Yaffa Eliach

When Yaffa Eliach was only four years old, she survived the Nazi massacres of Jews in her Lithuanian hometown. As an adult, she dedicated herself to the study and memorialization of the Holocaust and its victims. Her mission was to document the lives of the victims, not just their deaths, and restore their humanity. Professor Eliach spent 15 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in her quest to document the lives of almost everyone who was killed in her childhood shtetl. She did this by collecting photographs, diaries, and letters while traveling to all 50 states and a number of foreign countries. Fifteen hundred of these photographs were implemented in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Tower of Faces.” Yaffa Eliach passed away in November of 2016.