A New Life in Israel: Kibbutz Merhavia
Prof Shimon Redlich (Emeritus, Ben Gurion University)
SPEAKER: Shimon Redlich was born in 1935 in Lwów and grew up in Brzezany. He was saved during WWII and the Holocaust by a Polish and Ukranian family. Between 1945 and 1950 he stayed in postwar Lodz and then emigrated to Israel in early 1950. There he lived in kibbutz Merhavia 1950-57. He studied for a BA at Hebrew University, an MA at Harvard, and PhD at New York University. During his career, he wrote books and articles on the history of Jews in Eastern Europe. Since retirement from Ben Gurion University in 2003, he has published two volumes of his autobiography in historical context, one on his childhood in Brzezany and the other on his adolescence in Lodz. This presentation will be part of the third and last volume: ‘A New Life in Israel, 1950-54.’