The Yad Vashem Archives, which house the most comprehensive collection of Holocaust-era documentation in the world, announced on Sunday the addition of the late Professor Yaffa Eliach's personal collection.
Eliach, a Holocaust survivor, historian, and author, dedicated her life to documenting the events and victims of the Holocaust, as well as the legacy of the survivors. Eliach passed away on November 8, 2016 at the age of 79.
An event at Yad Vashem presenting her personal collection will take place on February 20, 2017 at 13:00 in the Constantiner Lecture Hall.
The collection was shipped to Yad Vashem in more than 500 archival containers weighing over a ton and will be cataloged as an independent archival division, available to both researchers and the greater public.
Yaffa Eliach was one of the leading pioneers in Holocaust research and education in the United States, as well as a forerunner in collating and researching oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
The Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection is carefully organized and spans a half-century of recorded testimonies, transcripts, diaries, authentic memoirs, and original documents in English, Hebrew, Polish, German, Russian, and Yiddish, individual photographs and photo albums, and articles she composed regarding the history of Eastern European Jews in general and in Eishishok, her native town in Lithuania, in particular.
She also published several books about the Holocaust, but is most famously known for her work The Tower of Faces, an exhibit featured at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which features 1,500 photographs of approximately 3,500 Jews murdered in her hometown.
The event will feature Prof. Eliach's husband, Rabbi Dr. David Eliach, Rabbanit Esther Farbstein, and Judith Cohen, Chief Acquisitions Curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"The Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection is one of the largest private Holocaust-related collections of its kind," says Yad Vashem's Archives Director Dr. Haim Gertner. "It is therefore appropriate for it to be included in the Yad Vashem Archives, which houses the largest collection of Holocaust-related documentation.
"The Eliach Collection was one of the first micro-history projects on the Holocaust. The more than 6,000 photographs in the collection provide a visual testimony to the existence of the town of Eishishok where over 90% of one town's population was murdered during the Holocaust."