Life
Yaffa Eliach was born Yaffa Sonenson to a Jewish family in Eishyshok near Vilna, now Eišiškės, Lithuania, a small town with a Jewish majority until the Holocaust, where she lived until she was four years old. When the town was occupied by the Germans in June 1941 and most of the Jewish population was murdered by the Germans and Lithuanians, she and her family hid and survived in hiding places in the Eishyshok vicinity. Upon returning Llto Eishyshok after the liberation in 1944, her mother and a brother were killed by Polish soldiers.
Eliach emigrated to Palestine in 1946, and later to the United States in 1954. She received her BA in 1967 and her MA in 1969 from Brooklyn College, New York and a Ph.D. in 1973 from City University of New York in Russian intellectual history, studying under Saul Lieberman and Salo Baron.
Since 1969, Eliach was professor of history and literature in the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College, and founded and served as director of the Center for Holocaust Studies in Brooklyn. She was 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 has been a frequent lecturer at numerous conferences and educational venues and has appeared on television several times in documentaries and interviews. She has written several books and has contributed to Encyclopaedia Judaica, The Women's Studies Encyclopedia, and The Encyclopedia of Hasidism.
Eliach has devoted herself to the preservation of memory of the Holocaust specifically from the perspective of a survivor's vantage point. She has also preserved her memories (via lecture) on video and audiocassettes. Her research has provided much material used in courses on the Holocaust in the United States.
Eliach thinks her generation “is the last link with the Holocaust”, and considers it her responsibility to document the tragedy in terms of life, not death, bringing the Jews back to life. In memory of her native Eishyshok she has written Once There Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (1998), recounting the colorful Jewish life of Eishyshok. Also in memory of the town, Eliach created the “Tower of Life”, a permanent exhibit which 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, now principal emeritus of the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School. She has a daughter, Smadar Rosensweig, Professor of History at Touro College (NYC), and a son, Yotav Eliach, the principal of Rambam Mesivta High School.
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