Israel Gutman Prize: Call for Nominations

Friday, 20 October, 2017


The editorial staff of the journal Holocaust: Studies and Materials and EHRI partner The Polish Center for Holocaust Research Association decided to establish the Israel Gutman Prize for the author of the best scholarly article about the Holocaust. They invite representatives of scholarly journals and academic milieus to nominate candidates for the Prize. The deadline for nominations is 5 November 2017.

The prize is named after prominent scholar Israel Gutman. Born in Warsaw in 1923, he belonged to the Jewish underground in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) during the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.  From 5 May 1943 until 5 May 1945, he was a prisoner in Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Mathausen concentration camps. After the war Gutman became the most important Israeli scholar researching and writing about the extermination of the Warsaw Jews and the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. He was both a witness and a historian of the Holocaust.

The Israel Gutman Prize has been created with the aim of supporting and encouraging all research on the Holocaust, but has the special goal of crediting the work of young scholars. The organisers wish to support them and encourage them to the hard and arduous work research entails, which also sometimes requires great patience and meticulousness. Moreover, the work of a Holocaust historian is burdened with extra-scholarly challenges, often becoming an emotionally, morally, and existentially difficult experience. The intention of the Israel Gutman Prize is therefore to not only serve as an expression of recognition of the high substantial quality of the winning work chosen in the competition, but also to direct attention to the humanistic and ethical dimension which Holocaust research is inevitably inscribed in.

There is a number of prizes awarded in Poland for scientific or literary works: prizes are given for monographs, editions of primary sources and popular science publications as well as for lifetime achievements in scholarly or community work. The novelty of this initiative consists in the fact that the Israel Gutman Prize is awarded for a scholarly article. A book often becomes an object of discussions and polemics, whereas an article sometimes vanishes without an echo in scholarly journals or collective works. It goes into wider circulation less often than a book, and it is less often noticed and commented on. Another reason why this prize is specifically awarded for articles is that, particularly in the case of young scholars, it is usually the only form of publication of the results of their work.

For more information on criteria and nominations, please see: http://www.zagladazydow.org/index.php?show=568&lang=en