Date Posted: Jan 31, 2025.
Written by: Paige Gavin
On January 16th, the Rituals in the Making team invited Jay Winter to discuss his current research on the history of the Mir Yeshiva and their story of survival.
“All wounds are not healed by time. Time itself is a wound within which life prevails. We do not overcome the finitude of death; we share it, as we share it with the life to which we give birth and for which we too will belong along with those having-been.” – Hans Ruin, Being with the Dead, p. 14
In collaboration with the GW History and Anthropology Departments, Rituals in the Making invited the esteemed Yale Professor Emeritus Jay Winter to lecture on his current research topic about the Mir Yeshiva. Dr. Winter is a historian of war and memory, focusing on the First World War, and is the author of numerous seminal works in the field, including his book Sites of Memory; Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European cultural history (Cambridge, 1995), and is editor, with the late Emmanuel Sivan, of War and Remembrance in the Twenty-First century (Cambridge, 2000). His most recent book is Statelessness after Arendt: Refugees in China and the Pacific during the Second World War, edited with Kolleen Guy. It will be published by Manchester University Press in 2025.
As a preview to his upcoming book, Winter lectured about the (deliberately) untold story of the Mir Yeshiva, a 300-person group of Jewish scholars, who survived the Holocaust by relocating from the town of Vilna (Lithuania) all the way to Shanghai, China. When the threat of fascism and genocide reached across Eastern Europe, the Mir Yeshiva found themselves as a crossroads—to leave or to stay put. The older generation within this yeshiva felt compelled to stay put in their homeland, but the younger generation urged the group to leave and find safety elsewhere. In order to leave, however, they needed money – and lots of it – to cover the cost of visas and travel. A few of the young Mir Yeshiva asked for visas from the Japanese, Russian, and Venezuelan ambassadors, who ended up giving them 300 visas. The visas, of course, cost around $36,000, which is equal to $11 million in 2025. The work and connections that went into obtaining this large amount of money relied on the younger generation who were brave enough to resist against their inner hierarchy—against the older generation in power.
The story of the Mir Yeshiva is quite astounding, as it is more than just about survival, but about the idea of parapolitics—the political power of the stateless. The Mir Yeshiva members were able to create their own cultural and political world in Shanghai for so long and were able to maintain their own spiritual world that they brought with them across the world. The opposing State wants the stateless to be weak and vulnerable, but that is not the actual case. Could we say that they have more agency than we give them, and that their survival was based on pure luck? Yes, we could; however, this question brings to rise the intellectual problem that is the instability of war and memory. As stated previously, the story of the Mir Yeshiva has been, as Winter argues, deliberately untold, because of the problems the younger generation caused by going against the elders’ wishes.
Professor Jay Winter answering questions. Photo by Paige Gavin.
Both war and memory are unstable fields that are constantly changing. When one diverges, the other adapts. Memory and history, especially when it comes to Jewish culture, are quick to be erased by the State and those in power. There is also a tendency to not give enough credit to those who rebelled against the highest authority, as we saw with the younger generation of the Mir Yeshiva. Survival always comes with a price—whether that be the loss of someone’s homeland or the loss of intellectual freedom. The way we construct our historical memory entails false binaries, such as military and civilian, oppressor and oppressed, villain and hero, war and peace. Yet, we cannot separate these binaries as they are so entangled with one another that as one changes, the other does as well. As Winter said, “War changes, and so does peace. If this is true, what does that say about the instability of memory? It turns into a kaleidoscope of human cruelty.”
What interests us, as Rituals in the Making, is this idea of memory as unstable. Memory is not static; it contorts and bends to our will. Winter challenges us to think outside of our linear conceptions of memory and history. How will the COVID-19 pandemic be remembered? Our team would argue that we are going through a time of a violent historical revisionism, a concept that goes beyond the idea of social forgetting and that turns the act of memorialization into an act of resilience against the state. With the help of Winter, we came to a relative conclusion that ritual acts as a frail stabilization in an unstable world. The rituals we form and enact in response to catastrophic disasters are a simple attempt to make sense of the world as it falls apart before our eyes. We hold our rituals close to us; believe in them even if they don’t quite make sense, because they help us persevere.