Tuvia Friling

Biography and early academic career

Tuvia Friling's parents with his elder brother and two sisters immigrated to Israel in 1951 from Bârlad, Romania. Arriving in Israel, the family, which had been prosperous in Romania, was first housed in a maabara (transit camp for new immigrants) in Beer Sheba. A year later they moved to a small apartment in a new neighborhood of the developing town. Tuvia Friling was born in Beer Sheba in 1953, two years after his family's arrival in Israel. In 1967, after completing elementary school in his hometown, he enrolled in the Jerusalem May Boyer boarding school for gifted students.

In 1971 he was drafted into the army and served as a squad commander in the 890 Paratroopers Battalion. In August 1973 he completed officer training and was deployed as platoon commander in the Golani Brigade's training base. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War he participated in two attempts to re-capture Mount Hermon, and fought in other battles on the Golan Heights. During the attrition war that followed and until the end of his regular military service he was deputy company commander in Golani. He continued to do reserve duty, eventually rising to the rank of major.

Friling received his B.A. with honors at the Ben-Gurion University in 1979 in Jewish and General History. For the four following years, 1979–1983, he taught history at a Beer-Sheba High School and worked as instructor for the teaching of history at Ben-Gurion University's teacher training program. He did his graduate studies at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where he completed his Masters degree with honors in 1984 (the topic of his thesis was "Ben-Gurion's Role in the Rescue Attempts of Children and in the Absorption Controversy") and received his Ph.D. in 1991 (the topic of his dissertation was "Ben-Gurion and the Destruction of European Jewry 1939–1945"). Both dissertations were supervised by Yehuda Bauer.

Prizes

Tuvia Friling was awarded the 1999 Mordechai Ish Shalom Prize for his book Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv leadership, and rescue attempts during the Holocaust; in 2001 he received the Prime Minister's Prize – the most prominent Prize awarded by the State Council for the Commemoration of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Additional Prizes: the David Tuviahu Prize of Yad Ben-Gurion; the Esther Parnas Prize of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem; the Denis Blum Prize of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; the Fridan Prize of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Hillel Kook Memorial Prize of the Institute for Mediterranean Affairs.

Academic positions and professional career

Friling began his academic career at Ben-Gurion University in 1977 as an instructor and research assistant, and has been teaching at the university ever since. During 1983–1991 he was a researcher at the Ben-Gurion Research Center as well as the director of the Ben-Gurion Archives. During 1993–2001 he served as director of the Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute and the Ben-Gurion Research Center in the University's Sde Boqer Campus. He initiated and in cooperation with the University's Computation center, established the digitalized Ben-Gurion Archive – a world class computerized archive and database that provides online access using full text retrieval software. For his accomplishments as the head of the Ben-Gurion institutes he was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize.

In the years 2001–2004 Friling served as Israel's State Archivist. In this position he initiated a master plan for upgrading Israel's archives system. The program's mainstays were: the construction of permanent quarters in Jerusalem housing the State Archives; the creation of a central modern storage center in the Negev for the archival holdings; the computerization of the State Archives and the creation of a computerized network of all Israel's public archives; the creation of the infrastructure and organization for the preservation of the State of Israel's computerized documentation and its conversion with the advent of new technological generations; the updating of the Israeli Archives' Law, shortening of the classification period, changes in the practice of destruction of the documentation in order to expand and enrich the quantity and variety of documentation that is preserved for perpetuity; and the establishment of a national Authority for Archives and Public Records.

In the years 2003–2004 Friling was one of the three co-vice chairs of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Nobel Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel.

Friling was a visiting scholar in various academic institutes in Israel and abroad: 1992–1993 at the Meyerhoff Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University of Maryland, College Park; 1996 at the Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Yarnton, Oxford; 1999–2000 at the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem and the Yitzhak Rabin Center, Tel Aviv; 2002–2004 at the Shalem Center, Jerusalem; 2006–2007 at the Center of Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; 2007–2008 at the Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies, University of Maryland; 2013-2014 at the Schusterman center for Israel studies, Brandeis university, Waltham, USA.

Friling served on the editorial boards of several academic journals: Iyunim Bitkumat Israel - Studies in Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel, published by the Ben-Gurion Research Institute; Israel Studies, published by the Ben-Gurion Research Institute and Brandeis University; and Shvut, published by the Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University and the Ben-Gurion Research Institute. Currently he serves at Israel Studies, published by the Ben-Gurion Research Institute and Brandeis University

Research interests

Friling's research interest focuses on the Zionist leadership's role in the nation building processes in the pre-state Yishuv and the State of Israel, as well as on David Ben-Gurion's leadership during that period and the ensemble of his decision making and strategic moves before and after the establishment of the State of Israel. In addition, Friling explored the Yishuv leadership's role in rescue attempts during the Holocaust and the impact of these issues on questions pertaining to Israeli identity. His book "Arrows in the Dark—David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv leadership, and rescue attempts during the Holocaust" (University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2005) analyzes the Yishuv's rescue efforts during the Holocaust and provides a detailed account of the scope and complexities of the activities carried out by David Ben-Gurion and the Yishuv leadership during that period.

Friling also dealt with post-Zionism and the roots of the controversy between so-called new historians and critical sociologists and "establishment" historians and sociologists. His article: The Seventh Million as the Zionist Movement's March of Folly, was published in 1992 and was among the first attempts to grapple with this controversy. Further contributions to this debate were an article he co-authored with Yehuda Bauer, that was published in Iton 77, and a comprehensive book he edited, entitled An Answer to a Post-Zionist Colleague – a compilation of articles by various researchers shedding light on different perspectives of this issue.

Friling also dealt with the historical and ideological roots of the debate about Israel's social and economic policy in recent years, and together with Daniel Gutwein and Avi Bareli edited a two volume publication Society and Economy in Israel: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.

Tuvia Friling was among Israel's pioneers in the development of computerized full-text databases of historical documentation based on modern retrieval systems. The digitalized online archive he created with his partners at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute in Sde Boqer provides scholars with unprecedented research opportunities. Friling also developed teaching methods for teaching history in a research environment and by means of computerized online settings. This program served as the foundation for scores of teacher training courses entitled "The Expedition to the Isle of Story".

Friling is at present engaged in researching the activities of the Yishuv's right-wing circles during the Holocaust in illegal immigration, aid and rescue, as well as their clandestine cooperation with American, British and other intelligence services, and their post World War II involvement in illegal immigration and the building of an armed force.

Who Are You Leon Berger? A story of a Kapo in Auschwitz, History, Memory and Politics

This book (Hebrew, Resling, 2009, 667 pp.) attempts to unravel the historical, political, and psychological forces that underlay the tragedy of a young Polish Jew, Eliezer Grynbaum (1908–1948), who was denounced as a Kapo for the role he played while interned at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Eliezer Grynbaum, who adopted the nom de guerre "Leon Berger" while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, was the communist son of Itzhak Grynbaum, the most prominent secular leader of interwar Polish Jewry, who later became the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive's Rescue Committee during the Holocaust, and the State of Israel's first Minister of the Interior. Eliezer Grynbaum's life story encompasses the tensions and tragedies of modern Jewish history— a Jewish community torn between Communism, Bundist socialism, Zionism, and ultra-Orthodoxy, and deeply battered by the deliberate Nazi attempt to eradicate it. By locating the biography of Eliezer Grynbaum within the varied cultural and political contexts in which he operated, the book brings to life the heart-wrenching debates that rent the Jewish community in Europe and Israel from the 1930s through the 1960s. It recreates not only the horrible dilemmas he confronted, but the Rashamon-like struggle over his memory, with radically different accounts by the family who loved him, the communist movement that disowned him, the ultra-Orthodox community that despised him, and the Zionist establishment that struggled to find a place for the wayward son of one of its leading politicians.

Eliezer was the second son of Itzhak and Miriam Grynbaum. His father was the most important Zionist politician in interwar Poland, which had the largest, most culturally vibrant, and most politically fragmented Jewish community in the world. The father was a champion of a secular, nationalist conception of Jewishness, whose major opponents included the communists — who sought to overcome Jewish particularity through universalist revolution — and the Ultra-Orthodox, who condemned the Zionists as heretics for their attempt to establish a Jewish state. As was often the case, the political and cultural tensions ran within families as well. So it was with the Grynbaums.

Eliezer began to study law, but was arrested in 1929 by the Polish secret police on account of his clandestine activity in the Communist Party. Following his trial, conviction and incarceration in the prison of Leczyca, his mother used the family's connection to Poland's political leadership to obtain his release after two and a half years in prison, on the condition that he leave the country. Young Grynbaum emigrated to France, where he became an activist in the Polish cell of the French Communist Party and a journalist for the communist press. As a communist, he joined the International Brigade and served in the Spanish Civil War. After the Brigade was disbanded, he returned to France where, with other suspect foreigners, he was confined to the detention camp at Saint Cyprien, while his mother struggled to use her connections to legalize his status in France. Continued involvement in the French Communist Party led to his arrest in Paris in the first years of the German occupation. He was subsequently interned in Beaune-la-Rolande, where he became the leader of the camp's inmates.

In June 1942, Eliezer was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. As was often the case, the communists in the camp tried to place their own members in privileged positions in the inmate hierarchy. Grynbaum became Blockaelteste (block elder) in Birkenau, earning him the epithet of Kapo. His role there was to become a matter of bitter contention. He acted with brutality toward some inmates, but whether his deeds were born of cruelty or, as he later argued, a strategic necessity under the morally intolerable conditions of the camp, remained a matter of dispute. As the Allied forces approached, Grynbaum and his fellow inmates were forcibly marched to Buchenwald in one of the infamous death marches. Immediately after the liberation, Grynbaum was twice put on trial at Buchenwald by a tribunal of inmates for his role in the camps. In both cases he was acquitted on the grounds of inconclusive evidence. On the orders of the Polish Communist Party, he returned to Paris as its representative. There, a judicial inquiry by the Polish Communist Party found him guilty of having been a Kapo and expelled him from the party. Next, the charges against him were investigated by a French juge d'instruction (examining magistrate). His friends and his father (by now a prominent official in the Zionist movement's quasi-government in Palestine) struggled to ensure that Grynbaum's side of the story was heard by the investigators, and the case was dismissed for insufficient evidence. Now Eliezer Grynbaum became a man without a country or a party. The government of France ordered his expulsion as an undesirable alien, but the ruling communist government of Poland, embarrassed by its association with a man increasingly stigmatized as a Nazi collaborator, refused his request to return to Poland. So Grynbaum, who had rejected Zionism throughout his adult life, was forced to seek refuge in the only place that would have him. Accompanied by his father, Eliezer arrived in Palestine on 1 May 1946. There he made repeated attempts to explain his role at Auschwitz to the skeptical officials of the Zionist government of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine). Still a committed communist, Eliezer sought once more to return to Poland, and was again denied entry by the Polish party. He struggled to build a new life with Stefa, a childhood friend and fellow survivor of Auschwitz. When the fledgling State of Israel came under attack, Eliezer, perhaps under paternal pressure, volunteered to join the Israeli defense forces, but rumors of his role as a Kapo led the army to reject him. Once again his father intervened, and Eliezer was permitted to enlist and join in the defense of Jerusalem. On 22 May 1948 he fell in the battle of Kibbutz Ramat Rachel, on the outskirts of the city. By evening, there were rumors that Eliezer had been executed by his comrades, in revenge for his role in Auschwitz. On learning of his death, Stefa committed suicide. The Grynbaum family grappled with the rumors about his execution and struggled to rehabilitate his reputation.

In the decades that followed his death, the public memory of Eliezer Grynbaum became a recurrent point of tension in Israeli political culture. His case was cited in the Knesset debates regarding the passage in 1951 of the "law against collaboration". His father, Itzhak, used up a great deal of his political capital to have Eliezer included in Scrolls of Fire, the prestigious memorial volume devoted to the fallen heroes of the War of Independence. The perceived pressure exerted by Itzhak Grynbaum on the volume's editors damaged his own reputation. In one of the most famous early Israeli Holocaust memoirs, Piepel (translated into English as Atrocity) by KaZetnik (the pen name of Yehiel Dinur), Eliezer served as the model for Fruchtenbaum, a loathsome Kapo and persecutor of orthodox Jews. This, in turn, led to a new uproar in the Israeli press over Grynbaum's inclusion in Scrolls of Fire, at the same time as ultra-Orthodox circles began a campaign against Itzhak Grynbaum, the secular Zionist father tainted by association with his Kapo son.

The cultural swings of the Grynbaum family came full circle when a younger Eliezer Grynbaum, Itzhak's grandson and the son of Eliezer's brother (named in memory of his uncle), came under the influence of the ultra-Orthodox and rabidly anti-Zionist rabbi and publicist Menachem Grilak, one of Itzhak's most implacable foes. The defection of the scion of the Grynbaum family to its ideological adversaries was trumpeted by the ultra-Orthodox press. Finally, the book discusses whether the competing narratives of Grynbaum's life can be reconciled, and ends by answering the question, "Who, really, was Eliezer Grynbaum/Leon Berger?

This is a story that spans four decades—from the mid-1920s until the mid-1960s—and many countries: Poland, France, Spain, Germany, and Israel. It is based on a wide variety of documentation uncovered by the author in Israeli archives, as well as on the records of Grynbaum's two post-war trials (the Polish Communist Party tribunal and the French investigation), and a diary written by Eliezer Grynbaum after the war describing his experience in Auschwitz, a document now in the possession of the Grynbaum family. These unique sources reveal a different aspect of Eliezer Grynbaum's character and camp record, highlighting his participation in the underground resistance in the death camp rather than his alleged ill-treatment of orthodox Jews while serving as a Kapo. This documentation records his sometimes courageous activity to save his communist comrades and other inmates in the camp. The heroic components of this saga were expropriated by his erstwhile communist comrades, who, for political and other reasons that are described in detail in the book, expunged him from the collective memory of their movement, even as they appropriated for themselves his role as a courageous resistance fighter.

The book presents a Rashomon-like account of four main narratives – the communist, the ultra-Orthodox, the Zionist, and the familial – and their battle for hegemony. It shows why Eliezer Grynbaum's story provided such fertile ground for abuse and manipulation by the communists on the one hand, and the ultra-Orthodox on the other. For Grynbaum was at once a Jewish Kapo, a communist, an anti-Zionist, a secularist, and the son of a polarizing Zionist leader. As such, Eliezer became a symbol to be exploited by opponents of the movements to which he was linked. Thus all attempts by the family to rehabilitate his name both after the war and after his death were in vain.

The book grapples with the ultimately unanswerable questions posed by Eliezer Grynbaum's life. Was he a Macbeth-like hero, a villain, who at the same time was a tragic figure? Did he succumb to the temptations of his privileged position in Auschwitz, or was he an honorable member of the resistance? Was his chief motivation as block-elder—a role his friends had asked him to assume — self-interest, or was he acting out of concern for his fellow inmates? Was there a sinister aspect to his character that coexisted with his native charm and charisma? Was he right in claiming he had been unjustly stripped of his heroic deeds, leaving him only with the stain of his collaboration? Where lies the truth and where the fabrication in Eliezer's and his friends' version of his past? Would his fate have been different – even if he had done what is claimed – had he not been the son of so prominent a Zionist leader? And, last but not least, was there an unbreachable gap of experience between him and his accusers in post-war Poland, France, and Israel, who were unable to imagine the moral ambiguities of his position in Auschwitz? For Grynbaum may well have been the first to place before a larger public the issue of the inevitability of collaboration and its inexorable dilemmas.

Books

• Tuvia Friling, 2014. A story of a Kapo in Auschwitz, History, Memory and Politics, University of New England Press, the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies/Brandeis University Press, 325+xiii pp.

Selected articles

• Tuvia Friling, (2012), Ben Gourion, Un Leader Hors Normes (French), in: David Ben-Gourion, Journal 1947-1948, Les Secrets de la Creation De L'etat D'Israel, Tuvia Friling and Denis Peschanski (eds.), (French) La Martinière, Paris, pp. XLII – LXXII. • Tuvia Friling, (2014) “Organizing Jewish Resistance: The Decision-Making and executive array in the Yishuv Rescue Operations During the Holocaust”, in: Jewish Resistance against the Nazis, Patrick Henry [ed.], Catholic University Press, Washington D.C, pp. 245–278. • The Evolution of Holocaust Memory in Israel- What to Remember? What to Forget? Israel Studies, Summer 2014, vol. 19, Issue 2, Indiana University Press, (English), pp. 51–69.