Talia Farkash’s doctoral thesis, supervised by Prof. Sara Bender, studies the history of the Jews of the town Tarnow, located in the Krakow district in Poland, during World War II and the Holocaust, 1939-1944.
The research aims to examine the response of Tarnow’s Jewish population to the various stages of the German occupation, from its beginnings to the extermination of the entire community. Consequently, it consists of an in-depth study of three main groups in Jewish society, and their interactions: the official Jewish leadership that came into being as a result of the German occupation, the unofficial Jewish leadership, and the general Jewish public in Tarnow.
At its core, the study addresses Jews’ responses to the realities of life under the German occupation and reviews the Tarnow population’s struggle throughout the Holocaust. As a researcher, Farkash focuses mainly on the complexities of the interactions within the Jewish community during the Holocaust as it struggled to survive, withstand the hardship and adversity, and perhaps even resist the Germans. In her article, “Labor and Extermination: The Labor Camp at the Dęblin-Irena Airfield Puławy County, Lublin Province, Poland- 1942–1944,” published in Dapim, 29 (2015), Farkash examines this complexity as manifested in the lives of the thousand Jewish inmates of the Dęblin-Irena forced labor camp, in the Polish province of Lublin.