News & Impact

Twelve years ago, JFCS Executive Director, Dr. Anita Friedman, visited her father’s ancestral village in the Polish countryside. Since then she has returned to Gniewoszow multiple times and joins thousands of Jews who have traveled to Poland since the fall of communism. Friedman has built relationships with the local community and helped rededicate its Jewish cemetery as she grapples with her family’s lost homeland. She is also teaching teens in the Bay Area about this important history. JFCS is the leader in Holocaust education in Northern California, and thousands of students each year learn about the Holocaust and other genocides… Read More

Enormous Visual History Archive Now Available in San Francisco JFCS Holocaust Center, in partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation founded by Steven Spielberg, now gives people full access to view thousands of video testimonies, and is one of just two sites in Northern California to do so along with Stanford University. The Visual History Archive (VHA) is USC Shoah Foundation’s online portal which allows people to search and view testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. Located in San Francisco, the Holocaust Center joins the ranks of a select group of 85 sites across the globe. When Leon Tsai talks… Read More

J Weekly By Sue Barnett Gniewoszow, Poland—Twelve years ago, brought her family from San Francisco to Poland to visit the ancestral village of her father. It would be her first time in Gniewoszow, one of the many towns dotting the Polish countryside where Jews made up a majority of the population before the war—and none after. More than 200 of her relatives had lived here. All were killed in the Holocaust in death camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz. Only her father made it out alive. Friedman, executive director of S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services, wanted to share the… Read More

When the JFCS Holocaust Center first received an old and tattered school notebook written in Polish and pulled from the ashes of Auschwitz, JFCS Executive Director Dr. Anita Friedman suspected the power the mysterious volume contained as she turned each carefully penned page. Since the manuscript’s publication in 2014 Rywka’s Diary: The Writings of a Jewish Girl from the Lodz Ghetto has been an international sensation, sold alongside The Diary of Anne Frank and, at last count, translated into 15 languages worldwide. This summer Krakow’s Galicia Jewish Museum has a new exhibit titled, The Girl In The Diary, In Search… Read More

J Weekly By Rob Gloster As a child, Iris Bendahan was confused when her grandmother would speak of relatives who were “not here because of Hitler.” It wasn’t until her sixth-grade class in Israel saw an exhibition on the Holocaust that she finally understood. As an adult, the former religious school principal at Congregation Beth David in Saratoga has made it her mission to ensure Bay Area kids have no such confusion. Bendahan, 57, personally created a Holocaust museum that has been on display each spring at Beth David since 2009. This year, it will be available for viewing until… Read More

J Weekly By Rob Gloster Berta Kohut endured more than 1,000 days at Auschwitz. She suffered through transfers to Ravensbruck concentration camp and the Birkenau death camp. Having somehow survived and started a family back in her native Czechoslovakia, the last thing she wanted to do was tell her two sons about those horrors. But when her seven grandchildren were old enough to understand, she shared her Holocaust nightmares. “When I was growing up, it was a taboo subject in our family. My father protected her from talking about it,” said her son, Tom Areton. “It’s easier for her to… Read More