Shmuel Refael Editor

Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz is the Director of the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research and Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of numerous books and articles and specializes in topics pertaining to gender, Jewish religious life, the Holocaust, memory, State of Israel, the United States, and commemoration. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivor Chaskel Tydor who spent five-and-a-half years in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and of Shirley K. Tydor whose grandparents, Devorah and Nachman Enzenberg, starved to death in the Moghilev ghetto, Transnistria, in 1942.

Shmuel Refael is the Director of the Salti Institute for Ladino Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His main subject of interest is Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) literature, language, ritual life, and culture. He is a board member of the National Authority for Ladino Culture and an Academic correspondence (Académico correspondiente) of the Spanish Royal Academy in Madrid. Currently he is the scientific secretary of the Israeli National Academy for Judeo-Spanish (Ladino). He has published extensively about the Sephardim and the Holocaust and about the representation of the Holocaust in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) poetry. He is the son of Esther (Vivante) and Haim Refael z”l, Holocaust survivors from Corfu and Salonica.