Rachel Auerbach

Born in Lanowce, Galicia (now Lanivtsi, Ukraine), Rachel Auerbach (also spelled Rokhl Oyerbakh) was a Yiddish essayist and historian. In 1933, she moved to Warsaw and was active in modernist literary circles. During World War II, she ran a soup kitchen, worked closely with Emanuel Ringelblum, and wrote prolifically while in hiding outside the ghetto. Following the war, Auerbach helped lead the mission to recover the Oyneg Shabes archive, documents compiled during the war that detail life in the ghetto and buried shortly before the ghetto’s destruction. In 1950, she settled in Israel, where she helped establish the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.