Rebel Readers: Rywka’s Diary by Rywka Lipszyc and Anita Friedman
Wednesday, November 1, 7:00 pm
In-person
Free to attend
Rebel Readers is a monthly book club hosted by Dahlia Fisher and Felicia Haney, two women from different backgrounds with shared values. Together, they lift the voices of diverse authors to explore stories about individuals with intersecting identities. Join them each month for something new!
The personal writing of a Polish teenager in the Łódź ghetto during World War II, RYWKA’S DIARY, is the subject of the Maltz Museum’s latest special exhibition now open to the public. Originally published in San Francisco, the book is now out of print but can be found on Amazon or other used bookseller websites. The book is at once an astonishing historical document and a moving tribute to the many ordinary people whose lives were forever altered by the Holocaust. At its heart, it is the diary of a girl named Rywka Lipszyc who detailed the brutal conditions endured under the Nazis: poverty, hunger and malnutrition, religious oppression, and, in Rywka’s case, the death of her parents and siblings. Handwritten in a school notebook between October 1943 and April 1944, the diary ends literally in mid-sentence. What became of Rywka is a mystery. A Red Army doctor found her notebook in Auschwitz after its liberation in 1945 and took it back with her to the Soviet Union. Join The Rebel Readers at the Maltz Museum on Wednesday, November 1 at 7 pm to discuss this moving coming-of-age story, in which a young woman expresses her curiosity about the world and her place in it and reflects on her relationship with God—a remarkable affirmation of her commitment to Judaism and her faith in humanity. Then, as a group we will explore the exhibition and her story.
