George Kadish, born Zvi (Hirsh) Kadushin (1910 September 1997), was a

Lithuanian Jewish Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks () are Jews with roots in the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (covering present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia, the northeastern Suwałki and Białystok regions of Poland, as well as adjacent areas o ...

photographer who documented life in the

Kovno Ghetto The Kovno Ghetto was a ghetto established by Nazi Germany to hold the Lithuanian Jews of Kaunas during the Holocaust. At its peak, the Ghetto held 29,000 people, most of whom were later sent to concentration and extermination camps, or were sho ...

during the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

, the period of the

Nazi German Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

genocide against Jews. Prior to

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

he was a mathematics, science and electronics teacher at a Hebrew High School in

Kovno Kaunas (; ; also see other names) is the second-largest city in Lithuania after Vilnius and an important centre of Lithuanian economic, academic, and cultural life. Kaunas was the largest city and the centre of a county in the Duchy of Trakai ...

Lithuania Lithuania (; lt, Lietuva ), officially the Republic of Lithuania ( lt, Lietuvos Respublika, links=no ), is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania ...

. As a hobby, Kadish was a photographer. He was skilled at making home-made cameras. During the period of Nazi control of Lithuania (along with indigenous Lithuanian collaborators) he successfully photographed various scenes of life and its difficulties in the ghetto in clandestine circumstances. Kadish constructed cameras by which he could photograph through the buttonhole of his coat or over a window sill. He was able to photograph sensitive scenes that would attract the ire of Nazis or collaborators, such as scenes of people gathered for forced labor, burning of the ghetto, and deportations.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto: A Project of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, Washington, DC, 1997.
His photographs were featured in a 2003 exhibition at the

YIVO YIVO (Yiddish: , ) is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to Yiddish. (The word '' ...

Institute in New York.

Bibliography

*Kadish, George, et al. ''Days of Remembrance, 1987: Family Life in the Kovno Ghetto.'' San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1991. Book is catalog of his work, as displayed in 1987 at the Russell Senate Office Building. "George's Kaddish for Kovno and the Six Million." Catherine Gong, edited by Michael Berenbaum. 2009. Also located at Stanford University (Cecil H. Green), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive, and Tom Lantos Foundation for Human Rights. See also, http://catherinegong.com/georges-kaddish-for-kovno-and-the-six-million/

References

2. "The Final Reckoning" Author Sam Bourne : Published by Harper Collins. References to George Kadish

External links

link to online Holocaust Encyclopedia article with links to photographs by Kadish

Lithuanian photographers Lithuanian Jews 1997 deaths Kovno Ghetto inmates Holocaust photographers 1910 births {{Jewish-hist-stub