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  • Leora Einleger: Granddaughter of Dr. Ruth, on Resilience and Connection

    Leora Einleger: Granddaughter of Dr. Ruth, on Resilience and Connection
    2026/04/06
    A deeply personal conversation with Leora Einleger, granddaughter of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, groundbreaking sex therapist and Holocaust survivor is featured on this episode of TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. The conversation reveals how Dr. Ruth’s experiences of profound loss fueled a lifelong commitment to joy, human connection, and combating loneliness and antisemitism, offering a powerful meditation on how trauma can be transformed into meaning, and how legacy lives on through the choices and voices of future generations. This episode is generously sponsored by Karen and George Goldberg, in honor of their children and three grandchildren, who are all descendants of Karen's mom, Ilona Medwied, a Holocaust survivor and the inspiration for this podcast; and also in honor of George's dad, Staff Sergeant Frederick Goldberg of the US Army Air Force, who flew 35 missions as a B-17 side gunner, fighting the Nazis. TRANSCRIPT: I once ran into her in the gift shop at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. She was very easy to spot—a diminutive woman who spoke with a German accent anyone would recognize. I introduced myself. She introduced herself. We exchanged pleasantries. It was all lovely. Then, a few years later, I was in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I saw her again. I reintroduced myself. Whether or not she really remembered me, she acted as if she did. Then she asked me a few questions about how I was doing. For some reason, I told her that I had become newly single again—and then her eyes sparkled. I could tell that she would have given me advice if only I had asked for it. I am talking about the late Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Welcome to our podcast, To Be Continued… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask: How do those memories shape you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? What is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? Before we begin, this episode is generously sponsored by Karen and George Goldberg, in honor of their children and three grandchildren, all descendants of Karen’s mother, Ilona Medwied, a Holocaust survivor and the inspiration for this podcast. Also in honor of George’s father, Staff Sergeant Frederick Goldberg of the U.S. Army Air Force, who flew 35 missions as a B-17 side gunner fighting the Nazis. I’m your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Because this episode is released in early April—close to Yom HaShoah—its relevance is particularly poignant. Before Dr. Ruth became a cultural icon, she was Karola Ruth Siegel, a Jewish child in Nazi Germany who escaped on the Kindertransport, a rescue effort that saved thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Europe. She lost her parents in the Holocaust and grew up as an orphan in Switzerland. Ruth would go on to become an Israeli soldier. She would come to the United States, earn a doctorate, and eventually become one of the world’s most recognizable and authoritative voices speaking openly about sex, relationships, and human intimacy. Today’s guest is Leora Einleger, the proud granddaughter of Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer—may her memory be a blessing—whom she calls Omi, a self-described orphan of the Holocaust. Leora had a rare blessing: she had Omi in her life for 28 years. Omi’s story of survival, resilience, and joy profoundly shaped Leora’s career and personal pursuits. She is a New York attorney specializing in commercial litigation and white-collar defense and investigations. In Omi’s memory, she maintains an active pro bono practice focused on reproductive rights and combating antisemitism. Leora represents the third generation—carrying forward both the memory of loss and the extraordinary resilience that followed. Before we go further, this is Women’s History Month. When we think of history-making women, Dr. Ruth is near the top of my list—not only because she carried grief, displacement, and survival, but because she refused to let loss define her. She used her life to help others live more fully and honestly. Leora, welcome. It’s great to have you with us. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Thanks so much for having me. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Let’s start simply—what was it like growing up with Dr. Ruth? Leora: It was the best experience ever. I had the best grandmother in the world. She was way cooler than I’ll ever be—went out more than I did, had more friends than I did—and she was truly one of my closest friends. I was lucky to grow up near her. I saw her at least once a week, and when I got older, we spoke almost every day. People always ask if she talked to me about sex—not really. She kept her home life and work life separate. But what stood out was seeing people stop her on the street. There were two types: people who wanted photos, and she’d say...
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    37 分
  • Dina Kraft: The Legacy of Anne Frank’s Best Friend

    Dina Kraft: The Legacy of Anne Frank’s Best Friend
    2026/03/10
    Anne Frank's best friend survived to tell the story Anne could not. Journalist Dina Kraft and Hannah Pick-Goslar’s daughter, Ruthie Meir, reflect on friendship, survival, and the weight of carrying memory forward in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... They discuss what was lost, and what was rebuilt through resilience, testimony, and hope across generations. TRANSCRIPT: This episode of TO BE CONTINUED… is sponsored by Vicki Robinson and Michael Robinson in honor of Morton Kess, who helped liberate the concentration camps in Germany, and in memory of all those who died at the hands of the Nazis, and by Carl Fremont and Joanne Fremont Burns in loving memory and in honor of their parents. Ted Fremont, born official Fischel Friedman, who was a Holocaust survivor from Vilna, Poland. Ted lost his mother and seven siblings. He married Helen Garfield from the Bronx, and together they built a welcoming and loving home. Both Ted and Helen were beacons of hope and inspiration. Today's conversation is about friendship, survival, and what it means to carry memory forward, not as history alone, but as life. When we think of Anne Frank, we often think of her diary, her hiding, her tragic death. But Anne Frank was also a girl with friends… friends who loved her and who laughed with her, and who survived her. One of those friends was Hannah Pick Goslar. Hannah survived Bergen-Belsen, where she and Anne had a final heartbreaking encounter through a fence. Hannah lived. Anne did not. And that single fact shaped Hannah's life and the lives of her children and grandchildren, to be continued for generations. Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, How did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Today we're joined by Dina Kraft, a journalist and veteran correspondent who has written for the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the JTA, among others. Dina is the co-author of My Friend Anne Frank, who writes not only as a storyteller, but as a third-generation descendant of a Holocaust survivor. We also welcome Ruthie Meir, Hannah Pick Goslar's daughter, a second-generation descendant who grew up in the shadow and the strength of her mother's experience. Ruthie was her mother's right-hand assistant before and during the writing of the Anne Frank book. All of them live in Israel. And that matters. Because this is not only a story about what was lost, but about what was rebuilt. It's about how trauma travels through generations, yes, but also how resilience makes that same journey. How survivor's guilt lives alongside gratitude. How memory gives birth to responsibility. And how Jewish life continues publicly and unapologetically after catastrophe. This is a conversation about intergenerational trauma, but it's also about intergenerational strength. It's about the burden of telling the story, and it's also about the moral courage that we need to carry that story forward with honesty, compassion, and humanity. Welcome, friends. It's great to have you on To Be Continued. Ruthie, your mother, Hannah Pick Goslar, wrote in her book, My Friend Anne Frank, that “Anne Frank had become a symbol in many ways of all the hope and promise that was lost to hatred and murder.” I would certainly agree that she has become the overriding symbol of the Holocaust…”Talking about her story, our story would later become a thread that bound me to her and kept our friendship alive long after she was gone.” So tell us a short version of your mother's story, from her birth in Berlin to the Netherlands, how she met Anne Frank and their last meeting in Bergen-Belsen. My mother was born in 1928 in Berlin. She had a lovely childhood. And her father was a very high official in the German Otto Braun government. In 1933, when Hitler came into power, her father understood immediately that he cannot stay anymore in Germany because he also wrote against Hitler, and he went to England. So, we didn't go and stay in England, and he went to Holland. And my mother had to go to school. And so on the first day they would go to the grocery. Her mother sees another woman that comes from Germany. Of course they started to talk and they came from Frankfurt. They came from Berlin. And then she saw a small girl, this woman, and they started to talk. And the day after, my mother had to go to the kindergarten first day, without knowing the language, without knowing anybody. And she sees the same girl as she saw the day before in the grocery shop. She was ringing the bells in the kindergarten. And they saw each other, ran ...
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    46 分
  • Jacki Alexander: De-Jewifying the Holocaust: Why Naming Jews Matters

    Jacki Alexander: De-Jewifying the Holocaust: Why Naming Jews Matters
    2026/02/12
    "De-Jewifying" the Holocaust is the concerning trend our host Rabbi Jeff Salkin talks about in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... with Jacki Alexander, CEO and President of HonestReporting. We are witnessing the media, politicians, religious institutions, and others talk about "6 million who died" while erasing the Jews. This episode explores this trend of Holocaust distortion including minimalization, inversion and denial, and examines how it threatens both accurate historical memory and contemporary Jewish safety. Is this a form of antisemitism? Listen to find out. 🎧Listen now on your podcast streaming service of choice, and watch on YouTube. Here is a related article by Rabbi Jeff Salkin: The Many Forms of Holocaust Distortion: https://religionnews.com/2026/02/03/the-many-forms-of-holocaust-distortion-and-why-jd-vances-remarks-matter/ TRANSCRIPT: Usually on this podcast, we sit with the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. We listen carefully as they reflect on memory, legacy, intergenerational trauma, resilience, and what it means to carry stories and experiences that were never meant to survive, but did. This is Sheryl Hoffman, podcast founder and co-director, and this episode of TO BE CONTINUED… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors is a little different. Not a departure from our mission, but in many ways a descent into its deepest urgency, because in recent years, the Holocaust is increasingly being remembered without Jews. Please listen and share on social media and with your family and friends. This is "To Be Continued." We discuss the implications of trauma and resilience for second and third generation Holocaust survivors. And where we are in the calendar right now is very important. We are now following up on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and we're talking about what it means to remember the Holocaust, to remember the Shoah, and what that memory entails, and how sometimes bad actors abuse and distort that memory. I'm Rabbi Jeff Salkin, I'm your host. And we're talking today to Jacki Alexander. She is the CEO and president of HonestReporting. I've been a big fan of HonestReporting for quite some time. So Jacki, this is really a treat for me. And so thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me to talk about this incredible, important topic, and one that's really personal to my heart, giving my background. Well, I want to talk about why that is in fact the case, but I want to go right to something you wrote. I want to talk about something that I wrote. I want to talk about your background as well. You know, what you did this past week was, you used a term and I love it. In fact, I've been quoting you over the last several days to friends of mine. The “De-Jewifying” of the Holocaust. In simple terms, what that really means is that when people discuss Holocaust today, and specifically in the media, within religious institutions, political realm, what happens is that there has been a diminishing of what is central to our understanding of the Holocaust and that is its Jewish component. You cannot understand this without its Jewish component, without the Jewish component, we wouldn't be having a conversation. So let me ask you a simple question, a pointed question. Is this a new phenomenon or is history simply repeating itself? History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, right? That was Mark Twain, however many years ago. And I think for our entire history, we have always been targets of, the Jewish people have always been targets of bad people and then we have always been identified with then the bad people, right? So how does that rhyme today? Israel and the IDF are the new Nazis. Jews were the victims and now we are the oppressors. Yossi Klein Halevi had a great speech about this a couple of years ago, going through history and saying, when the communists were the bad guys, the Jews were the communists. When the capitalists are the bad guys, the Jews are the capitalists, right? Today, Jews are the oppressors, Jews are the colonialists, Jews are, you know, white people has become a four letter term now, Jews are the white people. So I think that this is just erasing Jews from something that can bring sympathy or an understanding is just the next step in a long history. So your article, Jacki, uses this wonderful phrase, you really are very good at turning phrases and creating them, "Erasive Jew hate," as if it were the children's game Etch-A-Sketch, where you draw something, you turn it over, you shake it and it's gone. So let me ask you, how is erasing Jews from Holocaust narratives different from overt antisemitism? Is it the same and is it just as dangerous? So erasing Jews from the Holocaust takes the biggest trauma, the biggest generational trauma that Jews have had in the last hundred years and makes it not about Jews. And if you follow the discourse around this specifically, what's ...
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    44 分
  • Menachem Rosensaft: Living With Ghosts

    Menachem Rosensaft: Living With Ghosts
    2026/01/26
    Menachem Rosensaft is an attorney, law professor, poet, and one of the most influential voices of the second generation. Born in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp to parents who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, he has spent his life engaging questions of memory, justice, and moral responsibility. In this episode of To Be Continued… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, Rabbi Jeff Salkin speaks with Rosensaft about what survives survival itself: exploring inherited trauma, the “ghosts” carried by children of survivors, and the obligation to remember in ways that demand action. Speaker Bio: Menachem Z. Rosensaft is an attorney, general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. He is also adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School. Menachem is also a poet, and one of the most prominent voices of the second generation. He was a founder and first chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors a past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. Menachem has published several books of poetry, including Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (2021) and Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (2025). TRANSCRIPT: This episode is sponsored by Barbara Kaufman Simon, in loving memory of her parents, Blanche, (also known as Blima), and Max, (who was also known as Moniek) Kaufman, who were both born in Poland. Blanche survived numerous labor and concentration camps, and Max survived Auschwitz, the death march, and Mauthausen/Ebensee. May their memories be for a blessing. Today's episode is about what survives survival. Many children and grandchildren, Holocaust survivors, grew up with what our guest calls ghosts, not as metaphors, but as real presences, or as the author Thane Rosenbaum puts it, they grew up with secondhand smoke. The ghosts live in questions that were never answered. They live in names that are spoken carefully or not at all, in absences that somehow take up space. Welcome to our podcast, To Be Continued, Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask, how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you, the person you are today, and what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Our guest today is a man who has been described by the New York Times as one of the most influential sons and daughters of survivors. Today we're speaking with Menachem Rosensaft, an attorney, a professor of law, a poet, and one of the most prominent voices of the second generation. He was a founder and first chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. He is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, and he has one of the most coveted positions in the Jewish world. He's the past president of a synagogue, the past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City, but the titles, the rest of them, they really don't matter because they don't capture the work he's done or the ground that he stands on. Menachem was born in the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany. His parents survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Delsen. His grandparents and his five-and-a-half-year-old brother Benjamin were killed in the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I am a fan of his writing. He is a wonderful poet. There are several books of poetry. There is the most recent book, Burning Psalms, Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz, and in his poetry, Menachem confronts not only memory and inheritance, but the tender topics of God, faith, anger, and moral responsibility after Auschwitz. He asks what it means to pray when consolation feels impossible and what it means to remember if remembrance does not lead us to act. And so, this conversation is about trauma, resilience, rage, moral clarity, and the refusal to look away. Menachem, welcome. It's great to have you. Jeff, rabbi, thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me and thank you for this most gracious introduction. Well, we've already said and we know that you were born in the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen a few years after the war ended. But I'd like our listeners to know a little bit more about you, so let's just rewind. Let's go back a few steps. And can you give us some more background on your father's remarkable story of survival and what he did in Germany after the war and who your mother was as a doctor worked for in Auschwitz, and finally how they met exactly 80 years ago in 1946. Well, they actually met 80 and a half years ago in 1945, a couple of weeks after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Going back a bit…my mother was a dental surgeon. She had studied medicine in France and at Nancy, before the war, and she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau...
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    58 分
  • Elizabeth Rosner: What Children of Survivors Carry Forward

    Elizabeth Rosner: What Children of Survivors Carry Forward
    2026/01/23
    In award-winning author Elizabeth Rosner's book Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma, and the Labyrinth of Memory, she confronts what it means to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust — not as a direct witness, but as a child of survivors. In this episode, our host Rabbi Jeff Salkin discusses with Rosner: How do we carry inherited pain? What role does storytelling play in transforming trauma into meaning? And how can remembering help us heal? Elizabeth Rosner has published six books with a new book of poetry, Gravity, coming out in March 2026. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Elle, and others. Speaker Bio: Elizabeth Rosner is the acclaimed author of six books, including three novels, two nonfiction books, and a poetry collection, of which all are full or part memoir. Her latest two nonfiction books are Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and The Labyrinth of Memory, and Third Year, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. Hew newest book of poetry, Gravity, was released in March 2026. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah Magazine, CNN Opinion, the Forward, and many anthologies. Her works have been translated into 12 languages and have received many literary awards. TRANSCRIPT: Everyone has five senses. Taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. But for Jews, there is one more sense. Memory is a sense. The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, writes that for Jews, memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I am your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Our guest is Elizabeth Rosner. She is the acclaimed author of six books, including three novels, two nonfiction books, and a poetry collection, of which all are full or part memoir. Her latest two nonfiction books are Survivor Cafe, The Legacy of Trauma, and The Labyrinth of Memory, and Third Year, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah Magazine, and CNN Opinion, the Forward, and many anthologies, and her works have been translated into twelve languages and have received many literary awards. In Survivor Cafe, this deeply reflective and poetic work, she confronts what it means to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust, not as a direct witness, but as a child of survivors. She asks, "How do we carry inherited pain? What role does storytelling play in transforming trauma into meaning? And how can remembering, rather than forgetting, help us heal?" So, we're going to be talking about the enduring power of memory, the role of narrative and survival and what resilience looks like across generations of Jewish memory and of Jewish identity. Jewish insights are abundant in her work, and she reminds us of William Faulkner's quote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." So welcome, Elizabeth. It's great to have you here. Thank you, Rabbi. That was a beautiful introduction. I have to say that I reread your book, Survivor Cafe. I can't begin to tell you how many pages have little post-its in them because there are things that I wanted to remember, and it's a book about the burden and the gift of memory. And so, you struggle in this book with whether or not you, as a daughter of survivors, and the rest of us who are witnesses to so many survivor stories, have a right to tell their story. So, I'm going to ask that you briefly tell us about your family's story of survival and loss. Yeah. You know, that could easily take up the entirety of our conversation depending on how much detail I fill in. But I first want to say thank you for having me in this conversation and for giving me the chance to talk about things I care about so much, and that really, as you say, have shaped almost everything about me. I have always felt that the gift slash burden of inheriting my parents' histories is something I think of as a loved obligation, that I recognize it's something I didn't necessarily choose, but that I have come to really honor it as something that really gives shape and purpose to my life. And so, by telling their stories, even in brief snippets like I'll try to do right now, it keeps them alive. They've both passed away. And it also keeps me focused in a way on what I believe is so important about keeping memory in the present, recognizing that it has affected the present and ...
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    40 分