HHREC MemoryKeeper Story Hour: Rabbi Dr. Aliza Levy-Erber

Presentation to begin 7pm EST.

Aliza Levy-Erber is a Rabbinic Pastor, Podiatric physician, College Professor, Hebrew teacher and Playwright whose play, Holocaust Syndrome, was performed in the tri-state area and rewritten into a one-woman play. Together with a colleague, she also facilitates a monthly Infant Survivor Holocaust Group. She was born in the Netherlands in 1943 at the height of the Nazi occupation and persecution.

Dr. Levy-Erber tells the story of how her father, active with the Dutch resistance, was caught and sent to a concentration camp in Holland; how her mother received permission to visit him and eventually married and gave birth to Aliza who, with their entire family, was deported and separated into pre-arranged hiding places; and how the underground took the infant Aliza to be hidden in a bunker dug deep in the Dutch woods, where she remained for two years.

Dr. Levy-Erber speaks of the surviving family members’ struggle to reunite and survive after the war, and of her own struggles growing up in isolation and starvation with a severely traumatized mother, and her need to find strength and resilience to create a meaningful life, understanding that the law-of-the-land decreed that she be put to death at the moment of her birth.

Dr. Levy-Erber is the mother of three accomplished grown children and three proud, strong and amazing grandsons. She is the recipient of the 2024 Forbes Torch of Freedom Award; the 2024 Julian Y. Bernstein Distinguished Service Award; and the 2023 New York City College of Technology of the City of New York Distinguished Achievement Award. She was the keynote speaker at the 2023 Westchester Countywide Yom HaShoah Commemoration at the Garden of Remembrance in White Plains, N.Y.