Tuvia Friling

Tuvia Friling was born in Beersheba in 1953 to parents who had immigrated to Israel from Romania following the Holocaust. Before entering academic life, he served as a company deputy commander in the Golani Brigade.[2]

He completed a B.A. in general and Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, then pursued graduate studies in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning both an M.A. and a Ph.D.[1]

Friling built his scholarly career at the Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, attaining the rank of Emeritus Full Professor. The university records him as retired and displays an affiliation period ending in 2023.[5] He also directed the Ben-Gurion Heritage Center at Sde Boker, where he initiated the computerization of its archive and helped make approximately half a million digitized documents searchable online.[2]

Friling subsequently served as State Archivist of Israel. In that role, he was responsible for the country's archival system and publication policy, including implementation of the Archives Law, document-destruction policy, and access restrictions based on security or privacy concerns.[2] At the time of a 2002 interview, the Israel State Archives held roughly 34 kilometers of shelves containing document boxes, with approximately two additional kilometers accumulated during his first year in office.[2]

Friling proposed an "Israel Archives Network" that would place archives on a common platform and allow users to search across their collections. He estimated that a network of 20 to 30 archives could be established within three years at a cost of approximately $10 million.[2] He also replaced former archivist Evyatar Friesel on the management committee of the foundation responsible for publishing the Eichmann trial records in Hebrew. The foundation was registered in 1982 and worked for approximately a quarter-century before its trustees placed the material on the Ministry of Justice website.[6]

At Ben-Gurion University, Friling supervised Ezra Nishri's doctoral research concerning British involvement in the 1948 War of Independence.[7] Friling described the research as a paradigmatic change in the study of the war and said it helped explain the seriousness of David Ben-Gurion's decision to initiate Operation Yoav.[8]

Friling served as a vice-chairman of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania alongside Radu Ioanid and Mihail E. Ionescu, under the chairmanship of Elie Wiesel.[9] Established on October 22, 2003, at the initiative of Romanian President Ion Iliescu, the commission sought to establish an accurate historical account of the Holocaust in Romania and the events preceding it. It met in Washington, Jerusalem, and Bucharest and presented its final report to the Romanian president on November 11, 2004.[10]

Friling also headed the Ben-Gurion Research Center and Archives.[1] A JewishGen publication notice identifies him as director of the center and records his role in granting permission to republish historical research.[11] He was a Mandel Center fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, residing there from October 1, 2006, through May 30, 2007.[1]

Friling's research output, as cataloged by Ben-Gurion University, comprises 18 books, 28 articles, 24 book chapters, and five book, arts, or article reviews.[3] His publications address Holocaust history, Zionist political history, Israeli society and economy, and Israeli historiography.

His best-known work is Arrows in the Dark (Hebrew: Hetz ba-Arafel). The National Library of Israel catalogs its two-volume Hebrew edition as a 1998 publication by the Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute in Beersheba, while the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives the Hebrew publication year as 2001. The English edition was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2005.[4][1]

The National Library catalogs the study at 1,126 pages, with illustrations, maps, portraits, facsimiles, and an extensive bibliography. It reconstructs and analyzes assistance and rescue plans involving the Jewish community in Palestine and its leadership during the Holocaust.[4] Its title derives from a remark attributed to Jewish Agency treasurer Eliezer Kaplan: "The Yishuv in Eretz Israel is compelled to shoot an arrow into the fog; it must seize every chance, even the faintest, to save Jews from annihilation."[4]

The work examines the place of rescue efforts within the Yishuv's broader agenda, draws on primary documentation from archives in Israel and abroad, and studies the clandestine intelligence system available to the Yishuv leadership. It also challenges negative interpretations of the Yishuv's role in efforts to rescue European Jews.[4] Among the cases it examines is Joel Brand's financial negotiations with the Nazis, in which couriers involved in the transactions were later identified as Nazi intelligence agents.[4]

During his USHMM fellowship, Friling extended his research into right-wing Zionist circles, examining Revisionist involvement in illegal immigration to Palestine before the war, rescue efforts during the Holocaust, and attempts to strengthen the Yishuv's military force after the war.[1] He used archival collections from Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Italy, the Czech Republic, and other countries where Revisionists conducted underground activities.[1] His later publications included the 2015 Yad Vashem book translated as Ambitious Moves, concerning cooperation between Revisionist Zionists and anti-Nazi Germans in an attempt to bring about the defeat of the Third Reich.[3]

Friling co-authored with S. Ilan Troen the article "Proclaiming Independence: Five Days in May from Ben-Gurion's Diary," published in Israel Studies, volume 3, number 1, in Spring 1998. A course syllabus describes it as a study of Israel's formal birth, the debate and decision-making preceding the Declaration of Independence, and the declaration's meaning for the future.[12] He also contributed the chapter "David Ben-Gurion's 'Road Map' to Independence, May 1948" to Michael Cohen's edited volume The British Mandate in Palestine, published in 2020.[3]

His 2022 Hebrew book is an operational biography of Dr. Yosef (Joe) Schwartz, covering the Joint Distribution Committee's aid and rescue operations during and after World War II.[3] Friling also led a 2012–2013 Israel Science Foundation project concerning a Jewish kapo in Auschwitz.[3] His related book examines Eliezer Gruenbaum, who served as a kapo in concentration camps in Poland and Germany, was tried in Paris as a collaborator after the war, and died as an Israeli soldier near Jerusalem in May 1948 during the War of Independence.[13] Gruenbaum was the son of Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a prominent interwar Zionist leader in Poland and Israel's first interior minister.[13]

Friling contributed a Hebrew-language chapter titled "Between Friendly and Hostile Neutrality: Turkey and the Jews During World War II" to The Last Ottoman Century and Beyond: The Jews in Turkey and the Balkans, 1808–1945, published in Tel Aviv in 2002.[14] He co-edited Society and Economy in Israel: A Historical and Contemporary View, a two-volume, 876-page Hebrew work published in 2005, with Avi Bareli and Daniel Gutwein.[15]

He also co-edited the 2014 Hebrew volume Music in Israel with Michael Wolpe and Gideon Katz. Its subjects include Hebrew song, art music, jazz, rock, Arab musical traditions, religious music, and the relationship between music and culture.[16] A French-language volume, Journal 1947–1948: Les secrets de la création de l'État d'Israël, co-authored with Denis Peschanski and translated from Hebrew by Fabienne Bergmann, appears in the National Library of Israel's bibliographic records.[17]

Arrows in the Dark won the Mordechai Eish-Shalom Prize. Friling also received Israel's Prime Minister Prize in 2001 from the State Public Council for Commemoration of Late Presidents and Prime Ministers. Other awards recognized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum came from Yad Ben-Gurion, Yad Vashem, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.[1]

Friling's scholarship engages directly with contested debates in Israeli and Jewish historiography. Arrows in the Dark argued against positions he associated with the New Historians, maintaining that the Yishuv, led by David Ben-Gurion, attempted to act to save Jews during the Holocaust.[2] This conclusion represents Friling's interpretation of a debated historical question rather than an uncontested scholarly consensus.

In a 2017 article, historian Yehuda Bauer characterized the accusation against Ben-Gurion as fundamentally mistaken. Bauer presented Friling's interpretation as holding that Ben-Gurion understood the limited ability of Jews in Palestine and the United States to influence Allied policy but nevertheless pursued the Joel Brand mission as far as possible so that no conceivable opportunity to save lives would be missed.[18]

In 2002, Friling was reported to be preparing a volume titled A Reply to the Post-Zionist Colleague, with expected contributions from scholars including Anita Shapira, Nissim Calderon, Yoav Gelber, and Gadi Taub. The planned volume was intended to respond to the New Historians' challenges to established historical narratives during the preceding fifteen years.[2] His published chapter asking what critics who characterize Zionism as colonialism overlook reflects a related engagement with contested interpretations of Zionist history.[3]

Friling's research on Revisionist Zionist rescue activity similarly addresses politically and historically contested questions concerning illegal immigration, aid, rescue, and the Yishuv's wartime response.[1] His work on Eliezer Gruenbaum examines the intersection of Holocaust history, collaboration accusations, postwar memory, and Israeli historiography; a Yad Vashem review described the book as occupying a unique place in Israeli biography and historiography.[13]