During his invasion of Russia, the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte toured the synagogues and churches of Eastern Europe

Seven years later, the Nazis entered Olkenik, and the Napoleon curtain was never seen again. Only Farber’s photo remains as a testament to its beauty and the love of the community that cherished it.Holocaust scholar and survivor Yaffa Eliach has preserved that photograph and more than 400 others on the walls of the “Tower of Life” in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. That project is just part of her mission to “restore that vanished past” of European Jewry to transmit to post Holocaust Jewish generations the richness of pre-war life in Eastern Europe. Eliach’s mission will be the topic of her keynote speech at the Milwaukee community’s annual Yom HaShoah Commemoration, scheduled for Sunday, May 7, 2 p.m., at Congregation Shalom. Milwaukee’s Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland will also be honored at the ceremony.“We are the only ones who have to restored their past,” Eliach told the Chronicle in an interview from her home in New York. Other countries, she pointed out, do recreate their histories. In the United States, for example, Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and the Plimouth Plantation offer duplications of lifestyles more than 200 years old.In Israel’s coastal town Rishon L’Zion, Eliach is preparing to erect a similar project by recreating the Shtetl of Eishyshok, where she was born and can trace her family back 900 years.Although today’s Jews are bombarded with images of the Holocaust, Eliach said very few are aware of what life was like in Europe before the war. “The kids who go to Europe see only concentration camps, mass graves. That was not Jewish life,” she said.“It is very important for me to restore that great, vanished past. Jews were so much closer to one another than they are today. They can see how Jews lived together. It was a Jewish community.”Eliach plans to convert an old castle on the property in Israel into a museum, and she would like to rebuild the synagogue, the schools, and the marketplace. And she wants everything to be interactive – not just a model to look at.“People can go into the synagogue. They can have a wedding just the way it was in Eishyshok. Children can go to school and study what they studied. There will be lectures in the yeshiva, we will have market day. They can see how people really lived.”Eliach is convinced that this is more effective method of reaching out to Jews. After seeing her exhibit in Washington, she said, many people approached her. “People who left Judaism called and said they didn’t realize that life [in pre-war Europe] was so beautiful. Now they are coming back and doing research”.Eliach has established foundation in this country and Canada called “The Shtetl Foundation.” And she is not deterred by the fact that she needs to raise $100 million to realize her dream.Few SurvivorsEliach lived in the Shtetl for only brief time herself. She was three years old when the Nazis occupied the town in June 1941. Because Eishyshok had thrived under German domination during World War I – the Jews received far better treatment from them than they got from said the elders initially were not worried.But before Rosh HaShanah of 1941, the entire Jewish population was herded into the synagogue complex. Eliach’s father escaped and hid Yaffa and her older brother. The day of the massacre of the Jews of Eishyshok, he bribed a guard into releasing his wife and infant son. During a two-day spree, Eishyshok’s 3,500 Jews were slaughtered along with 1,000 from neighboring Olkenik.The family remained in hiding throughout the war. They returned to the Shtetl in 1944, but Jewish life was gone. Eliach’s mother and another infant son were shot in the attic of their home by uniformed Poles. Her father was exiled by the Soviets to Siberia. Yaffa posed as her uncle’s daughter and immigrated to British-run Palestine. There she married her high school principal, and the couple moved to New York. She became a historian and professor of Holocaust history at Brooklyn College. In 1979 she returned to Europe as a member of President Jimmy Carter’s Holocaust Commission, on a fact-finding mission for what would become the U.S. Holocaust Museum.During the flight, as she was flying over her former home, Eliach realized that her true mission in response to the Holocaust. ”I decided I would set out on a path of my own to create a memorial to life, not to death.”She spent the next 17 years searching for the remnants of Eishyshok. She read the villagers’ diaries and letters, and collected their photographs and whatever memorabilia they possessed. She was most successful with those who had left the Shtetl before war and formed landsmenshaft (Eishyshok societies) in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Boston.Her efforts resulted in a 795-page opus, “There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok” (Little, Brown, and Company, 1998, $50). The book brings to life every aspect of daily life in the Shtetl and surrounding areas, from the children carried in their fathers’ talleisim for their first day of school to the hustle and bustle of the town’s famous horse market.It was a labor of love for Eliach that often spanned continents as she tracked down and spoke to Eishyshok’s descendants.She also “went back to the shtetl three or four times”. She recalled. “It was very painful. Standing on earth soaked with blood, it was hard to believe there was once a creative, living culture there.”There is not a single Jew living in Eishyshok now, and the younger generation of Poles “doesn’t know anything about Jews,” Eliach said. When she would point out to them buildings that the Jews had built before the war, the young residents would say “no, it is ours. We built it.”Eliach has been criticized by Polish-American groups for writing that on the final day of destruction, the Nazis were joined by Poles who had lived side by side with their Jewish neighbors for generations. But she included those facts in her book, she said, because they were true. And because she is trying to understand how people who knew their neighbors so intimately could turn against them so quickly.The Yom HaShoah commemoration is a program of the Milwaukee Jewish Community Holocaust Resource Center of the Harry & Rose Samson Jewish Community Center. It is held in association with the New American Club and the Generation After in conjunction with many area organizations and synagogues. For information, call Dorene Paley at the JCC at 967-8217.