On Sunday, May 3, 2026, Goldie Morgentaler, editor, spoke about Letters from the Afterlife: The Post-Holocaust Correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson (2025, McGill-Queen’s University Press, translations by Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Soderlind).
See the video here.
The book opens a window into a remarkable postwar story told in real time. In correspondence between two articulate women rebuilding their lives after the Holocaust, the book reveals innermost hopes, frustrations, and private reflections rarely captured in traditional historical accounts. The letters between distinguished Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb and sculptor and author Zenia Larsson span 1945 to 1971. Writing across continents, they share joys and sorrows, the challenges of adjusting to new worlds and their deep affection for each other. They were childhood friends from Lodz who survived together through the ghetto, Auschwitz, the Sasel slave labor camp and Bergen-Belsen. After liberation, circumstances and geography separated them, with Rosenfarb settling in Montreal and Larsson in Sweden.
Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel introduced the book and offered her personal reactions to it. Also See her book review in Hadassah Magazine at https://rememberwomen.org/rw/resources/4073/.
On Sunday, May 17, 2026, author Matti Friedman discussed his new book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe (2026, Spiegel & Grau).
See the video here.
The book is an engaging history about the young Jewish refugees who agreed to parachute back into Europe as British agents from British Mandate pre-Israel in 1944. The program focused on two women in the group, Hannah Senesh and Haviva Reick, neither of whom survived. The name of 23-year-old Hannah Senesh is legendary, best known as the author of the beloved Hebrew song Eli, Eli. The other woman, Haviva Reick, should be, but is not, as well known. The program highlighted their stories and bravery. (A third woman in the group, Surika Braverman, did not have the opportunity to fulfill her mission because of conditions on the ground. She was later a founder of the women’s corps of the Israel Defense Forces.) Using thousands of original documents from once-secret files, manuscripts, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Matti Friedman follows the two women and two other parachutists from the beginning to the end of their missions, exploring the line between myth and reality, heroism and futility.
Following the author’s presentation, Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel added details about Haviva Reick and Remember the Women Institute’s efforts to make her better known, and Shlomit Dagan, director of the Hannah Senesh House at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, talked about Hannah Senesh and her memorialization.