Taubman Symposium Talk: James A. Diamond

Within the walls of the well-known Warsaw Ghetto uprising, another kind of resistance was mounted, not by combatants, but rather by a group of poets, artists, and historians known as the Oyneg Shabbes collective. Far less known than the Ghetto, that literary and artistic circle composed and ultimately buried thousands of documents attesting to the suffering under Nazi oppression. Among those documents, recovered after the war, was a manuscript of weekly sermons delivered during three years in the Ghetto (1939–42) by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889–1943), Grand Rabbi of Piaseczno (Poland). As a Hasidic leader, Shapira desperately tried to preserve his and his community’s faith confronted by unimaginable hardship, pain, and loss. He persisted in the face of mass deportations and continued to meticulously edit his sermons even after he had ceased delivering them and there was no longer a community to comfort and inspire. It is a rare testament to one human being’s struggle with the incomprehensible evil of the Holocaust and with his own herculean resistance to it.

Diamond has occupied the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at Waterloo University for the past twenty-five years. He holds law degrees from Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto University (LLB, 1978) and New York University School of Law (LLM, 1979). In 1990s he received an MA (1992) and PhD (1999) in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto.