Youngest Bergen-Belsen Survivor and Rabbi Makes Aliyah, Publishes Memoir
Rabbi Yossef Pollak, one of the youngest Holocaust survivors from Bergen-Belsen and a prominent North American rabbinical judge, has made aliyah to Israel, coinciding with the Hebrew publication of his memoir by Yad Vashem.
One of the youngest living witnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust has chosen to make aliyah to Israel, and his remarkable life story has now been published in Hebrew for the first time. Ahead of Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Yossef Pollak, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen and a renowned rabbi and rabbinical judge in North America, moved to Israel with his wife in an emotional closing of a lifelong circle.
Born in October 1942 in The Hague under Nazi occupation, Pollak was deported as an infant alongside his parents, Aaron and Ilonka, to the Westerbork transit camp and subsequently to Bergen-Belsen. During the final months of the war, both parents contracted typhus. His father, suffering from severe malnutrition, passed away in April 1945; his mother weighed a mere 23 kilograms and was not expected to survive.
Surviving Bergen-Belsen and Rebuilding Life
Yet his mother survived, recovered, and eventually tracked him down. For years, the two lived in a home for Holocaust survivors in The Hague before immigrating to Montreal. Pollak studied at the Lubavitch yeshiva and Concordia University, receiving rabbinical ordination in 1967. He later served as a campus rabbi at Ohio State University and Boston University, eventually being appointed as an Av Beit Din (head of the rabbinical court) in Boston.
"What does it mean to be a witness to an event you do not remember, especially when there is a sense of urgency because you might be the last witness to these events?" Pollak reflects in his memoir.
Publication and Aliyah to Israel
In his newly published Hebrew book, published by Yad Vashem, Pollak traces the awakening consciousness of a toddler who grew up amidst destruction. Written in a style that blends poetic reflection with Talmudic discourse, the book confronts profound theological questions about faith and the Holocaust. Today, as he settles in Israel where two of his daughters and nearly twenty grandchildren reside, the journey of the child once sent for adoption has come full circle.
