Farewell to Three Remarkable Women

During the past couple of weeks, three remarkable Jewish women have passed away. In their own way, each played important roles in the history of YIVO.

Two were from the generation born early in the 20th century with life experiences that embodied the dramatic history of East European Jewry in that century:

Rose Klepfisz, 1914-2016.  Rose was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. Her husband, Michal Klepfisz, a Bundist resistance fighter, perished in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Rosa and her daughter, teacher Irena Klepfisz (later a noted poet and teacher), survived and emigrated to the United States in 1949. Rose began a career as an archivist, first at YIVO, where she worked on the “Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact,” a joint project with Yad Vashem, and later at the JDC Archives, which she played a pivotal role in organizing.

Read obituaries on the JDC Archives website and in the Yiddish Forverts.

Pearl Sapoznik, 1920-2016. A native of Rowno, Poland, Pearl and members of her family fled the Nazis and survived the war in the USSR, living in a stable in Derbent. She later  immigrated to the United States, settling in Brighton Beach. Pearl was a Yiddish folksinger and a font of information for musicologists. Her repertoire and knowledge became more widely available to hundreds of Yiddishists, musicians, and music-lovers at KlezKamp, the program that originated at YIVO in the 1980s under the direction of one of her two sons, the famous klezmer musician and scholar Henry Sapoznik.

Read the obituary in the Yiddish Forverts.

A member of a younger generation, Yael Penkower, died at age 70 in Jerusalem. Yael was a pioneer in the field of Judaica reference librarianship, with a long career in libraries in New York and Israel. She worked as a librarian at YIVO in the 1980s. Her husband is esteemed professor of Jewish history, Monty Penkower.

Read the obituary at H-Judaic Net.