In Their Parents’ Words: Children of Survivors Share Their Stories
Join us for a powerful online Yom HaShoah event featuring members of Shoah Legacy Writers, an organization dedicated to preserving and sharing the stories of Holocaust survivors through their children’s voices. Through the lens of “The Value of Small Victories”, speakers will share the extraordinary yet often overlooked moments of resilience, courage, and defiance that helped their parents survive the Holocaust. These small but profound acts—whether a shared piece of bread, a whispered prayer, or a fleeting act of kindness—became the foundation for survival and transformation from victims to heroic survivors. Thank you to Shoah Legacy writers for sharing the stories of their parents’ survival and keeping their legacy and memory alive. Learn more about their mission here.
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Can’t make it live? Register anyway! All participants will receive the recording to free webinars. But join us in real time to engage with the speaker, ask questions, and be part of the conversation!
Paul Schneider is the youngest son and nephew of two sisters from Poland who survived the holocaust in Soviet exile, lost their parents to hunger in Uzbekistan, their brother to conscription in the Soviet army, and who made a pact to never speak of such things to their future children. Luckily, they slowly lost their willpower to keep their oath and began to tell him what happened.
Born in 1948, Aviyah Farkas was deeply shaped by World War II. Her Jewish father survived the Holocaust with help from her Christian mother. Aviyah published the award-winning book Overcoming Deepest Grief, A Woman’s Journey
Both of Debbie Beckman‘s ’s parents were Holocaust survivors. They were both born in small neighboring rural farm villages in Czechoslovakia. Since 2016, she has been involved with Holocaust Museum LA as a docent, volunteer, and part-time employee.
Fern Topas Salka’s parents married before the war, lived in then escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto, lived in and survived living in a wall, then a sewer and enslavement on a German pig farm.
At 17, Eli Eldan‘s father, Shaul, joined the Polish army and was wounded while fighting the Nazi Germans during their invasion of Poland. Fleeing to the Soviet Union, he was detained and sent to the Pechora Gulag in Siberia, and when he returned home after the war, he discovered that most of his family had been killed.
Alyssa Silva is the Programming Manager for the Office of Innovation at American Jewish University whose passion is to reimagine and implement what Jewish community looks like by bringing a unique perspective on what is engaging and inspiring Jewish communities today. Prior to arriving at AJU, she was the Assistant Executive Director of Houston Hillel, the Programming and Operations Associate at Maryland Hillel, and is a proud Moishe House DC alumni. Alyssa has a Master’s Degree in Jewish Nonprofit Management from The Zelikow School, a BA in Religious Studies from The University of Arizona, and a certificate in Jewish Experiential Education from The Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
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