Eva Fogelman is an American psychologist, writer, filmmaker and a pioneer in the treatment of psychological effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants. She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust and co-editor of Children During the Nazi Reign: Psychological Perspectives on the Interview Process. She is the writer and co-producer of the award-winning documentary Breaking the Silence: the Generation After the Holocaust and co-author of Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive (2019).
Early life and education
Fogelman was born in a displaced persons camp in Kassel, Germany, following World War II. She immigrated to the United States in 1959 after living in Israel. Fogelman received her bachelor's degree in psychology from Brooklyn College, her master's degree in rehabilitation counseling from New York University, and her doctoral degree from CUNY Graduate Center. She also has advanced training in family therapy from the Boston Family Institute and psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at Boston University Medical School.
Groups for children of Holocaust Survivors
In 1976, while working at Harvard Medical School, Fogelman and several other psychologists were interested in starting a Jewish mental health clinic at Boston University Hillel. The result of this project was the first short-term therapy group for children of Holocaust survivors, which Fogelman co-led with her colleague Bella Savran. The inspiration for the group came from reading a dialogue between several children of Holocaust survivors published in Response; a Contemporary Jewish Review in 1975. The groups attracted young adults from a broad spectrum of the Jewish community, from those who openly embraced their Jewish identity to those who did not know that they were Jews until well into their adulthood. The groups gave participants an opportunity to learn what they had in common and what was unique to their individual family histories; it also gave them support to be able to communicate with their parents about their horrific pasts, many for the first time. In 1978, Fogelman started the first short-term group for children of Holocaust survivors in Israel at Hebrew University, where she worked with Dr. Hillel Klein and Uri Last studying the psychological impact of the Holocaust on survivors and their families in Israel.
The groundbreaking therapeutic techniques established in these groups were written about in Helen Epstein's landmark article published in the June 19, 1977 New York Times Magazine entitled "Heirs of the Holocaust", and later in her book entitled Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. Epstein's article articulated what many children of survivors were feeling, but could not put into words: that they felt a sense of mourning that was unacknowledged by the greater Jewish community. This realization inspired the children of Holocaust survivors to want to connect with one another, sparking a movement of second generation Holocaust survivors, as they came to be known. These groups have taken different forms, in terms of time limited versus open-ended groups, with some incorporating multiple generations, child survivors, or the third generation, and others using different modalities, such as self-help and leader-led, psychoanalytic, psychodrama, and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Conferences and gatherings for generations of the Holocaust
First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors
In the summer of 1976, Eva Fogelman, Bella Savran, and Moshe Waldoks met with Rabbi Irving Greenberg, head of the National Jewish Resource Center (now the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership), to discuss the possibility of sponsoring a conference for second generation survivors. A huge proponent of Holocaust education and commemoration, Rabbi Greenberg was supportive of the idea and received the funds several years later to sponsor the First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors, which was held on November 4–5, 1979, at Hebrew Union College in New York City. Helen Epstein was the keynote speaker. The conference attracted more than six hundred members of the second generation from throughout the United States who returned to their homes and started organizations and groups for people like themselves.