YIVO Hosts a Book Talk with Renowned Scholar Samuel Kassow for the Newly Translated Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach

(New York, NY) – On Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 7:00pm (ET), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research will host a lecture by historian Samuel Kassow about Polish writer Rokhl Auerbach’s memoir, Warsaw Testament. The memoir paints a vivid portrait of Warsaw’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis. The book talk will take place at YIVO (located in the Center for Jewish History building at 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY). It will also be available via livestream on Zoom.

Born in Lanowitz, a small village in rural Podolia, Rokhl Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and a member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community before the Holocaust. Upon the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, she was tasked by historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum to run a soup kitchen for the starving inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto and later to join his top-secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes. One of only three surviving members of the archive project, Auerbach’s wartime and postwar writings became a crucial source of information for historians of both prewar Jewish Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto. After 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.

This book talk is co-sponsored by the Gross Family Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust

What:            Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach
When:           Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 7:00pm ET
Where:          Taking Place on Zoom and in person at YIVO, Located in the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011)
Cost:              Free
Reservations Available at:  yivo.org/Warsaw-Testament

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

For more information contact:
Shelly Freeman
Chief of Staff

About the Speaker

Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.

YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, now in its Centennial year, is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story