Personal archives of Holocaust historian dedicated at Yad Vashem

The personal collection of Holocaust documentation of survivor and historian Professor Yaffa Eliach was dedicated at the Yad Vashem memorial and museum in Jerusalem on Monday.

Eliach dedicated her life to documenting the events and victims of the Holocaust, particularly the pre-World War II life in her birthplace, the Lithuanian town of Eishishok. Eliach died in November 2016 at the age of 79.

The Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection was shipped to Yad Vashem in more than 500 archival containers weighing over a ton and is being cataloged as an independent archival division, available to both researchers and the greater public, according to Yad Vashem.

The 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 .

Eliach published several books about the Holocaust, but is most famous for her work “The Tower of Faces,” an exhibit featured at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, which features 1,500 photographs of the approximately 3,500 Jews murdered in her hometown.

The collection is described on the Yad Vashem website: “The arrival of the comprehensive collection fulfills Prof. Eliach’s desire for her lifetime’s work to be preserved in a safe haven at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and her archives will take an honored place among Yad Vashem’s other archival collections conserved for future generations.”