Yaffa Eliach, the Voice of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust

The New York Times’ assessment of Professor Yaffa Eliach, the elegant doyen of Holocaust research who passed away at the age of 79, was that she “Captured Faces of the Holocaust.” The headline recognized Eliach’s towering photographic exhibition of her childhood village Eishyshok, which has been on permanent display at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington since the Museum opened in 1993. What it missed was that we have lost one of our greatest storytellers of the Holocaust.

During her more than half-century of leadership, teaching, and writing, Eliach created a unique space for survivors to tell their story to their own children and students. Her approach of interviewing survivors and collecting testimony preceded Yale’s archive for Holocaust testimony by more than a decade. Her detailed Holocaust Oral History Manual, with hundreds of specific questions and guidance on how to ask, provided a theoretical and practical structure for Oral History projects, and has assisted museums and research centers to study the Holocaust and other global genocides around the world.

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