The UJA Committee for Yiddish and the California Institute for Yiddish Culture & Language Present a Virtual Talk IN YIDDISH with
Prof. Samuel Kassow
Rachel Auerbach's Lifelong Struggle for Yiddish Culture
Sunday, January 25, 2026
2:00 pm ET / 11:00 am PT
Please CLICK HERE to register for this program.
Rokhl/Rachel Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and a member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community before the Holocaust. She was also romantically involved with famous Yiddish writer Itzik Manger. With the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, she accepted several important tasks given her by historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum, including running a soup kitchen for the starving inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto and joining his top-secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes.
One of only three surviving members of the archive project, she spearheaded the effort to recover it. Upon immigrating to Israel in 1950, she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a key role in the development of Holocaust remembrance. Her memoir Warsaw Testament, recently translated by Dr. Kassow, paints a vivid portrait of the city’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.
In this Yiddish-language talk, Prof. Kassow will discuss Auerbach's life as participant in, and historian of, Jewish life in Europe before, during and after the Holocaust.
*This program will take place in Yiddish.*
Unfortunately, we cannot provide closed-captioning or translation for this program.
Prof. Samuel Kassow is an internationally recognized scholar of Jewish history and a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. Born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany to Holocaust survivors, Kassow earned his PhD from Princeton University and has dedicated his career to illuminating the history and cultural legacy of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. From 2006 until 2013, he served as the lead historian for two core galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. He is the author of the award-winning book Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), now translated into eight languages. His translation of Rokhl Auerbach's Warsaw Testament won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Memoir.
