Freitag, 24. Mai 2019, 15:00 - 16:30

Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, Research Lounge 1010 Vienna, Rabensteig 3, 3rd Floor

The lecture addresses the role of law for survivors of genocide and mass atrocities living in refugee camps. The Jewish displaced persons (DPs) established a bottom-up fascinating legal and judiciary system, comprised of four different types of courts that encompassed every aspect of their lives as individuals and a community.
The lecture suggests understanding the law not only as a means of maintaining law and order in the camps but also, and not less important, as a means of both reconstructing personal and communal agency. The lecture also demonstrates the use of law as a means to turn the Jews from a group of helpless survivor victims to a politically-charged community.
This understudied historical-legal story, as the lecture shows, serves as a reminder to both the strength of the community and the importance of its law as an independent instrument.

Rivka Brot is a lecturer at the Buchman Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University. She has authored various articles relating to legal aspects of the lives of the Jewish displaced persons in the US-American Zone of occupied Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Her book, People in the Gray Zone: The Jewish Kapo on Trial (Hebrew), will be co-published by the Open University Publishing House, the David Berg Institute for Law and History (Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law) and The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism.

The event will be moderated by Philipp Rohrbach (VWI)

Organised in cooperation with the Department of Legal and Constitutional History of the University of Vienna

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In Kooperation mit dem Institut für Rechts- und Verfassungsgeschichte der Universität Wien