P.24 - Dov Levin Collection - Partisan and Holocaust researcher

P.24 - Dov Levin Collection - Partisan and Holocaust researcher
 
 Dov Levin was born in Kaunas, Lithuania on 27 January 1925. His parents were Zvi Hirsh Levin and Bluma (Vigoder) Levin. Dov Levin died in Jerusalem on 03 December 2016. He received a Zionist education, and was fluent in Slavic languages, Lithuanian, English and Hebrew.
 
 Levin studied at the "Schwab" Hebrew high school in Kaunas, which was affiliated with the "Tarbut" educational network, until the school's closure following the Soviet occupation, and at the "Shalom Aleichem" Yiddish high school. He joined the Hashomer Hatzair movement at the age of 12. Following the German occupation of Kaunas, Dov Levin was deported to the Kaunas Ghetto along with his family. He joined the "Brit Zion" underground organization in the Kaunas Ghetto. A year later he escaped from the ghetto and was never to see his parents or his twin sister Blum again; all of them perished during the war.
 
 He became a member of the "Death to the German Occupiers" partisans brigade in the Rudniki forests on 07 March 1944. Dov sold the watch that he received from his uncle on the occasion of his bar-mitzvah in order to purchase a rifle.
 
 After he made aliya to Eretz Israel in October 1945, he fought against the British and against the Arabs. He studied sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and for his Master's degree he studied Jewish history and economics at the Hebrew University. He served as an IDF soldier and fought during the War of Independence in the defense of Mount Scopus, which was cut off from Jerusalem. After the War of Independence he studied social work and social sciences and Jewish history, for a second Master's degree at the Hebrew University. Levin wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Professor Yehuda Bauer.
 
 In the context of his work as a social worker for the Jerusalem Municipality, Levin traveled throughout Israel in order to make tape recordings of testimonies of fighters and of Holocaust survivors, with the assistance of Yad Vashem. These recordings form the basis of the Archives of Oral Documentation, which Levin eventually headed in the context of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. He also served as a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. 
 
 Levin wrote more than 15 books and 500 articles, in Hebrew and English, on the subject of the Jews of Lithuania and the Baltic States. He edited the Books of the Communities of Latvia and Estonia (in 5748 [1988]) and Lithuania (in 5756 [1996]) published by Yad Vashem. 
 
 He was active in the struggle against Holocaust Denial and in the search for and prosecution of Nazi war criminals. 
 Dov Levin bequeathed his personal archives to Yad Vashem in 2009.
 
 Included in the Record Group of the P.24 - Dov Levin Collection:
 
 Personal documentation: 
 
 Personal correspondence of Dov Levin from the prewar period, including information from Red Cross sources regarding the death of his parents and sister;
 
 Historical documentation: 
 
 Drafts of chapters he wrote for the Community Books published by Yad Vashem, lists that he prepared, correspondence with partisans and with personages in academic fields, as well as documentation that he collected regarding these subjects: testimonies, lists and certificates, newspaper clippings and letters; 
 Invitations to conventions, ceremonies and various events related to Lithuanian Jewry and to fighters in the ghettos and camps; 
 Draft of the doctoral dissertation written by Levin, on the subject of the part taken by Lithuanian Jewry in the war against the Germans during World War II;
 Collection of questionnaires and interviews of Anders Army soldiers, which were collected by the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University.