Out on a Lege is an intimate portrait of a brave Jewish girl coming of age. When Hitler's storm troopers poured into Lodz, Poland in September 1939, they quickly launched a reign of terror that fulfilled the Fuehrer's greatest fantasies. Going far beyond Kristallnacht in Germany the year before, the Nazis savagely beat and murdered the Jews, evicted them from their homes, and herded them into the first ghetto of modern times, in effect a giant prison racked by hunger, disease, and forced labor. A Jewish administrator, Chaim Rumkowski, was put in charge of Lodz's 175,000 Jews and made to do the Germans' bidding. He would be forced to round up 20,000 in a single week -- the elderly, the ill, and even the ghetto's children -- and deport them to a death camp on sealed trains with neither food or water. Against this backdrop of horror and humiliation, the Chasidic teenager Chava Gerszt (later Eva Libitzky), outwitted the Nazis as she ingratiated herself with German soldiers, managed to rescue her parents, and found desperately needed food on the black market. In the end, she survived Auschwitz and a slave labor camp before being liberated in Theresienstadt in the midst of a typhus epidemic. The story of resilience sheds new light not only on the sacrifices and survival of Lodz Jews, but on the Jewish experience throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Her dramatic postwar struggles in America -- in the city, suburbs, and on the farm -- are no less revealing. Lehrhaus is proud to publish the second edition, which includes Eva's eventful return to Poland in 2013 with 16 of her closest relatives spanning three generations.

Out on a Ledge: Enduring the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Beyond (2nd edition)

Eva Libitzky

Fred Rosenbaum

Lehrhaus Judaica

Mira Shelub's story is stirring and uncommon. Her advanced schooling at the renowned Yiddish-language Real-Gymnasium in the heart of Vilna, the "Jerusalem of the North," put her in touch with the major Jewish intellectual currents of her day. During the Nazi occupation, the escape of her entire family from the ghetto and its flight into the forest was little short of miraculous. Never a forest wife who settled for any male protector, she would meet, fall in love, and marry a partisan to whom she was exceedingly well suited; theirs would be a passionate love story ending only with his untimely death. In postwar America, Mira went back to school at age sixty-two, earned two degrees, and succeeded in both the business and the non-profit worlds. "An extraordinary story of horror, courage, and fortitude told with such simplicity and clarity. Mira Shelub's recollections of pre-war Vilna, of Soviet, and then Nazi-occupied Poland, and her life among partisans in Belorussia's forests is a document of singular, bracing truthfulness." -- Steven J. Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University

Never the Last Road: A Partisan's Life

Mira; Rosenbaum Shelub

Lehrhaus Judaica in partnership with JFCS Holocaust Center

In this 2nd Edition Book, Pell recounts his early life in Poland, the invasion of the Nazis, his family's flight to the Soviet Union, and his eventual emigration to the United States after the war. A large section of his biography details the activities of the partisan resistance group, who attacked the Nazis from their hideout in an Eastern European forest.

Taking Risks: A Jewish Youth in the Soviet Partisans and His Unlikely Life in California (2nd Edition)

Arts & Photography

Joseph Pell

Music

RDR Books and Lehrhaus Judaica; 2nd Edition (January 2018)

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Books by Fred Rosenbaum