News & Impact

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

The official start of the Legacy Tour began midday Friday, the 24th with a meet and greet of all the participants with introductions around including the introduction of Dariuysz Kyzniar, to be our tour guide during the entire time of schedule tour in Poland. He distributed earphones and receivers to each of us so that we could hear every tour leader quite well without having to stand close –much like the museum audio tours we have all used. Brilliant in conception and well executed. We will travel by the same quite comfortable, spacious and sleek big tour bus throughout our… Read More

When Rose Ludwig was growing up in a rural part of Riverside County, she was never taught about the Holocaust in school. That’s why, as a teacher at San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley Middle School, she makes sure that her students learn the Holocaust’s lessons. Her efforts earned her JFCS’ Holocaust Center’s 2014 Morris Weiss Award, which yearly goes to an exemplary educator dedicated to teaching about the Shoah and other forms of genocide. Morris Weiss, a founder of the Holocaust Center, was a survivor dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism. His family established the award in his memory.   “As a… Read More

A survivor of Auschwitz, Sam came to this country in 1947, the only member of a large extended family to have escaped death. After many years as a shipping clerk, he finds himself frail and alone at 89, living on a modest income and the support of JFCS’ Seniors At Home program, which provides him with subsidized home care and care management.”I don’t know how I’d carry on without this help,” says Sam, who has diabetes and gout and still suffers nightmares from the war. “The people at the Seniors At Home are angels and JFCS is an absolute… Read More