In 1973, Leonard and Edith Ehrlich chose to undertake a daunting task that would ultimately become their greatest work: conducting over thirty years of meticulous research to investigate and document Vienna's Jewish community and its leadership during the Holocaust.

In 1973, Leonard and Edith Ehrlich chose to undertake a daunting task that would ultimately become their greatest work: conducting over thirty years of meticulous research to investigate and document Vienna's Jewish community and its leadership during the Holocaust. Inescapably, this path led them to the controversial figure of Benjamin Murmelstein, Viennese rabbi and later Judenrat council elder at Theresienstadt. Choices under Duress of the Holocaust is most certainly a historical work, but it is also a philosophical work, in which "duress" and "choice" are considered fully in their relevant contexts. It is, then, a history of the destruction of the Jewish community of Vienna and an examination of the performance of the Jewish leadership in its dealings with the Nazis on behalf of the Jews. But it is also the positing of a question, the opening of a space to consider the nuances of consent, complicity, and condemnation.