A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

Stories From The Holocaust

Jews being led to Umschlagplatz; photo taken from a window of St Zofia Hospital at the corner of Żelazna and Nowolipie Streets, most likely (to be confirmed) overlooking Nowolipie Street; author’s comment noted after the war at the back of the print held in the USHMM archive in Washington, DC:
”Scenes from the evacuation of the ghetto, ca 20 April 1943”
Photo: Z. L. Grzywaczewski / from the family archive of Maciej Grzywaczewski, son of Leszek Grzywaczewski / scan of the negative: POLIN Museum, Archaeology of Photography Foundation

A look at never-before-seen Warsaw Ghetto Uprising photos

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished April 16, 2023

April 19, 2023, marks the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. On that day in 1943, on the eve of Passover, 50,000 people were still imprisoned in the area of the Warsaw ghetto—among them 20-year old Mietek Pachter, 21-year...

David “Saba” Wisnia in a lighter moment. “My father’s personality is effervescent,” said his son Eric. “He sparkles, which I find amazing considering his life story.” After his family was killed by Nazis, Wisnia was imprisoned at Auschwitz at age 16, and survived by singing for guards. After a daring escape, he was rescued by U.S. Army troops and went on to flourish in America. Photo credit: Retro Report

Story of man who sang to survive Auschwitz to premiere on Nine PBS Tuesday

Published April 16, 2023

(JTA) — Hillary and Chelsea Clinton have produced a documentary about a Holocaust survivor that will debut on Nine PBS on Tuesday, April 18th at 9 p.m. CST.,timed to Yom Hashoah, or Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. “How Saba Kept Singing”...

Jewish resistance fighters who were captured by SS troops during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Warsaw, Poland, April 19-May 16, 1943. 

 The original German caption reads: These bandits offered armed resistance. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

How to honor and learn about the unsung heroines of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished April 14, 2023

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was one of the most famous acts of Jewish rebellion during the Holocaust. April 19 marks its 80th anniversary, which will be remembered with events planned across the world. The Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) is marking the...

The book includes haunting photos from inside the ghetto, along with its record of the medical effects of starvation.
Maladie de Famine, American Joint Distribution Committee

Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto secretly documented the effects of Nazi-imposed starvation

Merry Fitzpatrick, Tufts University and Irwin Rosenberg, Tufts UniversityPublished April 14, 2023

Eighty years ago, a group of starving Jewish scientists and doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto were collecting data on their starving patients. They hoped their research would benefit future generations through better ways to treat malnutrition, and they...

From Berlin to St. Louis, the incredible story of the doll Eveline

From Berlin to St. Louis, the incredible story of the doll Eveline

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished March 6, 2023

Artifacts are tangible pieces of history that can tell a unique, often personal, story.  Nearly all of the artifacts at the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum have been donated by survivors, their descendants, veterans and others since the museum...

The Book of Names, at U.N. Headquarters in New York. Credit: Yad Vashem.

Yad Vashem to unveil ‘The Book of Names’ at the United Nations

By Mike Wagenheim, JNSPublished January 23, 2023

(JNS) In recognition of this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yad Vashem is set to unveil on Thursday an installation at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. It’s a book filled with the names of 4.8 million murder victims....

From Germany to Shanghai, how Rudolf Oppenheim found his way to St. Louis

From Germany to Shanghai, how Rudolf Oppenheim found his way to St. Louis

St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, Special To The Jewish LightPublished January 10, 2023

Today, we tell the remarkable story of Rudolf Oppenheim a St. Louisan whose family in 1938, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht and his father’s release from a concentration camp, fled Germany. Because there were few countries that permitted Jews...

How strangers gave a Holocaust survivor a Jewish funeral

How strangers gave a Holocaust survivor a Jewish funeral

By Baila Brackman, Chabad.org/newsPublished January 5, 2023

Time is vitally important, especially when it comes to helping someone in a critical situation. Living on the rough-and-tumble South Side of Chicago, it had been decades since Jakob had been in contact with organized Jewish community life, which is...

Can you help us identify the Jews depicted in these Holocaust-era portraits drawn by a St. Louis artist?

Can you help us identify the Jews depicted in these Holocaust-era portraits drawn by a St. Louis artist?

Miriam Friedman Morris, Special To The Jewish LightPublished December 1, 2022

This story is being published in partnership with the National Library of Israel. All photos courtesy of Yad Vashem Art Museum, Beit Theresienstadt, and the  Jewish Museum in Prague. I was born in Israel in 1950, and named after my father’s first...

Klotzer’s father was imprisoned in Buchenwald Concentration camp. Here is a photo of eating utensils from the camp.

Photo by Dr. Hans-Günter Wagner via Flickr

Coming of age on Kristallnacht

By Charles Klotzer, Special To The Jewish LightPublished November 9, 2022

My Bar Mizvah in Berlin, Germany, was scheduled for Saturday, November 12, 1938. However, the night of November 9 lasting through November 10, Nazis launched a night and day of terror attacks against Jews in Germany and Austria. The Nazi’s attacks...

Tragic tale of the MS St. Louis takes the stage for the first time

Tragic tale of the MS St. Louis takes the stage for the first time

BY JUDITH NEWMARK, SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH LIGHTPublished November 1, 2022

Among the myriad Holocaust narratives we tell, which almost always end in tragedy, the fate of the passengers on the MS St. Louis exerts a particular hold on our imagination. Of course, it does. The juxtaposition of strong, conflicting emotions —...

Janet Gillow

Lost memoir of St. Louis woman’s escape from Nazis found in storage container

By Bill Motchan, Special to the Jewish LightPublished November 1, 2022

Lilo Fauman was a Holocaust survivor, a proud grandmother, a talented writer and an extrovert. Born in 1923 in Munich, Germany, Fauman and her family narrowly escaped the Nazis during Kristallnacht and arrived in the United States in February 1939. Fauman...

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