Philip Friedman (1901-1960) was a Polish-Jewish historian and the author of several books on history and economics.
Born Filip Friedman on April 27, 1901 in Lwów, he studied at th...показать большеPhilip Friedman (1901-1960) was a Polish-Jewish historian and the author of several books on history and economics.
Born Filip Friedman on April 27, 1901 in Lwów, he studied at the Jan Kazimierz University, the University of Vienna, and the Jewish Paedagogium under Salo Baron. He moved to Łódź in 1925 after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna. He taught at a leading Hebrew secondary school in Łódź, as well as at the People’s University of that city, at YIVO in Vilna (1935), and at the Taḥkemoni of Warsaw (1938-1939). He also continued his historical research. In autumn of 1939 he returned to Lwów, where he worked in the Science Academy of Ukraine.
At the beginning of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Lwów, Friedman went into hiding outside the Lwów Ghetto. Friedman survived World War II, but lost his wife and daughter. After the war he taught Jewish History at the University of Łódź and served as the director of the Central Jewish Historical Committee, collecting testimonies and documentation on Nazi war crimes, including his own on the concentration camp at Auschwitz, which he later published. He published further historical works, including several monographs on various destroyed Jewish communities such as including Białystok and Chełmno, whilst simultaneously teaching Jewish history at the University of Łódź (1945-1946). He was a member of the Polish State Commission to Investigate German War Crimes in Auschwitz and Chełmno.
After testifying at the Nuremberg trials, Friedman immigrated to the U.S. in 1948, and from 1951 until his death, he served as lecturer at Columbia University. From 1949, he also headed the Jewish Teachers Seminary and taught courses at the Herzliya Teachers Seminary in Israel and was the Research Director of the YIVO-Yad Vashem Joint Documentary Project, a bibliographical series on the Holocaust, from 1954-1960.
Friedman died in New York City on February 7, 1960.показать меньше