29 Facts About Yaffa Eliach

Yaffa Eliach was an American historian, author, and scholar of Judaic studies and the Holocaust.

Yaffa Eliach was born Sonia Sonenzon to a Jewish family in Ejszyszki near Vilna.

In 1944, following the Soviet takeover of the town from Nazi Germany, Yaffa Eliach's family returned to the town.

Yaffa 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, and that she survived underneath her mother's body that had fallen back down on her in the closet.

Yaffa Eliach said her family members were shot deliberately in an act of antisemitism.

Yaffa Eliach became a history teacher in the school while still a teenager.

From 1969, Yaffa Eliach served as a professor of history and literature in the department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College.

Yaffa Eliach 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.

Yaffa Eliach began requiring students to record audio interviews with Holocaust survivors in their community as a course assignment.

In 1974, Yaffa Eliach established the Center for Holocaust Studies to serve as a repository for these interviews.

Yaffa Eliach's organization became the model for many other similar efforts, and changed the dialog about Holocaust victims to include more focus on their pre-Holocaust lives.

Yaffa Eliach was a frequent lecturer at numerous conferences and educational venues and has appeared on television several times in documentaries and interviews.

Yaffa Eliach wrote several books and contributed to Encyclopaedia Judaica, The Women's Studies Encyclopedia, and The Encyclopedia of Hasidism.

Yaffa Eliach devoted herself to the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust from a survivor's vantage point.

Yaffa Eliach preserved her memories on video and audiocassettes, and her research provided much material used in courses on the Holocaust in the United States.

Yaffa Eliach thought her generation "the last link with the Holocaust", and considered it her responsibility to document the tragedy in terms of life, not death, bringing the Jews back to life.

In memory of her hometown, Yaffa 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 US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

In 1953, Yaffa Eliach married David Yaffa Eliach, who served for decades as principal of the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School.

Yaffa Eliach had 14 grandchildren, including Itamar Rosensweig, and nine great-grandchildren, at the time of her death in New York on November 8,2016.

Yaffa Eliach is the author of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust.

Yaffa Eliach employs her scholarly gifts only to connect the tellers of the tales, who bear witness, to the reader who is stunned and enriched.

Yaffa Eliach's eyewitness testimony was published and widely disseminated in a New York Times op-ed, in which she said she was a victim of a pogrom by Poles and the Polish Home Army.

Yaffa Eliach claimed that prior to the attack, the Polish commander outside the houses concluded his order with what she claims was a popular Home Army slogan "Poland without Jews".

Yaffa 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".

Historian Jaroslaw Wolkonowski did not deny the incident, but said Yaffa Eliach omitted to mention that her family was harboring a Soviet spy and that her father was a supporter of the Soviet Union, who had occupied the area from Poland and later Nazi Germany.

John Radzilowski said that Yaffa Eliach believed that the Home Army with the help of the Catholic Church held a conference similar to the Wanesee Conference in which a plan to mass murder all remaining Jews was discussed, and death of her family was part of a "Polish Final Solution".

Radzilowski stated that Yaffa Eliach was questioned on her claims and documents supporting them by members of US Holocaust Memorial Museum Memorial Council, and responded by joking "they didn't have Xerox machines", later changing her version to stating that the documents were found by Soviet secret police, and later again changing her claim and stating that this document was found by her father and NKVD in raid against the Home Army.

Yaffa 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.

Yaffa Eliach questioned the lack of the Polish investigation into other murders of Jews by Poles in Poland, and into Holocaust denial in Poland.