Yaffa Eliach, pioneering Holocaust historian, dies at 79

The survivors ‘Tower of Faces’ exhibit, at the US Holocaust Museum, commemorates 3,500 murdered Jews of her birthplace

By JTA 10 November 2016, 9:34 am

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Interior of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: CC-BY-SA AgnosticPreachersKid, Wikimedia Commons)

Yaffa Eliach, a prominent historian of the Holocaust who opened the first center for Holocaust studies in the United States, has died.

Eliach, a Holocaust survivor, died Wednesday at 79, The Jewish Press reported.

In 1974, she opened the Center for Holocaust Studies in Brooklyn. It later merged with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

Eliach created the “Tower of Life,” or “Tower of Faces,” exhibit for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The three-story exhibit features 1,500 photographs from Eishyshok, her Lithuanian birthplace near Vilna, showing life there before the war. Nearly all of the village’s 3,500 Jewish inhabitants were killed during World War II, according to The New York Times.

Dr Yaffa Eliach being interviewed on C-Span about her book "There once was a world: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok" (Screen capture: YouTube). — Dr Yaffa Eliach being interviewed on C-Span about her book “There once was a world: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok” (Screen capture: YouTube).

Eliach also published several books about the Holocaust.

Following the war, she fled to prestate Israel in 1946. Several family members had been killed in the war.

In 1954, she moved to the US with her husband, David Eliach, and studied at Brooklyn College and the City College of New York. In 1969, she started working at Brooklyn College, teaching Jewish studies.