A survivor herself, Yaffa Eliach has accomplished a staggering amount in commemorating the Holocaust. Throughout, she has focused not only on the deaths of the residents of the vanished shtetlach, but also on their lives.

Even as a seven-year-old, Yaffa (Sonenson) Eliach was a fighter, tenaciously fulfilling her father’s directive to “choose life.” She survived the Holocaust, escaped the long arm of Communism, narrowly avoided baptism, and staunchly refused to enroll in a Zionist anti-religious school. Later, she became a pioneer in Holocaust research, enlisting the help of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in her effort to commemorate not just the deaths of six million Jews, but their lives as well. Though her list of achievements is long and impressive, Yaffa remains a builder, with new dreams and goals yet to be accomplished. In a far-ranging interview with Mishpacha, she discusses her dramatic personal history as well as the mission that has given her life so much urgency and meaning

A wealthy chassidic rabbi living near Danzig had the custom to take a walk every morning, during which he would greet each passerby.  He always passed by a German man who worked in the fields outside the city and would greet him, “Good morning, Herr Mueller!” Herr Mueller would wave and respond, “Good morning, Herr Rabiner!”

When the war began, the rabbi lost his family in Treblinka and found himself transferred to Auschwitz. One morning, while waiting in line for the selection — left to death, right to life — he raised his feverish eyes to look at the white-gloved man whose baton pronounced the sentence. Suddenly he heard himself saying, “Good morning, Herr Mueller!”

“Good morning, Herr Rabiner,” responded the SS officer with a little smile. The baton waved to the right, and the next day the rabbi was transferred to a less dangerous camp. “Such is the power of a good-morning greeting,” the rabbi later said, in the years after the war.  

 I first heard the story of Herr Mueller at a shiur by Rabbi Paysach Krohn, but it has been told and retold in many different settings. What I didn’t realize at the time was that this story first appeared in a book, published in 1982, entitled Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. The book’s author, Dr. Yaffa Eliach, was a pioneer in collecting first-person accounts of the Holocaust and publishing them for an international audience (Hasidic Tales was translated into seven languages and, ironically, sold particularly well in Germany). Yaffa Eliach’s ceaseless efforts and scholarship have made the Holocaust come alive for literally millions of people, not only through her books, but through the Holocaust museums that she herself instigated and helped plan and execute.

Dr. Eliach’s accomplishments are staggering. It was she who first brought Holocaust history to the attention of U.S. presidents, persuading them to create a committee that ultimately led to the founding of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She also played a part in the construction of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, and is currently in the process of attempting to construct a model shtetl, along the lines of Virginia’s colonial Williamsburg, on a 124-acre tract of land in Rishon L’Tzion in Israel. Should anyone find these achievements insufficient, Yaffa Eliach has also helped create documentaries about the war and shtetl life, and even organized an exhibit commemorating Pope John Paul II’s friendly relationship with the Jewish community. In the course of a scholarly career that has spanned almost fifty years, Mrs. Eliach has lectured all over the world and become the friend of countless celebrities.

One might expect a person of such towering accomplishment to command an equally towering presence, but Yaffa Eliach in person is slight and gentle in manner, greeting me warmly, dressed in a flowered dress and beaded necklace, her trademark bun-and-braid headpiece bound in the back with a bow. Her voice is almost childlike, her English barely accented (her books reflect an impressive mastery of English, which is at least a fifth language for her after Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and Russian).

Her husband, Rabbi Dr. David Eliach, (Principal Emeritus of Yeshivah of Flatbush High School) joins us for our discussion. Rabbi Eliach looks hale and fit for a man in his eighties, tall and white-haired with a capacious reserve of knowledge and memories. The Eliachs live in Manhattan on the Upper East Side, in a spacious apartment they bought about ten years ago that commands an impressive view of the East River and is filled with Jewish artwork, tapestries, folk art, and framed pictures of the Eliachs with various dignitaries. A hook on the wall holds up, in addition to a hanging piece of art, a brass medal on a ribbon reading National Book Award Finalist: Yaffa’s 1998 opus There Once Was A World received this honor.

The Eliachs fuss over me like grandparents: Can they get me something to drink? Maybe I want to eat something, some fish or Rabbi Eliach’s own recipe for chatzilim, an eggplant dish? But I can’t think about food just now, I am too impatient to hear all their stories. In particular, I want to find out how Yaffa Eliach became America’s first driving force behind Holocaust studies and Holocaust education.

Choosing Life

No one is better equipped to tell Holocaust stories than one who survived it herself, and Yaffa Sonenson Eliach is a survivor. Her family traced their roots to one of the first five Jewish families who settled in Eishyshok, a village near Vilna in Lithuania, over 900 years ago. “Actually, my mother went to Vilna when it was time to give birth to me,” Yaffa says, “because all the important rabbis were in Vilna and she wanted me to be born around that hashpa’ah [influence]. My family is descended from the Gaon of Vilna, eight generations before me. But my childhood was spent in the shtetl of Eishyshok.”

Yaffa’s father was well-to-do, and when the Germans came into their area in 1941, he buried most of their gold and paid money to neighboring non-Jewish farmers to hide them, managing to save some other families as well. He acted just in the nick of time; shortly afterwards the Nazis rounded up all the Jews of Eishyshok and mercilessly shot them into pits. The rabbi of the shtetl was buried alive.

In the meantime the Sonenson family hid with the farmer, spending the next few years sleeping in a pit under the stable and coming out to help with farm work when it was safe to do so. When the area was “liberated” by the Russians, the family returned home — only to suffer a yet more terrible fate. As they sat at dinner one night, neighbors who were Polish fascists stormed into their home and began shooting everywhere. “They killed my mother and my baby brother,” Yaffa recounts, with the matter-of-factness that comes from telling the story innumerable times. “My mother fell on me, but because I was small, they didn’t see me.” She was all of seven years old.

The murderers were caught by the Communists, but as if the loss of her mother were not enough, a Jewish neighbor denounced Yaffa’s father to the authorities as a Zionist. Moshe Sonenson was arrested and sentenced to serve indeterminate time in Siberia. A Soviet police officer brought Yaffa to say goodbye her father in the cell where he was being held before his deportation. He told her: “I am Moshe and your mother was Tzipporah, like in the Chumash … you saw so many Jews killed, and they are killing so many now, you must make sure it never happens again. The Torah says, ‘Ubacharta b’chaim, choose life,’ and you must do everything for the life of Am Yisrael. Focus on life and love good people. And study and study, because that’s how you will learn what to do. Do not cry. Bacharta b’chaim, and do not stop studying.”

Then Yaffa’s father instructed her to dig up the gold that had been buried in the yard of the house and seek out a woman in Vilna who might help her. The seven-year-old Yaffa made her way to Vilna and managed to find her, but the woman cruelly confiscated the money and threw out the child. Yaffa had the presence of mind to seek out a police officer; he brought her to a Communist Jewish school where the headmaster told her to keep quiet about anything Jewish or she would find herself in Siberia like her father. “So I left,” Yaffa says simply. “I found my Uncle Shalom in Vilna. He was trying to go back to Eretz Yisrael, where he had lived before the war.”

As I listen, I can barely imagine being put in such circumstances as an adult, much less a child. “How did you manage to get through all that?” I marvel. “You were only seven years old! How did you have the wits to manage all this on your own?”

“I was always praying and praying,” she answers. “I never stopped praying, and that is why I succeeded. Hashem listened to my prayers.”

Journey to the Promised Land

Yaffa’s Uncle Shalom had returned to Europe for a visit when the war broke out and he found himself unable to return; his wife Miriam and their daughter were murdered by the Nazis. After the war, he married another woman named Miriam. As Shalom still had his old Mandate Palestine passports for himself and his first wife and daughter, they contrived to use the old passports for the second Miriam and Yaffa. The three of them escaped Soviet Poland and traveled to Czechoslovakia, where the very-expectant Miriam went into labor and delivered a baby in a hospital outside Prague. Somehow the authorities discovered that Shalom was a Zionist, and they were forced to flee the hospital that very same night. Shalom and Yaffa managed between them to shepherd Miriam and the baby to safety.

Miraculously, they made it to the American sector in Germany. Miriam and Yaffa were both quite ill after the journey, and were taken to different hospitals. Yaffa ended up near Munich, in a hospital where the staff decided to baptize her. But Yaffa would have none of it. “I screamed to them that I was Jewish. I told Sister Henrietta that my Yiddish came from her German, but her religion came from my religion. She was able to appreciate what I said, and she promised to help me get to Israel, but she asked me for one favor. She said, ‘When you get to Jerusalem, go to a certain tree [which is historically linked to the founder of Christianity] in the Old City and send me a branch, so I know I’ll be “saved” for saving you.’

“Sister Henrietta found some American soldiers to take me to Shalom and Miriam — it was a miracle, since they had just about given up on ever finding me and planned to leave the next day. We finally got a boat to Egypt, then Tel Aviv, and the Eishyshok people found us an apartment in Jerusalem. Miriam and I went to that tree in the Old City and sent a branch to Sister Henrietta.”

Yaffa pauses for effect. “And you know what happened as a result of that? Sister Henrietta later helped the Chief Rabbi of Israel gather 12,000 Jewish children who had been hidden with Christian families and send them to Israel.”

As time went by in Jerusalem, Shalom and Miriam found that money was so tight they had no more left to help raise Yaffa. She was directed to the Youth Aliyah office, which tried to assign her to a nonreligious Hashomer Hatzair school. But Yaffa, now all of ten years old, put her little foot down and staunchly refused to go. Her aunt and uncle enlisted the aid of the “Nazir of Jerusalem,” Rabbi David Cohen, who was outraged and immediately contacted a friend who worked with AMIT. They were able to reassign Yaffa to an AMIT village in Tel Raanan for child survivors of the war. There she became close to Bessie Gottesfeld, one of the directors, and blossomed under the love and tutelage of the school. She acted in school plays, wrote essays, played sports, and swam. (“I still swim every day,” she tells me.)

When Yaffa was old enough for high school, Mrs. Gottesfeld saw to it that she was placed in Kfar Batya, where Rabbi David Eliach, a former talmid of the Hevron Yeshivah, was the headmaster. Rabbi Eliach, a tenth-generation Yerushalmi and a grandson of the Lelover Rebbe on one side and Karlin-Stoliners on the other, had studied to become a teacher “because my family didn’t think I should end up a schnorrer.” Yaffa thought he was the best teacher she had ever had, and for his part, Rabbi Eliach remembers, “Yaffa was a sponge. She absorbed everything she was taught and threw herself into the work with a passion.” Out of twenty-five students, Yaffa was one of six to complete the bagruyot matriculation exams and continue independent studies.

In 1953, following Yaffa’s graduation, she married her favorite teacher. “I had already been recruited by Mr. Braverman to take a position at Yeshivah of Flatbush,” Rabbi Eliach says. “So two months after we were married, I left for New York. It was supposed to be a two-year position.” He smiles. “Now it’s fifty-five years that I’m living in New York.”

The Seeds of Holocaust Remembrance

Yaffa stayed in Israel until 1954, trying to obtain her father’s release from Siberia. Moshe Sonenson was finally liberated in 1957, after four years of Nazi occupation and twelve of Soviet prison hell. Sadly, he was no longer able to find much inspiration in his religion. But he did live to dance at the wedding of his granddaughter in 1983 (he was niftar a few months later), and always encouraged his daughter’s efforts to ensure that, as he is quoted as saying in her book, “at least the people, and perhaps even G-d, will remember that there once was a world filled with faith, Judaism, and humanity.”

The Eliachs settled into Brooklyn, where Rabbi Eliach began a long and distinguished career at Yeshiva of Flatbush. The couple was eventually blessed with two children, Yotav and Smadar. Yotav serves today as the principal of Rambam Mesivta High School in Lawrence, and Smadar is a professor of history at Touro College (between the two of them, they have given the Eliachs, bli ayin hara, fourteen grandchildren). Yaffa herself began to work at Yeshivah of Flatbush, setting up a “Holocaust Center” in the school. “At the beginning it was just a room we set aside, with some books and materials,” Rabbi Eliach recalls. “But we expanded, and eventually Yaffa began putting out a newsletter.”

Quite a few of the students had parents or relatives who were Holocaust survivors, and Yaffa began to collect first-person accounts of Holocaust experiences. One of her students came from a family close to the Bluzhever Rebbe, Rabbi Yisrael Spira, ztz”l, who was himself a survivor. As the Rebbe did not grant private audiences to women, the student accompanied Yaffa when she spoke to the Rebbe and collected his reminiscences, many of which became part of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. “I spent many hours interviewing him, and I became close to his Rebbetzin as well,” Yaffa says.

As she continued interviewing people and collecting stories, Yaffa refined her interviewing techniques and even put together a small booklet about methods for interviewing survivors. That booklet has since been adopted by Steven Spielberg for use by his Shoah Foundation, which aims to establish an archive of filmed first-person testimonies about the Holocaust. “You have to understand,” says Rabbi Eliach, “that until that point, most histories of the Holocaust were focused on statistics, and based on non-Jewish documentation. Or they were comprised of stories that had never been verified. Yaffa decided to get the stories from the Jews who had actually lived through it. She developed her own techniques for taking oral histories, and she was always very careful to verify her information.

“At the beginning, she received a lot of opposition from people in her field. But later the idea of taking oral histories became accepted and even came into vogue in academia.”

By the early 1970s, Yaffa had a PhD and was teaching history and literature at Brooklyn College. Her Center for Holocaust Studies Documentation and Research moved with her — “the first Center for Holocaust Studies in the United States,” she boasts, “and the first Holocaust Studies program on a U.S. campus.” She was known as a riveting lecturer, and students flocked to her classes. “She brought the Holocaust to life,” I was later told by Suri, a friend who was one of her students in the mid-1970s. “She made everything seem so immediate — you could feel  yourself in a room with the Nazis, feel the Hashgachah that saved people’s lives. She inspired us to want to learn more, but she inspired us even more through her personal example.”

Spurred by the drive to propagate Holocaust awareness, Yaffa invited then-President Gerald Ford to come visit her Center for Holocaust Studies. To everyone’s surprise, he took her up on the offer, visiting on October 12th 1976. “He knew nothing at all about the Holocaust,” Yaffa remembers. “It was an eye-opener for him. After that, he agreed to create a committee to discuss some kind of national memorial to the Holocaust.”

Ford lost the election that November to Jimmy Carter, but Carter picked up the baton, creating a President Carter Holocaust Commission and inviting Yaffa Eliach, Elie Wiesel, and others to serve on a committee that eventually brought the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum into being over fifteen years later (it was dedicated in 2003). The Commission was sent in 1979 on a fact-finding tour of Europe, and as the plane headed for Russia, flying over Yaffa’s old home of Lithuania, Yaffa felt a flood of memories and nostalgia that led her to a profound realization: for all that she and other historians had been focusing on the ways Jews of the shtetlach had died, nobody had paid any attention to the way they had lived. She resolved then and there to begin constructing her own testimony, of both shtetl life in general and her own shtetl, Eishyshok, in particular.

Going Back “Home”

 That inspiration led to Yaffa’s decision to create what she ultimately entitled the “Tower Of Life” exhibit within the Holocaust museum: a space devoted to remembering the life, not the death, of the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Over the next seventeen years Yaffa traveled frequently to Eastern Europe, researching Eishyshok and shtetl life, collecting photos, documents, and artifacts. She now owns albums upon albums of photos, many at her Manhattan apartment and even more at the couple’s country home in the Poconos, and amassed an astounding 1600 to be used at the museum.

These photos were not always easy to get. “When I visited Eishyshok for the first time in 1982, I found that many photos of Jewish people had been appropriated by non-Jews. They saw images of people with long beards, holy-looking, and they assumed they were pictures of saints! They used to hang them up in their homes!” (“It’s a very primitive place,” Rabbi Eliach puts in. “Many homes still don’t have running water, even today!”)

The Eishyshok photos were hung in collage fashion within a three-story cylindrical space in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Tower was my brainchild start to finish,” Yaffa says proudly. “And the first pictures I hung there were, of course, pictures of my own family.” Millions of visitors to the museum, many (though not the majority) of them Jews, have been awed and enlightened by this exhibit.

An even more substantial monument to Eishyshok is the book that resulted from Yaffa’s many years of concerted research into her home town. Entitled There Once Was A World (Back Bay Books, 1998), this eight hundred-page volume chronicles the history and all facets of Jewish life over the 900 years of the community’s existence. Jam-packed with interviews, photos, and historical detail, the book sheds light on Jewish life not only in Eishyshok but in many similar shtetlach as well. “For fifteen years my husband felt like he was living in Eishyshok,” Yaffa jokes. “I think one of our grandchildren’s first words was Eishyshok! It consumed our lives for a very long time.”

Into The Future

Yaffa’s immersion in shtetl history led her to envision recreating a model shtetl on the lines of Virginia’s colonial Williamsburg. She set up an organization she called the Shtetl Foundation, and convinced the State of Israel and the city of Rishon L’Tzion to donate 124 acres to build a “Living History Museum of the Jewish World.” The idea was to recreate the Jewish past, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, and showplace the contributions of Jews to their host countries and their relations with the non-Jews there. With the help of Keren Kayemet, a “Forest of Life” was planted on the grounds to memorialize the 1.5 million children killed during the Holocaust; an educational center for children and teens is planned there as well. The Living History Museum had its groundbreaking ceremony in 2003 and is scheduled for completion in 2010, although lack of funds may delay its completion. Rishon’s mayor, Meir Nitzan, himself a survivor, is an enthusiastic supporter of the project.

Yaffa was also recruited to help create a 2005 exhibit at Xavier University in Ohio entitled “A Blessing To One Another: Pope John Paul II and the Jewish People,” which opened shortly after the pontiff’s death and toured the entire United States before being transferred to Israel. The exhibit featured the Pope’s affection for Jews and the Land of Israel, and displayed photos of him touring Israel, as well as old Polish photos of some of the Pope’s Jewish friends and artifacts from the Holocaust. She met the Pope at the beginning of the project and received his blessing and good wishes for her success; her photo albums document their meeting.

In between lecturing all over the world, Yaffa also found time to assist with a documentary about the Holocaust and shtetl life in 1997, and another about the Yaldei Tehran that was done by a German company. More recently, some health issues have kept her closer to home, but her enthusiasm never wanes. “I am working hard on all this, night and day,” she repeats several times. “She has an incredible passion for what she does,” puts in Rabbi Eliach, and you can see it in Yaffa’s expression, in the way her eyes shine when she talks about her work and in the way she lavishes praise on all her collaborators — everyone is “outstanding” and “excellent.”

“How did she manage to become such a dynamo?” I ask her husband when Yaffa goes off to find yet another of her massive photo albums to show me. “Here we are sitting in Manhattan, where every third person is seeing a psychoanalyst, and I’m willing to bet not one of them has lived through the kinds of tragedies and hardships that Yaffa did. Most people would have been crushed by those experiences!”

Rabbi Eliach nods. “I think you had to already be something special just to survive the war,” he says. “You had to manage your life every second, to make sure you had that extra sip of water, that extra scrap of blanket to lie on. The people who came through were fighters from the beginning. Yaffa always had that drive.”

“But how does she find so many people who help fund her work and make it happen?” I persist, still amazed that this diminutive lady with the gentle voice has managed to coordinate gargantuan, wildly expensive projects like building Holocaust museums.

Rabbi Eliach smiles. “Yaffa has a way of making friends and getting to know people,” he says. “She can sit on a train and strike up a lifelong friendship.”

I see what he means; before I leave, Yaffa insists that her husband take a picture of us on the balcony of the apartment. We go out, and she puts an arm around me. After several hours of absorbing conversation, the Eliachs are starting to feel like family.

Yaffa gazes out at the skyscrapers. “Such beautiful buildings. I also built things,” she murmurs. “I built so many things.” After living through so much destruction, she has devoted a lifetime to heeding her father’s admonition to “make sure it never happens again; choose life and do everything for the life of Am Yisrael.” Through her books, museums, documentaries, and monuments, she has ensured that literally millions of people have gained awareness, not only of the cruelty of the Holocaust, but of the beauty of what was lost.

The Bicyclist from Heaven

In 1982, the Eliachs went to Eishyshok for the first time since the war. Lithuania was still Communist, and people were not as a rule allowed to visit the shtetlach. Yaffa had already begun writing Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, and she persuaded the KGB to allow her to visit for scholarly purposes.

Once in Eishyshok, she found that the younger generation knew absolutely nothing about Jews, had no memories whatsoever. They finally found an old man who said he could help them find Yaffa’s grandmother’s house. They got into a taxi, but it soon became obvious the man was simply very drunk, and they told the driver to stop at the hospital and drop him off.

“As we stood in front of the hospital, a man happened to bicycle by,” Yaffa recounts. “Out of desperation, we asked him if he might be able to help us. He said, ‘I don’t know much, but my mother probably remembers something from those days.’ He took us to his mother’s house, where she told us, ‘Yes, all the Jews were killed during the war, they shot them into a ditch. There was one little Jewish girl I used to help watch, I was like her nanny …’ Then we realized the little Jewish girl she was talking about was me! Both of us started to cry.

“After that, this woman showed us everything — the cemetery, which by now was destroyed, and all the other old Jewish sites. But we just couldn’t get over the Hashgachah pratis — that we just happened to run into her son at precisely the right moment.”

Some years later, the Eliach family erected a monument to the Sonenson family in Eishyshok. Of the town’s 35,000 pre-war residents, only twenty-nine survived. A few of them stayed in the area, most raised as Catholics. When, through Yaffa’s research, she managed to ferret them out, she was able to reconnect some of them to long-lost family in Israel. While grateful to her for helping them meet up with lost family members, most of them were not, unfortunately, interested in reconnecting to their Jewish roots.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 220)