News & Impact

The Righteous Among the Nations Award Will Be Presented by the State of Israel as Part of the Yom HaShoah Ceremony For Immediate Release: Thursday, April 21, 2016 (San Francisco, CA) – Community members are invited to observe Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Sunday, May 1 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. This year’s observance, titled Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Artists, Musicians, and Poets, will include performances, workshops, and a Memorial Ceremony focusing on the young artists, musicians, and scholars whose lives were cut short because of the Holocaust. During the Memorial Ceremony there will be… Read More

  Never the Last Road: A Partisan’s Life By Mira Shelub and Fred Rosenbaum Mira Shelub is a partisan and a familiar face to many Bay Area students who have had the privilege of hearing her speak. Never the Last Road: A Partisan’s Life has just been released and tells Mira’s miraculous story. Barely twenty years old, Mira escaped from a Nazi labor camp to join the Jewish Resistance in the forest. She fought back against radical evil and began a passionate love affair that would last a lifetime. Published by Lehrhaus Judaica in partnership with Jewish Family and Children’s… Read More

Anti-Semitism is on the rise—not just in Europe, but around the globe. At JFCS, we take this very seriously, standing with the communities that have been attacked by recent events and working closely with other organizations across the country and in Israel to counter growing anti-Semitism. Because anti-Semitism and other forms of hate can lead to extreme acts of violence against people—including genocides— the JFCS Holocaust Center, which holds more than 2,000 oral histories and testimonies from Bay Area survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust, believes that the need to educate others about the lessons of the Holocaust is… Read More

The wooden barracks, stretching off into seeming infinity as the gaps between them are shrouded in a thick white fog, the layers of barbed wire fence with pencil-trunked trees and green grass just beyond the environs of the camp. The atmosphere here is just as I’d seen it in the recurring bad dreams I’d had when I first was taught about Auschwitz-Birkena through viewings of the film Night and Fog. Though I understand that this documentary isn’t used any more, it was the educational tool in my generation; and as we enter the galleries with the grotesque piles of… Read More

On the bitterly freezing day when we were on the market in Karzimierz, Daniel pointed me to a table of souvenirs with a curious collectible set: This was a replica of a seal used in the Lodz ghetto.  The text reads: “Der Aeltester der Juden.  Litzmannstadt”  (The Chair of the Judenrat.  Lodz ghetto).   I’ve seen a lot of Polish tchatchkes in my time, but I found this collectible to be especially painful.  As I was wheeling myself away from the table, I reached a bump in the concrete path and had trouble going further.  One of the souvenir sellers, a… Read More

It is hard to know where to begin in writing about the experience of Shabbat in Poland. Since I had never been here before, I did not know what to expect; now that I am here, I see that this was just as well, because Poland is unlike any other place I have been, and any serious attempts to imagine it beforehand would have in any case been futile. The strange truth is that this place is, in many respects, the most Jewish place I’ve ever been. Jews have lived here continuously for eight or more centuries, and for much… Read More