MORESHET • VOL. 16 • 2019 56 | GEVA Sharon Geva Documenters, Researchers and Commemorators: The Life Stories and Work of Miriam Novitch and Rachel Auerbach in Comparative Perspective From their arrival in Israel until their dying day, Miriam Novitch and Rachel Auerbach never ceased engaging in the subject of the Holocaust. It was an event that both of them had experienced frst hand. Novitch had spent this period in France, and Auerbach was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. After the war, they both immigrated to Israel where they worked tirelessly collecting, cataloguing, classifying and preserving materials pertaining to the Holocaust and making them accessible to the public. Each worked at a major institution for Holocaust documentation and commemoration in Israel: Novitch at the Ghetto Fighters’ House – Te Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot in the Western Galilee, which was established in 1949, and Auerbach at Yad Vashem, the National Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, which was grounded in Israeli law in 1953. 1 Rachel Auerbach (1903-1976) was a writer, translator and journalist. 2 In the Warsaw Ghetto she was involved with the Oyneg Shabes Archive, the documentary project of historian Dr. Emmanuel Ringelblum. As one of the project’s few survivors, Auerbach worked to recover the documents that had been buried in Warsaw during the war. 3 After the war, she was active in the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, 4 and after immigrating to Israel in 1950 she continued to work tirelessly documenting the Holocaust. Beginning in 1954, she served as director of the Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony at Yad Vashem and spent time writing and publishing books and articles. Miriam Novitch (1908-1990) was a curator, documenter