Rachel Rojanksi, Through the Poisoned Mists: Rachel Auerbach and Her Life Mission
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Elizabeth and Tony Comper Holocaust Education Fund
Rachel Rojanski (Brown University)
Through the Poisoned Mists: Rachel Auerbach and Her Life Mission
This talk will focus on the remarkable figure of Rachel Auerbach, a Yiddish writer best known for her heroic social and cultural activism in the Warsaw ghetto, but focusing on her post-war struggle over Holocaust commemoration. One of the first four people employed by Yad Vashem, she single-handedly mounted a public campaign over the way in which the Holocaust should be documented. This, then, is the story of a single woman and new immigrant who not only took on Israel’s male and misogynistic establishment, but won, and in so doing laid the foundations for Holocaust documentation as we understand it today.
Rachel Rojanski is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University. She is the author of : Conflicting Identities: Labor Zionism in North America 1905-1931 , Ben Gurion University of the Negev press, 2005 (in Hebrew) and, Yiddish in Israel: A History, Indiana University Press, 2020 which won the Jordan Schnitzer book award for 2022. She is currently working on a book project about Rokhl Oyerbakh.