Leah Goldstein

Commemoration from a Personal Perspective: News from the Library

Among its recent acquisitions, the Yad Vashem Library – the most comprehensive collection of published material about the Holocaust – counts two unique publications that highlight the wide variety of ways in which private individuals have dedicated themselves to bringing new narratives to a wider audience. One is a personal quest in search of the wartime fate of a relative the author discovered by chance; and the other is the fruit of an unusual endeavor to bring Holocaust commemoration to... Read more

Tackling Antisemitism Through Holocaust Education

Yad Vashem has long understood the need to educate about the Holocaust as a tool for combatting antisemitism. Today, as the definitive source for Holocaust remembrance, documentation, research and education, it is working tirelessly not only to ensure that the memory and meanings of the Holocaust continue to be relevant, but also to use its comprehensive knowledge and carefully developed educational tools to fight contemporary forms of antisemitism. Read more

Graduate Spotlight

Every year, over 300,000 students and educators from Israel and around the world attend hundreds of educational activities, in a dozen languages, at the International School for Holocaust Studies. Featured here is one of the School’s graduates, and what she has achieved since: Read more

Children in the Holocaust

To mark International Children's Day, and to answer the high demand for material on the experience of Jewish children during the Shoah, Yad Vashem launched a new online exhibition in November 2019, entitled "Children in the Holocaust." The exhibition features children's toys, games, artworks, letters, diaries and albums, all carefully preserved in Yad Vashem's Collections, and which appear across the Yad Vashem website as part of other online presentations on a variety of... Read more

Yad Vashem Studies

In January 2020, Senior Historian at Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research Dr. David Silberklang ended his position as Editor-in-Chief of Yad Vashem Studies, Yad Vashem's flagship academic journal. In a special interview for Yad Vashem Jerusalem, Dr. Silberklang reflected upon more than two decades in the position, and how the journal has become the leading source for research papers on Holocaust-related topics: Read more

Fellows Corner: Dr. Chiara Renzo

From October-December 2019, Dr. Chiara Renzo was the recipient of the fellowship supported by The Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Chair for the Study of Racism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust, established at Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Studies. Her research focused on Jewish Holocaust survivors, who between 1943 and 1951 temporarily lived as displaced persons (DPs) in the refugee camps of Italy. Read more

"I Suddenly Felt I Was No Longer Myself"

“The new decree is exceptional. No one was in a hurry to obey it, putting it off to the very last minute. The decree itself does not cause any physical pain, nor does it involve great expense… No! Better to shut oneself up at home for an entire year than to become a subject of mockery! Not to go out wearing a yellow badge on your clothes, a target for scorn, derision, humiliation.”From Simcha Guterman, Leaves from the Ashes (Heb.) Read more

Keeping the Hope Alive

"I am alive and I am free. After three torturous years I am back to being a man like all others. The German bastards have murdered my entire family. Lyuba and Arik are no longer with me. I still hope to find them." Hirsh Brik (father of future Israeli Chief Justice Aharon Barak), Kovno, September 1944 "While probing around for the fate of my relatives here in Belgium, I encountered Mr. Mendel Toder, a relative of yours. I promised him that I would inform you that, by God’s grace, the... Read more

From Rescued to Rescuer: Holocaust Survivor Takes Part in Two Rescue Missions

For almost three years until the end of the WWII, Harry Klausner was hidden with his sister Ruth at the home of Oepke Haitsma and Jitske Haitsma-Tiesma in Zeist near Utrecht in the Netherlands. The Haitsmas’ children could not bring home friends, lest the existence of the secret guests be revealed, and Harry and Ruth were not allowed to play outside. With neither books nor toys, all Harry could do was look out of the attic window at the Allied planes passing over the houses on their way... Read more

Dilemmas and Sacrifices. Yad Vashem Symposium Highlights Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust

In 1941, Yoshko Indig (Josef Itai), a young madrich (counsellor) in the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, set out with a group of orphaned Jewish children from Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia on a four-year-long rescue journey. The journey took the group through occupied Yugoslavia and Italy and into neutral Switzerland, until he and the children finally reached the shores of the Land of Israel at the end of the war. Along the way, Indig was aided by two other Jewish rescuers, Aron Menczer and... Read more

Familiarity and Murder

In certain Nazi-controlled areas of Europe, the persecution of Jews by people who knew them often did not begin with the murder, but rather was part of the landscape of the developing persecution. Children in particular suffered at the hands of the former playmates and teachers. In occupied France before the mass murders began, Jewish businessmen were denounced by their French rivals in order to ensure that their companies be shut down or "Aryanized." In Hungary, before the wave of deportations... Read more

Holocaust Education in a World without Survivors

I’m afraid that in the future the Holocaust will become just another historical episode; that’s why it’s important that the story be told from a personal perspective: numbers alone have no meaning.”Holocaust survivor Rena Quint, volunteer guide in Yad Vashem's Holocaust History Museum Read more

"A Champion of Life". Commemorative Israeli Citizenship Conferred Upon Italian Righteous Gino Bartali

On 2 May 2018, as part of the events leading up to the Giro d'Italia Cycling Race's "Big Start," Yad Vashem hosted participants of the Israel Cycling Academy and leadership of the Giro d' Italia at an event posthumously bestowing Commemorative Citizenship of the State of Israel on Righteous Among the Nations Gino Bartali. Read more

Memorial Ceremony Marks 75 Years since the Jewish Revolt at Sobibor

On 9 October 2018, a memorial ceremony and event was held at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, commemorating 75 years since the Jewish revolt at former German Nazi death camp Sobibor. The memorial event took place at the Yad Vashem Synagogue, in the presence of Holocaust survivors and next generations, as well as the Ambassadors of the Netherlands and Slovakia in Israel and diplomatic representatives from Poland and Russia. Researcher Naama Galil from Yad Vashem's... Read more

Tears of Anguished Pride

On 24 July 1943, a concert was held in secret in the Kovno ghetto, marking the anniversaries of the deaths of the leader of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, and the celebrated Hebrew and Yiddish poet, Chaim Nahman Bialik. Seventy-five years later almost to the day, this concert was revived in its entirety at Yad Vashem on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem. Read more

Engraved on a Silver Platter

Until recently, the name of six-year-old Michoel Hesheles was one of the more than one million names of Shoah victims that are still missing from Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims Names. However, when 84-year-old Yoske Badichi, a longtime active volunteer in Yad Vashem's Names Recovery Project, came to Jerusalem in the summer of 2017 to participate in his great-nephew's son's recent Pidyon Haben ceremony – whereby a Jewish firstborn son is "redeemed"... Read more

Flashes of Memory. Photography During the Holocaust

"The photograph: It cannot say what it lets us see." Roland Barthes Many different parties created visual documentation during WWII: For the Nazi German regime, visual media played a crucial role in propaganda as a means of expression and a tool for manipulating and mobilizing the masses. This kind of documentation attested to Nazi ideology, and how German leaders sought to mold their image in the public eye. The Allied armies, who understood the propaganda value of photographing the camps... Read more

"But My Soul is Free"

On 25 January 2016, the week of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, German Chancellor H.E. Angela Merkel opened a new exhibition of artworks from the Yad Vashem Art Collection at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Jointly curated by Yad Vashem and the Bonn-based Foundation for Art and Culture, "Art from the Holocaust: 100 Works from the Yad Vashem Collection" was the first-ever art exhibition of its size and stature that Yad Vashem has sent abroad. The exhibition was on display until... Read more

An Arduous Road

On 8 December 2006, an exhibition entitled “An Arduous Road: Samuel Bak – 60 Years of Creativity” opened at Yad Vashem’s Exhibitions Pavilion, in the presence of Ambassador of Lithuania H.E. Mrs. Asta Skaisgiryte Liauskiene, celebrated author Amos Oz, renowned artist Samuel Bak, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council Joseph (Tommy) Lapid, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev and Senior Art Curator of Yad Vashem’s Museums Division Yehudit Shendar. “The interconnected... Read more

An Incredible Journey

Twinning Program Connects British Schoolgirl to the Fate and Family of Young Holocaust Victim Two years ago, British schoolgirl Victoria Sarah Galia Caplin began a journey whose ending she could never have imagined. Just before her Bat Mitzvah in the summer of 2015, she and her parents decided to mark this special milestone in her life by remembering a young Jewish girl who had been murdered in the Holocaust and was not lucky enough to celebrate her own Bat Mitzvah. "I had heard about Yad... Read more

"Superficial Knowledge Can be Catastrophic". Swedish Educators Attend Teachers Seminar at Yad Vashem

"I grew up in a pretty normal family – a mother and five siblings – but in a xenophobic environment. My older brother was in the neo-Nazi movement, my mother was a xenophobe, my grandfather was a Nazi in the 1940s. That is my family story." So recalled Peter Sundin, a participant of a recent seminar at Yad Vashem for Swedish educators. Sundin and a colleague who also hailed from a neo-Nazi background joined 25 teachers who came to the Mount of Remembrance to learn more about the Shoah and... Read more

"Interesting, Inspiring, Surprising": Summer Interns at Yad Vashem

Over the months of June-August 2017, Yad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies welcomed a number of young interns eager to help out in preparing materials and organizing seminars, and looking forward to learning more about the World Center for Holocaust Remembrance in return. Four of the interns – a Rwandan genocide survivor, and Evangelical Christian, a Latin-American Jewish history student and a former Birthright participant – spoke about their time at the International... Read more