P.65 - Yaffa Eliach Collection

P.65 - Yaffa Eliach Collection Professor Yaffa Eliach was born Yaffa (Sheinla) Sonenson in the village of Ejszyszki, Poland (in Yiddish: Eyshishok; today Eišiškės, Lithuania) in 1935. Nazi Germany occupied the village in June 1941. Within two days in late September, almost all 3,500 Jews of the village were murdered in the local cemetery by Einsatzgruppe A. Yaffa escaped to a hiding place with her family just before the massacre. Until the liberation of Eyshishok by the Red Army in July 1944, the family moved from one hiding place to another, escaping death many times. Yaffa made aliya to Eretz Israel in 1946. In 1953 she married Rabbi David Eliach. In 1954, David and Yaffa Eliach emigrated to the United States where Yaffa started her academic studies at Brooklyn College, completing her requirements for certification as a Doctor of Philosophy in History and Russian Literature at City University of New York in 1973. Eliach established the Center for Holocaust Studies in Brooklyn and was one of the pioneers of Holocaust research and education in the United States; she was among the first of the researchers to gather and base their research on the oral documentation of survivors. In 1978 she was appointed as a member of President Jimmy Carter's Commission on the Holocaust headed by Elie Wiesel. The Commission brought about the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in 1993. The "Tower of Faces", which became one of the symbols of the permanent exhibition at the museum, is composed of 1,500 photographs from Prof. Eliach's personal archive. Yaffa Eliach died in New York, 08 November 2016, and was buried in Jerusalem. Prof. Eliach conscientiously gathered and organized the Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection over 25 years, including thousands of recorded testimonies, transcripts of testimonies, original diaries, written memoirs and original documents in English, German, Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. There are also photograph albums and original photographs in the collection, and articles and research papers written by Prof. Eliach pertaining to the history of the Jews of eastern Europe in general, and her birthplace, the village of Eyshishok, Lithuania, in particular. Over 6,000 photographs included in the collection reconstruct life in the village from the late 19th century and include documentation from more than 90% of the residents of the village who perished during the Holocaust. In 2012 the Eliach family contributed the entire collection to Yad Vashem.