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WHO WE ARE"Voices from the Ashes: The Forgotten Testimonies" is a project whose goal is to translate and publish some 7,300 testimonies taken from or personally set down by Holocaust survivors throughout Poland as early as July 1944. Because of their immediacy to the events they describe, these documents are of unique value. The project was conceived in 1997 by Mark Swiatlo, then curator of the Judaica Library Collections at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). An initial anthology of seventy testimonies has been translated under the joint auspices of FAU and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (JHI, also known by its Polish initials ZIH), where the testimonies are housed, and is soon to be published. After Mr. Swiatlo's passing in May 2003, the Voices from the Ashes Foundation, Inc., a Florida not-for-profit organization, was established for the sole purpose of ensuring that the homonymous project is brought to completion as originally envisioned. The Foundation works in close collaboration with JHI and is assisted by an Advisory Board comprised of the following eminent individuals: Michael Berenbaum, Ph.D. Michael Berenbaum, Ph.D. Michael Berenbaum is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and the historical development of films. He is also an adjunct Professor of Theology at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and director of the newly established Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust. Dr. Berenbaum has taught at Georgetown, Wesleyan, Claremont, Clark and Yale Universities. For three years he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He served variously as Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute, Project Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Deputy Director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust. Dr. Berenbaum is the author and editor of twelve books, including After Tragedy and Triumph, The World Must Know, and Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. In film, his work as co-producer of One Survivor Remembers: The Gerda Weissman Klein Story was recognized with an Academy Award, an Emmy Award and the Cable Ace Award. He was the historical consultant on The Shoah Foundation's documentary The Last Days, which won an Academy Award for the best feature-length documentary of 1998. Yaffa Eliach, Ph.D. Yaffa Eliach is a pioneering scholar in Holocaust studies and the founder of the first Center for Holocaust Documentation and Research in the United States. She is a Professor Emerita of Brooklyn College, specializing in Eastern European intellectual history, Holocaust studies, and Hasidism. She teaches as a Distinguished Professor at universities around the USA. A member of President Carter's Holocaust Commission, she created and assembled the photographic material for the Tower of Life permanent exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Her scholarship has made her a valued contributor to the Encyclopedia Judaica, the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Hasidism, and numerous scholarly as well as literary and popular publications throughout the world. The author of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, an international classic, Professor Eliach has also published the National Book Award finalist There Once Was a World, an account of nine hundred years of Jewish life in her hometown of Eishyshok. As President and Founder of the Shtetl Foundation, Professor Eliach is currently undertaking a full-scale recreation of a typical shtetl in Rishon Le-Zion, Israel. The 67-acre site will include synagogues, Hebrew and Yiddish schools, stores, a market square, and a castle housing a museum of Jewish life. Saul Friedländer, Ph.D. Saul Friedländer holds the 1939 Club Chair for the History of the Holocaust at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has taught at Tel Aviv University, at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem). Through his research and writings, Saul Friedländer has made landmark contributions to our understanding of Nazi Germany and the destruction of European Jewry. Professor Friedländer has authored eight books, including When Memory Comes; Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe; Reflections on Nazism; and the Jews Vol I: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, considered the definitive history of the period. He was the recipient of the Israel Prize in History and a MacArthur Foundation Award. Professor Friedländer is the founder and editor-in-chief of the influential scholarly journal History and Memory. He is a member of the Independent Experts Commission investigating Swiss policies during World War Two, and Chair of the Independent Historians Commission researching the history of the Bertelsmann Publishing Company during the Third Reich. Raul Hilberg, Ph.D. (z’l) Until his passing on August 4, 2007, Raul Hilberg was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Vermont and widely acknowledged as the dean of Holocaust scholarship. The University created a department of Holocaust studies to honor his achievement and legacy in the field. He was appointed to President Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust and to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. First published in 1961, Professor Hilberg's three-volume The Destruction of European Jewry has remained the standard against which to judge all subsequent histories of the Holocaust and remains the most comprehensive analysis of the Nazi destruction process. In addition, Professor Hilberg authored Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 (1992) and The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (1996), an autobiographical account of Hilberg’s life and scholarship. He edited Documents of Destruction: Germany and Jewry, 1933-1945 (1971) and co-edited The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom (1979). A member of our Advisory Board until his passing, he is fondly remembered for his heartfelt interest in our project and his invaluable insights. Samuel Kassow, Ph.D. Bio coming soon. Lawrence Langer, Ph.D. Lawrence L. Langer (Professor of English Emeritus at Simmons College in Boston) is one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust. His Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, drawing on the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, was named one of the "Ten Best Books of 1991" by the New York Times Book Review and won a 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His many other published works include The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination; Admitting the Holocaust; In a Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak; and Preempting the Holocaust. Professor Langer has conducted interviews and interviewer training sessions for the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive, and lectures throughout the world. He served as Senior Scholar at the Research Institute of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1996 and was a Koerner Fellow for the Study of the Holocaust at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University in 1997. More recently he was a resident scholar at the Villa Serbelloni of the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. Professor Langer received NEH fellowships in 1979 and 1989, and has directed five NEH-funded summer seminars for high school teachers on the literature of the Holocaust. Aaron Lansky, Ph.D. (Hon.) In 1980, at the age of 24, Aaron Lansky set out to rescue the world's Yiddish books before it was too late. He found priceless books in basements and attics, demolition sites and garbage dumpsters. Today, the nonprofit organization he founded, the National Yiddish Book Center, has recovered almost 1.5 million volumes and is still going strong. Book collection was only the beginning of Mr. Lansky's work. The Yiddish Book Center also reprints and distributes books, publishes an award-winning English-language magazine, spearheads an international effort to translate the best of Yiddish literature into English, offers exciting exhibits at its $8-million headquarters in Amherst, Massachusetts, and sponsors a wide range of cultural and educational programs designed to "open up" the treasures of Yiddish culture for a new generation. With Lansky as its president, the National Yiddish Book Center is supported by more than 30,000 members, making it one of the largest and fastest-growing Jewish cultural organizations in America. Aaron Lansky holds an M.A. in East European Jewish Studies from McGill University, and honorary doctorates from Amherst College, the State University of New York, and the Hebrew Union College. His work has been widely featured on National Public Radio and network television, and was the subject of articles in Time, Smithsonian, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and countless other publications. In 1989, Aaron Lansky became the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Award, one of America's highest honors. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Ph.D. A modern Jewish studies specialist, Professor Deborah Lipstadt has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Occidental College in Los Angeles. She has lectured worldwide and was a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1994, she was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the museum's council. As a member of the Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom, Professor Lipstadt advised the government on political responses to religious oppression. Deborah Lipstadt is currently Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1986 she published Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-45. Professor Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, is the first full-length account of Holocaust denial. It led to a celebrated libel suit filed against Professor Lipstadt and Penguin Books by David Irving, a military historian affiliated with the Holocaust denial movement. In the wake of Professor Lipstadt’s forceful defense, the British High Court of Justice ruled resoundingly in her favor, finding that she had accurately labeled Irving a Holocaust denier. The trial was described by the Daily Telegraph (London) as having "done for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations." In July 2001 the Court of Appeal roundly rejected Irving's attempt to appeal the judgment against him. Lipstadt is currently writing a book about the trial. Aryeh Rubin Aryeh Rubin is the founder and director of Targum Shlishi (www.targumshlishi.org), a philanthropy dedicated to supporting innovative projects that promote positive change in the Jewish world. The foundation concentrates on four areas: education, women’s issues, Israel, and justice for Nazi war crimes. One of the recent projects conceived and supported by Mr. Rubin, in collaboration with the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Office, is “Operation Last Chance,” which awards $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Nazi war criminals. In 2003, the program’s first year, 241 suspects’ names were submitted from Lithuania, Latvia, the Ukraine, and Estonia, where Operation Last Chance was first introduced. As a result, by early 2004 eight official murder investigations had been opened in Lithuania and one in Estonia, with additional investigations likely to be initiated. The program was introduced in Poland, Austria, and Romania in Fall 2003 and by early 2004, several names were submitted from those countries. Mr. Rubin’s work on behalf of justice for Nazi war crimes is motivated in part by a personal journey in which he visited eleven concentration camps by himself at the age of twenty-four, in 1974-75. Mr. Rubin is also the founding partner and managing director of The Maot Group, an investment company. Prior to founding The Maot Group in 1991, Mr. Rubin was in the publishing field, first as the founder and publisher of Jewish Living magazine in the late 1970s and then as the publisher of New Yorkbased KSF Group, a medical publishing company. Mr. Rubin received a B.A. from Yeshiva University. He is married, has three children, and divides his time between Florida and New York. Born contemporaneously with the establishment of the State of Israel, Simcha Stein has been a member of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot since 1969. Between 1977 and 1980 he served as Kibbutz Secretary, the equivalent of mayor. Since 1988, he has been associated with the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum, first as founder of the Museum's Department of Education and later as Vice-Chairman and then Chairman of the Museum's Directorate. Since 1996, Mr. Stein serves as the General Director of the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum. The Ghetto Fighters' House Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum, the world's first Holocaust museum, was founded in 1949 by a community of Holocaust survivors led by Yitzhak Zuckerman, a co-commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and his wife, Zivia Lubetkin, a leader in the Jewish Resistance. Located on the grounds of Kibbutz Lohamei Haghetaot in northern Israel, the Museum was intended as an archive for historical materials related to the Holocaust and the Resistance. Today it encompasses extensive historical and art exhibits, the Ungar Education Building, a seminar and dormitory facility, and Yad Layeled - the world's only museum dedicated to the lives and memories of the one and a half million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust. In addition to his responsibilities as General Director of the Museum, Simcha Stein coordinates educational youth visits to Poland and is a member of the Board of Directors of the World Federation of Polish Jews in Israel, the Janusz Korczak Association, the Western Galilee Tourism Board, and the Acco Theater. He also serves as Chairman of the Foundation for Scholarships to Students Writing on the Holocaust and as Chairman of the Oskar Handler Fund. |