Nearly three million Soviet Jews died in the Holocaust, but unlike other Jews in Eastern Europe, Soviet Jews were not sent to concentration camps. Instead they were killed where they lived, in their villages and towns. Professor Anna Shternshis will examine the scale of the Holocaust in the U.S.S.R., its impact on Soviet Jewry, and how archival material – released only with the collapse of the Soviet Union – provided new insights about this aspect of Holocaust history.

Anna Shternshis is an Associate Professor of Yiddish and Associate Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1929-1939 (Indiana, 2006) and the forthcoming Jewish Daily Life under Stalin (Oxford University Press).

For more information about Holocaust Education Week 2014, visit the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre's website.