Kipen of North Caulfield, Melbourne, Australia.
Israel was born into an Orthodox family of Jewish manufacturers in Bialystok. He survived the Holocaust by taking the eastern escape route through Russia, Japan and the open port of Shanghai, where he resided for 6 years, prior to arriving in Australia in 1946. Israel has involved himself in a wide variety of Jewish communal activities and has made significant contributions to organised Jewish life in Melbourne. He has played a most important role in the establishment, growth, and consolidation of Melbourne’s Jewish day-school system. This has recently been recognised by his having been awarded a Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa from Melbourne University. His autobiography “A Life to Live” was published in 1989.
Ruby Kohn of Kingston, New York, U.S.A.
Ruby was born in Canada into a Hebrew and Yiddish speaking family. As a 10-year-old Ruby visited relatives in Poland, all of whom except for a solitary first cousin later perished in the Holocaust. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and a Master’s degree in Social Work, both from the University of Toronto, and a Master’s degree in Library Sciences from Queen’s College at Long Island. She worked for twenty years as a social worker and later on as a librarian for a number of years prior to retirement.
Ben Korman of Dianella, Perth, Western Australia.
Ben grew up in Melbourne, where he attended the I. L. Peretz Yiddish School, first as a pupil and then as a student of its Teacher Seminar. He graduated from the University of Melbourne with the degrees of B.Sc. in 1969, M.B. B.S. in 1971 and M.D. in 1996. Nowadays he works as a practising anaesthetist in Perth. He has been the President of the Holocaust Institute of Western Australia since its inception in 1990.
Don Marejn of Toorak, Melbourne, Australia.
Don, a Bialystoker, studied chemistry in France during the early nineteen-thirties, after which he returned to Bialystok to work in his family’s tannery business. When the Soviets invaded Bialystok in 1939 he was forced, as a capitalist, to flee first to Lithuania and later, clandestinely, into the Soviet Union. After the war he was repatriated back to Poland and left for France a few months later together with his wife Sonia. They migrated to Melbourne in 1950. Don and Sonia are well-known philanthropists in Melbourne. They have provided more than fifty scholarships to post-graduate students at Tel Aviv University, have endowed a Day Care Centre at the Melbourne Montefiore Homes for the Aged, and have been supporters of the Melbourne Sholem Aleichem Yiddish School.
Shifra Pollard of Boca Raton, Florida, U.S.A.
Shifra was raised in Brooklyn, New York, learned Yiddish at school, and graduated from Brooklyn College. She taught English and American Literature at High School for twenty-five years and in retirement also taught Yiddish at a local college.
Jacob Rosenberg of North Caulfield, Melbourne, Australia.
Jacob was a teenager living in Lodz on September 1st 1939. “The war finished my primary schooling,” he says, “the ghetto was my high school, Auschwitz was my university, and Mauthausen was my institute of post-graduate studies.” Jacob was liberated in May 1945, arrived with his wife Esther in Melbourne in 1948, and worked for many years in the clothing trade. On retirement Jacob returned to his childhood love of writing. He is a recognised Australian poet and writer, both in Yiddish and in English; and his most recent book, “East of Time,” won the prestigious 2006 Douglas Stewart Prize at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the 2007 National Biography Award. “East of Time” was also shortlisted for the Australian Literary Society’s 2006 Gold Medal.
Murray Sachs of West Newton, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Murray has a B.A. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York. He has taught French language and literature at various universities, and from 1960-1996 was Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He is now Emeritus Professor. He is the author of four books and more than thirty articles in professional journals, and he has also served on the Editorial Advisory Board of six professional journals.
Berek Segan of Toorak, Melbourne, Australia.
Berek, a native Yiddish speaker from Lida in Poland, emigrated to Australia after obtaining his Matriculation Certificate in 1938. Berek has had a profound love of music since early childhood. He studied violin from the age of 6 and attended the Vilnius Conservatorium as a schoolboy. In Melbourne he became a successful businessman and an early supporter of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Opera Australia. In 1975 he established the biennial Castlemaine Festival of the Arts. For his contribution in promoting a relationship between business and the arts he was presented with a “Business and the Arts Award” from the University of Sydney in 1975, an O.B.E. in 1975, and an A.M. in 1980.
Michael Silver of East Brighton, Melbourne, Australia.
Michael survived the Holocaust first as a prisoner of the Soviet Government for one and a half years, and then, after his release, as a refugee in Central Soviet Asia. He was repatriated to Poland in 1946 and migrated to Australia in 1958. He worked for many years as an auditor with the Commonwealth Public Service. I first met Michael in 1976, when we climbed Mount Sinai together.
Simcha Simchovitch of North York, Canada.
Simcha survived the Holocaust in Poland by escaping to the Soviet Union. He emigrated to Canada in 1949. He has a B.A. in Humanities from the University of Toronto and a Masters in Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. Until his retirement in 1998 he was Librarian and Curator of the Beth Tzedec Museum in Toronto. He is a poet, writer, and translator. He won the Dr. Hirsh and Debra Rosenfeld Award for Yiddish Literature from the I.J. Segal Cultural Foundation in Montreal in 1991 & 2004; the Zhitlowski Award for Writers of High Quality from the Yiddish Cultural Association of New York in 1998; the Izzy and Betty Kirshenbaum Award for Excellence in Yiddish Writing from the Book Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater Toronto on six occasions, in 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2002; the Harry and Florence Topper & Milton Shiel Award for Creative Yiddish Writing from the Book Committee of the Toronto Jewish Congress in 1990 & 1997; and the Nachman Sokol, Chaim Joel and Mollie Halberstadt Prize in Yiddish and Yiddish Translation, Canadian Jewish Book Awards, at the Koffler Centre of the Arts, Toronto in 2004.
Nathan Sobel of Long Beach, New York, U.S.A.
Nathan, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and the only member of his family to survive, is from Luboml, formerly in Poland, now in Ukraine. His family managed to hide for a long time in a dugout his father built under an apple tree in their yard. A crawl tunnel from the kitchen provided access to it. Nathan’s father and sister were murdered in 1943. In January 1944, he saw his mother, two brothers, and ten other Jews machine-gunned by Polish resistance fighters in a barn. Nathan miraculously managed to hide away in the hayloft, but then had to escape a blazing inferno, when the barn was set alight. He served in the Palmach during Israel’s War of Independence, emigrating to the United States in 1951. An urban planner, Nathan also edited the English translation of “Luboml: Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl (New York: KTAV, 1997).” In my first printing run I inadvertently omitted Nathan from the list of translators and had to add him as a postscript. When I rang Nathan to say sorry he replied, “What’s new, everyone forgets me!” You are definitely not forgotten Nathan and your efforts
