, (/Eishyshok) 31 May 1937) is a historian, author, and scholar of Judaic Studies and the Holocaust. She is probably best known for creating the “Tower of Life” made up by 1,500 photographs for permanent display at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Life

Yaffa Eliach was born Yaffa Sonenson to a Jewish family in Eishyshok near Vilna, now Eišiškės, Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

, a small town with a Jewish majority until the Holocaust, where she lived until she was four years old. When the town

Shtetl

A shtetl was typically a small town with a large Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe until The Holocaust. Shtetls were mainly found in the areas which constituted the 19th century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia and Romania...

 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 liberation in 1944, her mother and a brother were killed by Polish soldiers.

Eliach emmigrated to Palestine

Palestine

Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....

 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

Brooklyn College

Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...

 and a Ph.D. in 1973 from City University of New York

City University of New York

The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

 in Russian intellectual history, studying under Saul Lieberman

Saul Lieberman

Saul Lieberman , also known as Rabbi Shaul Lieberman or The Gra"sh , was a rabbi and a scholar of Talmud...

 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

Jimmy Carter

James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...

'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

Encyclopaedia Judaica

The Encyclopaedia Judaica is a 26-volume English-language encyclopedia of the Jewish people and their faith, Judaism. It covers diverse areas of the Jewish world and civilization, including Jewish history of all eras, culture, holidays, language, scripture, and religious teachings...

, 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 resarch 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

Yeshivah of Flatbush

The Yeshivah of Flatbush is a Modern Orthodox private Jewish day school located in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, New York. It includes an early childhood center, an elementary school and a secondary school.-History and mission:...

. She has a daughter, Smadar Rosensweig

Smadar Rosensweig

Smadar Rosensweig is professor of Bible at Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women, as well as a professor of biblical studies at Allegra Franco Sephardic Women’s Teachers College. Previously, she was a professor of Judaic studies and history at Touro College.Professor Rosensweig received her...

, Professor of History at Touro College (NYC), and a son, Yotav Eliach, the principal of Rambam Mesivta High School

Rambam Mesivta

Rambam Mesivta is a private Jewish school in Lawrence, New York. Rambam is a highly politically active school and is known for having major pro-Israel rallies, events, and functions...

.

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

Chaim Potok

Chaim Potok was an American Jewish author and rabbi. Potok is most famous for his first book The Chosen, a 1967 novel which was listed on The New York Times’ best seller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3,400,000 copies.-Biography :Herman Harold Potok was born in The Bronx, New York City, to...

, 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."

There Once Was a World

"In the soaring, three-story space that is the Tower of Life at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., sixteen hundred photographs collected by the historian Yaffa Eliach give face to a murdered people. In There Once Was a World, Eliach brilliantly and movingly records the history of that people.
Nineteen years of scholarship, a poet's ear, and a storyteller's voice have yielded what is perhaps the richest, fullest, most detailed portrait of Eastern European Jewish life that we will ever have, a book that encompasses both the sweep of history and an intimate view of the day-to-day lives of generations of small-town Jews, in all their uniqueness and universality. Eliach's own roots in Eishyshok, as a descendant of one of the five founding families and herself one of only twenty-nine survivors, give her work an unrivaled depth and passion.

Two million visitors a year enter the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where 1,600 photographs from the shtetl of Eishyshok constitute what many consider to be the most moving exhibit in the museum - the Tower of Life. In this soaring, three-story space we see the people of Eishyshok at their weddings and bar mitzvahs, their social clubs and literary gatherings, their winter sports and summer camps. Now Professor Yaffa Eliach, whose haunting collection of photographs gave faces to a murdered people, has written the history of that people.

Eliach's nine-century saga of Eastern European Jewish life is richer and fuller than any ever written. Her research took her from family attics on six continents to state archives no scholar had seen since the start of the Cold War. Confronted with the near total disappearance of the world of the shtetl, Eliach was indefatigable in her search for the truth-of a people, a place, a culture.

Some of what she found was as familiar as the chicken soup on a Jewish table, or an image from a painting by Chagall; other findings were more unexpected. Her research on family life, for example, shows that the "world of our fathers" was actually a world in which all the affairs of daily life were run by mothers. Her profound understanding of medieval history illuminates her description of early Lithuania, the last pagan country in Europe and the only one where Jews lived on equal terms with the rest of the population. Access to family letters ,and memorabilia and interviews with shtetl survivors gave her startling insight into one of history's most troubling questions: Why were the Jews so blind to the Nazi threat? In Eishyshok, she learned, as in hundreds of communities in Eastern Europe, the German occupiers of World War I had been so civilized that no one could believe their sons would be any different. Yet the June day in 1941 when Nazi troops roared into Eishyshok marked the beginning of the end for the shtetls 3,500 Jews.

In this book, as in her Tower, Eliach has sought to emphasize life over death. Nineteen years of scholarship, a poet's ear, and a storyteller's voice have yielded a book that contains both the sweep of history and an intimate portrait of the day-to-day lives of generations of small-town Jews, in all their uniqueness and universality. But it is Eliach's own roots in Eishyshok, as descendant of one of the five founding families and one of only twenty-nine survivors, which give her work its depth and passion."

Honours and Awards

• Woodrow Wilson dissertation fellowship, 1971–72;
• Myrtle Wreath award for humanitarian activities (with Joseph Papp), 1979;
• Christopher award, 1982, for Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust;
• Guggenheim fellowship
  Guggenheim Fellowship
  Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
  
  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;
• Brooklyn College Alumna of the Year award, 1998;
• Eternal Flame award, 1999;
• Honorary doctorates: Yeshiva University, New York; Spertus College, Chicago; Keene State College, 2003