Michael Berenbaum is a distinguished professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. He has created Holocaust and human rights museums on three continents and in several American cities, headed the Shoah Visual History Foundation and was the executive editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.
A special exhibition entitled “Through the Lens of Faith” opened just outside the gates of Auschwitz on Monday, July 1. A joint creation of Henri Lustiger-Thaler, architect/designer Daniel Libeskind, and photographer Caryl Englander, the exhibition portrays 21 survivors of Auschwitz: 18 Jews, two Roman Catholics and one Roma. They entered the gates of Auschwitz and…
The life of Mark Talisman, who died on July 11 at the age of 78 must be noted for its most significant accomplishments. Talisman was raised in Cleveland, then as now, one of the most organized and accomplished of Jewish communities in the United States, one in which Jews comfortably played a central role in…
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — 1993 was a dramatic year in the memorialization of the Holocaust. In April, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors; 45 million visitors later it is a fixture adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., not only telling the story of the Holocaust but demonstrating the ongoing significance of…
The other day, 12,000 Jews from all over the world marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) as part of the annual pilgrimage known as the March of the Living. Students spend a week in Poland and then another week in Israel; they are at Birkeanu for Hom Hashoah and in…
Elie Wiesel, the world’s best known and most influential Holocaust survivor, is no longer. His death at 87, announced Saturday, makes us ever more acutely aware that we are coming to the end of an era. Soon, all too soon, there will be no survivors. Elie Wiesel was a unique figure among American Jewish leaders….
I first met Rosalie Chris Lerman and her husband, Miles Lerman, in 1978 when I interviewed for the position of deputy director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. As they said in “Casablanca,” it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. In the almost 40 years that followed we worked together building the United…
The date of Ernest Michel’s death was fitting, somehow. A Holocaust survivor and former executive vice president of UJA-Federation of New York from 1970-1989, Michel died at home on May 7, in the week between Yom Hashoah and Yom Ha’atzmaut. Michel was a Jewish communal executive for more than 60 years when such work was…
● God, Faith & Identity From the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors Edited by Menachem Rosensaft Jewish Lights Publishing, 352 pages, $25. Israel prize winner and this generation’s most gifted Talmudist, David Weiss Halivni, who was born in Sighet, Romania, a year and a day before his friend and fellow sighter,…
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