| abstract | - Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski (February 27, 1877 - August 28, 1944) was a Polish Jew and businessman who was appointed as the German Nazi-nominated head of the Ältestenrat ("Council of Elders"), or Jewish authorities in the Łódź Ghetto. He accrued power as he organized the ghetto as an industrial site, believing that productivity was the key to Jewish survival. Before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, Rumkowski was director of an orphanage. On October 13, 1939, the Nazi occupation authorities appointed him the Judenälteste ("Elder of the Jews"), or head of the Ältestenrat, in Łódź. In all other ghettos, the head of the Jewish council was known as the Judenrat. In this position, Rumkowski reported directly to the Nazi ghetto administration headed by Hans Biebow, but he had direct responsibility for providing heat, work, food, housing, and health and welfare services to the ghetto population. When the rabbinate was dissolved, Rumkowski began to perform weddings. The nickname of the ghetto's money or scrip, the Rumki, sometimes Chaimki, was derived from his name, as it had been his idea; and his face was put on the ghetto postage stamps. Some remember him for his haunting and tragic speech, Give Me Your Children, in 1942, when the Germans insisted on deporting 20,000 children to death camps. He was also remembered as an autocrat and tyrant who built a personal empire within the ghetto. He made work the basis of survival and created profit for the Germans, to preserve the Jews. In 1944, the Germans proceeded to liquidate the ghetto in view of defeats in the East. In August, Rumkowski and his family voluntarily joined the last transport to Auschwitz, and were murdered there August 28, 1944. A family friend (who in 1944 was a teenaged resident of Łódź ghetto) suggests that Jewish inmates may have murdered him. Although Rumkowski and other Judenrat came to be regarded as collaborators and traitors, since the late 20th century, historians have reassessed this in light of the terrible conditions of the time. A survivor of the Łódź ghetto noted in his memoir that Rumkowski had kept it going for two years beyond the ghetto at Warsaw, and given more people from Łódź a chance to survive, although they were a few thousand. He wrote, "This is a horrific reckoning, but it gives Rumkowski a posthumous victory".
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