Nationality Israel Fields Statistics | Name Ester Samuel-Cahn | |
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Institutions Hebrew University in Jerusalem | ||
Holocaust survivor testimony ester samuel cahn
Ester Samuel-Cahn (born May 16, 1933; died November, 2015) was an Israeli statistician and educator. She was a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Biography
Samuel-Cahn was born in Oslo, Norway. During the Nazi occupation of Norway, in 1942, her father, a rabbi, was warned that he would be arrested by the Germans. He refused to leave in order to try to support his community. In September, her father was ordered to report to the Gestapo office, where he was questioned and later sent to Auschwitz. Later that year, the Nazis were going to arrest the other Jews in Oslo, however Samuel-Cahn's family were moved by members of the underground, Ingebjørg Sletten-Fosstvedt and Sigrid Helliesen Lund, to safety and later to a refugee camp in neutral Sweden. In order to cross the border, Samuel-Cahn and the rest of her family had to hide in trucks used to transport potatoes. In Stockholm, Samuel-Cahn's family found out that her father had been killed in Auschwitz. In 1946, Samuel-Cahn, her mother and brothers moved to Mandatory Palestine (part of which later became Israel).
Samuel-Cahn received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1961. From 1993 to 1995, she was the president of the Israel Statistical Association. In 1989 she was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
In 2004, Samuel-Cahn won the Israel Prize for her work in statistics. In 2012, she spoke at a memorial ceremony in the Martyrs' Forest in Jerusalem Hills, commemorating Norwegian Jews who died in the Holocaust and remembering those who helped hide and protect Jews in Norway.
She died in November, 2015.