Yaffa Eliach

Life

Yaffa Eliach was born Yaffa Sonenson in 1935, to a Jewish family in Eishyshok (Yiddish: איישישאָק‎/Eishyshok)), now Eišiškės, Lithuania, a small town inhabited roughly in equal numbers by Jews and Poles 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 to Eishyshok after the arrival of the Soviet forces in 1944, her mother and a brother were killed when the village, now occupied by the Soviet army and security services (NKVD) was attacked by the Polish Home Army (AK) attempting to liberate Polish soldiers arrested by the Soviet occupying forces. The Sonensons were hosting an officer of SMIERSH, Soviet counter-intelligence (Yaffa Sonenson's father joined the Soviet NKVD forces and helped them fight and arrest the Polish resistance, becoming a lieutenant). The Russian officer and several of his soldiers fired on the arriving Home Army from the Sonensons' house and as a result of a short exchange of fire there were at least three civilian casualties, a Polish woman and two above-mentioned Sonenson family members. Later Yaffa Eliach accused the Polish Home Army of antisemitic motivation of the attack, however, her interpretation was found groundless by Polish historians as well as reputed Israeli scholars, including professor I. Gutman ("Znak", July, 2000). In a rare interview in a film produced by pbs frontline called Shtetl Yaffa Eliach describes graphically how her mother died with her little brother while she witnessed it as a 4 years old girl. The interview starts about 1:46:00 into the long film and the section is titled "we should have never come back". Little Yaffa describes in the interview every little detail of what happened.

Eliach emigrated to Palestine in 1946, and later to the United States in 1954. She received her B.A. in 1967 and her M.A. 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. In Israel she attended Kfar Batya. At that time her Hebrew last name was Ben Shemesh. Yaffa married the principal of the institution David Eliach. She also became a history teacher in the school (while still a teen ager). In the school she met a student, Izhak Weinberg who was two years younger. According to Izhak, Yaffa was most positive, talented and gifted student. Here is a rare picture of the class with David, Yaffa and Izhak

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 devoted herself to the preservation of memory of the Holocaust specifically from the perspective of a survivor's vantage point. She 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 thought her generation “is 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 native Eishyshok she wrote There Once 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 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. Yaffa Eliach died in New York on November 8, 2016.

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 Chaim Potok, Hasidic Tales is "An important work of scholarship and a sudden clear window onto the heretofore sealed world of the Hasidic reaction to the Holocaust. Its true stories and fanciful miracle tales are a profound and often poignant insight into the souls of those who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis and who managed somehow to use that very suffering as the raw material for their renewed lives." And, as Robert Lifton wrote "Yaffa Eliach provides us with stories that are wonderful and terrible -- true myths. We learn how people, when suffering dying, and surviving can call forth their humanity with starkness and clarity. She employs her scholarly gifts only to connect the tellers of the tales, who bear witness, to the reader who is stunned and enriched."

Honors and awards