashem. In anticipation of the Ei
 chmann trial in 1961 Auerbach promoted a new conception of a victims’ ce
 ntered trial\, which the Israeli prosecution partly adopted. However\, her
  ideas and legacy have largely been forgotten and did not receive recognit
 ion in the annals of international law. This talk recovers Rachel Auerbach
 ’s early efforts to re-imagine the role of the victims in Holocaust tria
 ls by putting forward a new conception of testimony as resistance to cultu
 ral genocide. The talk will also shed light on why women’s contributions
  to international law are largely forgotten or marginalized\, and why even
  the ‘historical turn’ of international law\, and the growing research
  on the unique contribution of Jewish émigré-lawyers to the development 
 of international law\, did not help recover their legacy. \n\nRegister "he
 re":https://wolfson-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/webinar/register/6116184761138/WN_x-
 lBjZpOQTKNTR4AiM8lmA\n
LOCATION:Wolfson College Zoom webinar
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