In Memoriam: Dov Levin

Professor Dov Levin, scholar and Holocaust survivor, died on December 3, 2016 at the age of 91. Levin was born in 1925 in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania. He escaped the Kovno Ghetto, where the rest of his immediate family perished. He eventually joined the partisans fighting the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.

After the war Levin made his way to Palestine, where he fought in the War of Independence, which secured the state of Israel; he subsequently fought as well in the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the Six-Day War in 1967, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Having studied sociology, history, and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he graduated from the Institute of Social Workers in Jerusalem (1951), was employed at the Department of Social Work of the City of Jerusalem and the Sociology Department at the Hebrew University, and became one of the founding figures (later, director) of the Oral History Division of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Chicago in 1966, and completed his doctorate at the Hebrew University in 1971 with a dissertation entitled "The Armed Struggle of the Lithuanian Jews against the Nazis." Levin was senior researcher at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, directing the project "Jews in Territories Annexed by the Soviet Union during World War II." He also served as an officer of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy.

Levin authored numerous scholarly works, advised students, took part in many international conferences, and served as visiting professor at several American institutions of higher learning. His books included Fighting Back: Lithuanian Jewry's Armed Resistance to the Nazis, 1941–1945 (1985); Baltic Jews under the Soviets, 1940−1946 (1994); The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry under Soviet Rule, 1939–1941 (1995); and The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania (2000, 2002).