Monumental Holocaust Historian & Brooklyn College Professor Dies At 79

Yaffa Eliach, Holocaust survivor, photographer, historian, and Brooklyn College Professor, died Tuesday at age 79, reports the New York Times.

After surviving Nazi violence against Jews in Lithuania, Eliach dedicated her life to the memorialization of Holocaust victims.

Eliach’s career had a significant impact on local Jewish communities. As a Judaic studies history professor at Brooklyn College, beginning in 1969, she founded the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Yeshiva of Flatbush. The center’s collection of interviews, diaries, letters, photographs, and artifacts aimed to document victims’ lives, not just the stark images of their deaths, to be remembered as more than just victims.

Numbering among her many accomplishments, Eliach spent 15 years collecting 6,000 photographs that had scattered around the world — as well as diaries and letters — that told the story of life in a Lithuanian shtetl whose population of 3,500 Jews perished at the hands of Nazis.

Her persistent and fearless documenting made the atrocities of the Holocaust more accessible for a generation of Orthodox Jews struggling to understand what happened, Menachem Z. Rosensaft told the Times. Rosensaft works with Holocaust survivors and their families.

Her three-story collection of photographs is on display at the ‘Tower of Faces’ exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

You can find hundreds of Eliach’s photographs and stories in her 818-page book, There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, which became a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award.