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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

The Holocaust

Erika Schwartz

Born in a ghetto, one day before it was sealed: Her story moved St. Louis to tears

By Bill Motchan, Special to the Jewish LightPublished April 27, 2025

“I was born Erika Hornstein on April 23, 1944, in the Nyíregyháza, Hungary ghetto. Two weeks later, all of the women and children in my family were transported to Auschwitz to be murdered.” – Erika Schwartz The St. Louis Yom HaShoah (Holocaust...

Donald Trump and Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun light a candle during an Oct. 7 remembrance event at the Trump National Doral Golf Club, in Doral, Florida, Oct. 7, 2024. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Trump issues Yom Hashoah proclamation

JNS StaffPublished April 24, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday issued a proclamation to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) in Israel. Below is the full text: April 23, 2025 By the President of the United States of America A Proclamation On Yom HaShoah, Holocaust...

Leo Wolf, Tom Green and Bill Kahn.

They built a museum so we wouldn’t forget—now it’s our turn to remember

By Greg Yawitz, Myron FreedmanPublished April 22, 2025

“We can’t let people ever forget,” said Leo Wolf, chairman emeritus of the St. Louis Holocaust Committee and a Holocaust survivor, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s 1995 coverage of the opening of the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center. “We...

Holocaust survivors (L-R) Guenter Pappenheim, Eva Fahidi-Pusztai and Heinrich Rotmensch sit in wheelchairs at a ceremony at the Buchenwald concentration camp on Jan. 27, 2020, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. All three died before the 80th anniversary. (Jens Schlueter/AFP via Getty Images)

Half of Holocaust survivors alive today will be dead in 6 years, new analysis finds

Grace Gilson, JTAPublished April 21, 2025

Almost all of the Holocaust survivors alive today will be dead in 15 years, a new projection by a leading organization advocating for their compensation finds. While the timeline is something of an actuarial inevitability — the Holocaust ended 80...

One mystery donor. Hundreds of voices. A legacy saved.

One mystery donor. Hundreds of voices. A legacy saved.

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished April 16, 2025

The St. Louis Jewish community didn’t waste any time. Just three days after launching an emergency fundraising campaign to protect its digital archive of Holocaust survivor stories, the museum reached its $130,000 goal—and then surpassed it—thanks...

St. Louis Holocaust Museum scrambles to save survivor stories after funds cut

St. Louis Holocaust Museum scrambles to save survivor stories after funds cut

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished April 14, 2025

The St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum has launched an emergency fundraising campaign to save its Holocaust survivor stories after losing over $130,000 in federal support. The cut jeopardizes efforts to finish digitizing and sharing more than 300...

Yom HaShoah event to honor Holocaust survivors and the journalists who told their stories

Yom HaShoah event to honor Holocaust survivors and the journalists who told their stories

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished April 14, 2025

There are stories that live in history books and then there are stories that survive because someone was there to tell them. On April 27, St. Louis will gather at Congregation Temple Israel for its annual Yom HaShoah commemoration, focusing...

The documentary ‘Prosecuting Evil’ looks at Ben Ferencz, a war crimes investigator and a prosecutor at the post-WWII Nuremberg trials.

St. Louis law library honors Nuremberg prosecutor who put Nazis on trial

Published April 2, 2025

As part of its monthly educational series, the Law Library Association of St. Louis, a public and membership law library located in the Civil Courts Building in downtown St. Louis, is presenting a program in April focusing on Nuremberg prosecutor Ben...

Buried history uncovered! The shocking Nazi death camp escape you’ve never heard of!

Buried history uncovered! The shocking Nazi death camp escape you’ve never heard of!

Alan Zeitlin (JNS)Published March 20, 2025

There have been many powerful films about the Holocaust, so if one opts to create a new one, one must “bring something new to the conversation,” according to the Israeli-American director Lior Geller. Geller told JNS that the new film “The World...

The Pentagon logo is seen behind the podium in the briefing room at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., January 8, 2020. REUTERS/Al Drago

Holocaust remembrance pages removed in Pentagon’s DEI purge

Grace Gilson, JTAPublished March 20, 2025

When she was five years old, Kitty Saks’ home in Vienna was commandeered by the Nazis, leading her family to flee to Brussels, where she was hidden in a convent until the Allies liberated Belgium. Twenty-seven members of her family were killed in the...

An image of Adolf Eichmann, from the Tuviah Friedman Archive, the National Library of Israel

Argentina’s Nazi secrets could soon be exposed

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished February 28, 2025

In a historic decision, Argentina has granted the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) full access to previously sealed Nazi-era financial archives. The move, ordered by President Javier Milei, is an unprecedented step toward uncovering how South American banking...

The Weber Siblings at the New York Harbor, May 20th, 1946; Front Left to Right: Renee, Judith, Bela Back Left to Right: Gertrude, Alfons, Senta, and Ruth.

How seven siblings survived the Holocaust — and how the next generation is telling their story

By Olivia Haynie, The ForwardPublished February 18, 2025

Alfons Weber recorded every detail of how he and his six siblings survived the Holocaust, and distributed copies of the typed memoir at a family reunion in 1996. His niece, actress Beth Lane, couldn’t bring herself to read it for years. “Every...

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