Gerald Szames chokes up easily, especially when talking about his mother. So for years, his daughter has taken it upon herself to tell her father’s story of surviving the Holocaust as a small boy. She speaks to audiences at schools, houses of worship and community centers, often with her father by her side to answer questions.
Julie Gruenbaum Fax
Julie Gruenbaum Fax was a senior writer and editor at the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and has co-authored six personal history books. She is currently writing a book about her grandmother’s Holocaust experience.
Articles by Julie Gruenbaum Fax
-
January 19, 2023
-
December 5, 2022Robert Widerman Clary was among the first 100 Holocaust survivors interviewed for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, and he conducted 75 interviews of other survivors. In his testimony, he talks about his instinct and talent for entertaining—honed while he was a child in Paris—saved and shaped his life.
-
November 10, 2022
Dr. Kori Street, Deputy Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation, was recently appointed to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education.
Governor Newsom launched the council last year to promote Holocaust and genocide education with the goal of providing young people with the tools necessary to recognize and respond to bigotry or discrimination.
-
October 14, 2022Rena Quint has worked hard to find a balance between moving beyond memory and living inside of it, between yearning to know—and have proof of—where she came from and what she lost, but of not wanting to be defined by it.
-
August 4, 2022
When Zuzanna Surowy needed to make herself cry as the lead actress in the Holocaust-era feature film My Name Is Sara, she followed the advice of her co-star to “put a demon inside of her” – to imagine something so tragic it would bring tears to her eyes.
It was much harder for Surowy, then 15, to follow the second half of that directive: to leave the demon on the set.
-
June 29, 2022
On a Wednesday morning in New York in the fall of 2021, Rabbi Nicole Auerbach greeted Walter and Phyllis Loeb in Central Synagogue’s majestic sanctuary. She led them through the arch-lined nave, past row after row of pews, beyond the six sets of capital columns wrapped in colorful, gold-accented reliefs, all the way up to the intricately carved Mahagony bima, the stage where the synagogue’s rabbi and cantor preside over Shabbat and holiday services.
-
May 23, 2022
Alexa Dollar flings open her arms and spins across the stage, relishing the moment as if she’s just arrived at a party thrown in her honor. She kicks out her leg and flutters back across the floor, chasing the piano’s tantalizing lilt.
Drew Lybolt comes next, taking over the stage with powerful leaps and commanding twirls set to an insistent, almost argumentative, piano vignette.
-
May 23, 2022
Herbert Zipper, a world-renowned conductor, composer and pioneer of the community arts movement in the United States, grew up in a Vienna of extremes: From his birth in 1904 until he fled in 1939, the Austrian capital transformed from the heights of science and culture to the depths of economic depression and the onslaught of violent antisemitism and Nazi rule.
-
April 20, 2022
When Sam Kadorian was a child, Ottoman soldiers would conduct drills in a field near his home in Mezre (modern-day Elazığ, Turkey), adjacent to the fortress town of Kharpert. Sam would stand close by, mimicking their drills.
-
April 13, 2022
Sally (Fink) Singer still cries over the spilled milk. Yes, it happened more than 80 years ago. And at the age of 100, Sally knows that her siblings – Anne (99), Sol (97), and Ruth (95), who to this day remain inseparable – have long since forgiven her. But the pangs of guilt and hunger linger.
