Lighting Up the Soul

Stories from a Changing Jewish World
By Stanley Abramovitch
(328 Pages)Publisher: Penina Press, 2011

In a remarkable sixty-five year odyssey, Stanley Abramovitch criss-crossed the Jewish world on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or the Joint ) bringing aid and simple caring to Jews in need in more than twenty countries on three continents.

Through his life s work, Stanley did more than just bear witness to the great events of post-Holocaust Jewish history. He helped shape them.

In these pages, Stanley captures a dramatic and often poignant dimension of this history: the individual stories of the men, women and children whose lives reflect times and circumstances that are now only memory. We learn of their challenges of the struggles and the immense strength that enabled them, their communities and our people, to overcome difficult times.

Through his stories, Stanley Abramovitch offers us a precious and fascinating window on a Jewish world that has changed beyond recognition in just one lifetime.

About the Author:
Stanley Abramovitch s drive to help his fellow Jews in need led him to volunteer to work with Holocaust survivors in 1945. With this, he left the London of his youth for Germany, where he began a sixty-five year association with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Jewish world s preeminent international relief agency. In the following decades, Stanley worked with Jews and Jewish communities from Iran to Western Europe, North Africa, Israel and the former Soviet Union. His contributions earned him wide recognition including an honorary doctorate from Bar-Ilan University. He also received rabbinical ordination from the chief rabbis of Israel and Jerusalem. Stanley and his wife, Noemi, live in Israel surrounded by their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.