Jewish New Year's card from Jankiel Herszkowicz, showing the performer singing his famous parody about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Lodz ghetto Jewish council.

Photograph | Digitized | Photograph Number: 59782

Overview

Caption: Jewish New Year's card from Jankiel Herszkowicz, showing the performer singing his famous parody about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Lodz ghetto Jewish council.
Locale: Lodz, [Lodz] Poland
Variant Locale: Litzmannstadt
Photo Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Joseph Wajsblat

Photo Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Provenance: Joseph Wajsblat

Source Record ID: Collections: 2000.134

Keyword: CLOSE-UPS GREETING CARDS HERSZKOWICZ, JANKIEL JEWS (POLISH) MUSICIANS/INSTRUMENTS NEW YEAR'S CARDS
Photo Designation: DISPLACED PERSONS/RETURN TO LIFE -- DP Camps/Postwar Communities -- Poland

Biography: Jankiel Herszkowicz (1910-1972), Lodz ghetto singer and songwriter who chronicled life in the ghetto in a series of ballads that earned him fame and income as "Yankele, the steet singer". Born in Opatow, Poland on July 22, 1910, Herszkowicz moved with his parents to Lodz (ca 1930), where he worked as a tailor. During the German occupation he was a resident of the Lodz ghetto, where he became a popular entertainer. His best known song was "Rumkovski Khayim," a broadside aimed at the dictatorial chairman of the Lodz ghetto Jewish council, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, that became the unofficial anthem of the ghetto. In the summer of 1944 Herszkowicz was deported first to Auschwitz, then to a labor camp in Braunschweig, Germany, from which he was liberated on May 2, 1945. After the war he returned to Lodz where he worked at a variety of jobs and actively participated in Jewish cultural affairs. Herszkowicz was deeply anguished by the mass exodus of Jews from Poland following the antisemitic purges of the late 1960s. Increasingly isolated and insecure, yet finally unwilling to join his friends in emigration, the 61-year-old Herszkowicz ended his own life on March 7, 1972.

[Source: USHMM web site]