MiDor L'Dor: How My Father Lived with and Passed on His Holocaust/Israeli War Trauma to Our Family

Please join us on Parashat Terumah when Eliene Augenbraun will share her father and family’s story post-kiddush.

Eliene Augenbraun is a PhD (Columbia) biologist and journalist who covered science for ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Discovery, Scientific American, Nature, Forbes, and other news outlets. Currently she is an instructor at University of Pennsylvania and a writer and film-maker focusing on aging, multimedia, and education. 

 Aron Augenbraun z"l was born in south eastern Poland in 1930. The war began for him in 1939 when bombs started falling on his street. Soon after, he and his family became ragged, hungry refugees in a distant Ukrainian ghetto (there is a surprising Bayit connection to that tiny ghetto). Things got worse when the ghetto was liquidated and the few survivors went into hiding in forests and fields. Miraculously, he, his sister, niece, and one other brother survived; his parents, grandparents, and one brother were murdered. Traumatized, Ahron decided to invest his still young life into fighting for Israeli independence. He trained as a soldier, snuck into Palestine in 1947, and spent three years in the army. After that he became a police officer until 1960, when he met the love of his life, Loretta. They married 4 months later, and his emotional healing finally began.