We, the editors of Medaon, have directed our attention towards the research of Jewish history in connection to World War I in the past issues, just as many other colleagues. In doing so, we concentrated on critical appraisal of this new perspective in light of the abundance of new publications on the topic, and published manly reviews.

At first we planned that this would remain our contribution to the increasing attention of the historical event and its remembrance (100 years!). But we were very happy when Barbara Breysach, Birgit Krehl and Magdalena Marszałek surprisingly approached us with the offer of publishing their own thematic focal point, following their conference “Erster Weltkrieg: Jüdische Erfahrungen in Ost- und Mitteleuropa”, with very different and thrilling contributions, thereby also making the decision to publish the results in an online-journal like ours. We are also very pleased that the cooperation, for which we handed over the responsibility for such a thematic part entirely for the first time, has now come to a successful finish. We wish to thank them for extensively depicting the project in their thematically related introduction, their trust and – without say – the nice result, as well as for their efforts in the publication process!

Three further contributions, i.a. in the series „Biografien jüdischer Frauen“, which is contributed for by Martina Bitunjac, as well as a number of reviews complete the current issue.

We wish you an insightful and entertaining reading!

The current issues could also not have been achieved without the support of our reviewers. Cathleen Bürgelt, Patricia C. Sutcliffe, Maja-Sophie Götting and Phillip Roth as well as Gunther Gebhard and Steffen Schröter of text plus form did corrections and translations – the editors thank them all!

The editors of Medaon, April 2016.