Yaffa Eliach

Yaffa Eliach (May 31, 1935

In 1944, following the Soviet takeover of the town from Nazi Germany, Eliach's family returned to the town. Soon thereafter, her father again became involved with the Soviet authorities.[5]^[9] Her father began to house Soviet soldiers.^[5][9] During a fight between Polish resistance and Soviet forces, two members of Eliach's family and two Soviet soldiers were killed.^[9] Eliach claimed that her mother and baby brother, who had begun crying, were shot multiple times after her mother, wanting to save the rest of the family, stepped out of a closet they were hiding in. Eliach said she survived underneath her mother's body that had fallen back down on her in the closet. ^[10]

Post war

Eliach emigrated to

From 1969, Eliach served as a professor of history and literature in the department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College. She created a course on Hasidism and the Holocaust, and she found that many of her students were the children of Holocaust survivors, liberators, or Holocaust survivors themselves. She began requiring students to record audio interviews with Holocaust survivors in their community as a course assignment. In 1974, Eliach established the Center for Holocaust Studies to serve as a repository for these interviews. Initially housed at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, the Center grew to include professional staff, over 2,700 interviews, and thousands of physical objects donated by Holocaust survivors. In 1990, the Center merged with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where its oral history collection, objects, and institutional archives are now housed.

Eliach served as a member of President Jimmy Carter's Commission on the Holocaust in 1978-79 and accompanied his fact-finding mission to Eastern Europe in 1979. She was a frequent lecturer at numerous conferences and educational venues and has appeared on television several times in documentaries and interviews. She wrote several books and contributed to Encyclopaedia Judaica, The Women's Studies Encyclopedia, and The Encyclopedia of Hasidism.^[12]

Eliach devoted herself to the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust from a survivor's vantage point. She preserved her memories (via lecture) on video and audiocassettes, and her research provided much material used in courses on the Holocaust in the United States.^[12] She thought her generation "the last link with the Holocaust", and considered it her responsibility to document the tragedy in terms of life, not death,^[13] bringing the Jews back to life.

In memory of her hometown, Eliach created the "Tower of Life", a permanent exhibit that contains approximately 1,500 photos of Jews in Eishyshok before the arrival of the Germans for the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

In 1953, Eliach married David Eliach,^[12] now principal emeritus of the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School. She has a daughter, Smadar Rosensweig, Professor of Bible at Stern College for Women (NYC), and a son, Yotav Eliach, the principal of Rambam Mesivta High School. She has 14 grandchildren, including Itamar Rosensweig.^[14] Yaffa Eliach died in New York on November 8, 2016.^[15]

Works

Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust

Eliach is the author of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press). Derived from interviews and oral histories, these eighty-nine original Hasidic tales about the Holocaust provide unprecedented witness, in a traditional idiom, to the victims' inner experience of "unspeakable" suffering. This volume constitutes the first collection of original Hasidic tales to be published in a century.

According to

In memory of her native Eishyshok she wrote There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (1998),. John Radzilowski in his review of the book states that although sections of the book on everyday Jewish contain useful and important ethnographic information for the history of the Jewish people, when Eliach discusses general east European history, the history of Polish-Jewish relations, and Second World War, the work contains many errors.^[9][17] Radzilowski criticizes what he considers simplistic and partisan portrayal of ethnic groups in the book, in which Elliach presents all Jews as good, intelligent, handsome/beautiful, brave, generous, almost all Poles bad, and Lithuanians good until they come under the influence of Poles and become anti-Semites.^[17] However what Radzilowski considers a more important flaw is the fact that Eliach often contradicts herself, presenting different version of events and not presenting any documents that would prove her claims. Sometimes she relies on sources, only to criticize them later for not backing her up. In his view, it is a flaw that she relies on Soviet interrogations as a source of historic information. In summary, he states that the fact that Elliach is writing on such difficult subject as the Holocaust, "raises troubling questions about her motives"^[18]

Dispute over death of Eliach's family members

Eliach's eyewitness testimony was published and widely disseminated in a

Israeli historian Israel Gutman criticized Eliach stating "I don't have sympathy for this author; she's not an authority on Holocaust, and her books haven't been translated to Hebrew. One shouldn't close eyes to the fact that the Home Army in the Vilnius region fought with Soviet partisans for the liberation of Poland. That's why Jews that belonged to the other side were killed by the Home Army as enemies of Poland, and not as Jews".^[21]

Polish-Jewish journalist Adam Michnik, founder of the liberal Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, said she insulted Poland and that while "individual anti-Semitic excesses could have happened(...)it is shocking and out of place for a professional historian to blame everyone for a crime committed by one individual" and that the Eliach's claim was "senseless fanaticism".^[22] A Polish American Public Relations Committee member said that "Holocaust survivors tend to be revisionist, wanting to satisfy their egos, defame others and financially profit". Eliach responded by saying that "several fringe Polish-American groups, following in the footsteps of Holocaust revisionists, set out to deny the truth about the murder of Zipporah and Hayyim Sonenzon, my mother and baby brother".^[23]

Historian

The Polish Ministry of Justice asked the U.S. Justice Department to allow lawyers to interview Eliach so that a case could be opened to investigate if any guilty party is still being alive. Eliach refused, saying that the request was "couched in Orwellian language" about bringing the killers of her mother and brother to justice, when they were already tried and punished by the Soviets more than 50 years prior. Eliach questioned the lack of the Polish investigation into other murders of Jews by Poles in Poland, and into Holocaust denial in Poland.[22]^[23]

According to an documentary article in Gazeta Wyborcza written in 2000 in which Eliach was interviewed, Eliach herself claimed that the Polish Home Army slogan was "Poland without Jews" and that it planned the mass extermination of all Jewish people within Poland. The article also mentioned her stating that the primary goal of the Polish Home Army was killing Jews.^[27] Two historians interviewed in the article have rejected Eliah's claims and described the death of her family members as most likely a coincidence during a shoot out between Polish resistance and Soviet and NKVD operatives.^[27]

Other claims

In an interview in 2000, she also stated that she has in her possession photos of a woman allegedly engaged to pope

• The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs by Chana Steifel and Susan Gal (Scholastic Press, 2022) is a
  Sibert Honor-winning children's book about Yaffa Eliach.^[29]

• Myrtle Wreath award for humanitarian activities (with Joseph Papp), 1979;
• Christopher award, 1982, for Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust;
• Guggenheim fellowship
  and Louis E. Yavner award, both in 1987;
• Women's Branch of the Orthodox Jewish Congregation of America's "Distinguished Woman of Achievement," 1989;
• AMIT Women's Rambam award, 1990;
• Award of accomplishment, 1994, and National Holocaust Education award, 1995, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations;
• CBSTV "Woman of the Year," 1995;
• Eternal Flame award, 1999;
• Honorary doctorates: Yeshiva University, New York; Spertus College, Chicago;[12] Keene State College, 2003^[30]

Notes

Bibliography

• Eishet ha-Dayag [Hebrew; The Fisherman's Wife]. 1965.
• The Last Jew: A Play in Four Acts, with Uri Assaf (Tel-Aviv, 1975). 1977.
• Liberators: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberation of Concentration Camps 1981^[31]
• Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust 1988^[31]
• We Were Children Just Like You 1990^[31]
• There once was a world: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok 1998^[32]

External links

• Yaffa Eliach's collection at Yad Vashem
• Yaffa Eliach's contributions to the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

References