Welcome to the personal website of Ilya Eli Luvish. While the primary purpose of this site is to publish my Senior Honors Thesis on Post-War Pogroms in Eastern Europe 1944-1947, I hope to also comment on world issues, trends in higher education, share my interest in aviation photography and explore the wonderful underwater world of Scuba Diving. If you are visiting here to research World War 2 I welcome you and hope that you will comment on my work.
My Honors Thesis was completed in 2005 at Northeastern University under the guidance of Professor Jefferey Burds. In late 2004 I was the recipient of the Gladys Brooks Award which allowed me to travel to Jerusalem, Israel where I lived for six months conducting research in the archives of Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust Museum. Over those months I amassed hundreds of documents in English, Russian, Hebrew, Polish, German and French. There were survivor testimonies, official German records, Polish underground resistance correspondences, photos of the immediate post-war era in Eastern Europe and most importantly first hand accounts with incredible detail by Soviet Communist authorities in Ukraine and Poland. In the end I focused on 3 primary sources detailing the massacres that occurred not during the war by the German army but by ordinary people and underground resistance fighters in the liberated territories of the east.