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vii Preface and Acknowledgments Sister in Sorrow: A Journey to the Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary began as a PhD thesis that was written in the 1990s and devoted to the experiences and narratives of both male and female survivors living in Israel and in Hungary. At that time, the idea that Holocaust testimonies, as they were regularly termed, are narratives or stories with themes, structures, metaphors, and messages was not yet as widely accepted as it is today. Furthermore, the voices of women survivors had not yet started to receive the literary, artistic, academic, journalistic , and political attention they presently enjoy (if such a verb can be used in such a painful context). The present work is fortunate to have been part of these processes or developments, and to have been one of the pioneering projects in Israeli personal-oral narrative study. The following persons and organizations have a share in this accomplishment: First and foremost are the Holocaust survivors in both Israel and Hungary who were willing to share with me their painful memories, losses, and grief, and also their remnants of hope, which they still had despite all that they had endured. While carrying out this research project, I enjoyed the support of the Institute of Jewish Studies (now the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies) and the Rosenfeld Research Project on the History of the Jews of Hungary and the Habsburg Empire, both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as that of the World Sephardi Federation. The adaptation of this work into a book more widely accessible to the general public in Israel was enabled by the support of the President, Rector, and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) as well as the Esther and Sidney Rabb Center for Holocaust and Redemption Studies at BGU. The translation of this work from Hebrew to English was supported by the Jewish Memorial Foundation at New York. Throughout my academic career, I have benefited from the guidance , advice, expertise, experience, and critical eye of my PhD mentor, Professor Galit Hasan-Rokem of the Department of Hebrew Literature viii Preface and Acknowledgments and the Program of Jewish and Comparative Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and I greatly appreciate the fruitful communication we have had and still have. For this project specifically, as well as for others related to Hungarian Jewry, I thank Dr. Michael Silber of the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University for his advice and support. Likewise, I thank Dr. Gavriel Bar-Shaked of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, for his help with Hungarian terms and the lore of Hungarian Jewry. The same thanks go to Professor Katrin Kogman Appel of BGU for her help with German and to Dr. Dalit Berman of BGU for her help with Yiddish. Next, I am thankful to Professor Dan Ben-Amos of the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, who is the general editor of the Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology by Wayne State University Press. His trust and interest in this work and myself from a very early point have been invaluable. Parts of this work were previously edited by Sarah Fine-Meltzer of BGU. More inclusively, my regular editor for abroad publications, Sandy Bloom, stands behind both the English edition of this entire volume and the translation into English of its analytical parts. (I am responsible for the translation of the oral-literary parts.) Shlomo Ketko has dexterously indexed this book. Finally, this work has profited from the thorough and professional treatment of Beth Ina, the freelance copyeditor hired by Wayne State University Press. Last, but never least, all my projects are carried out and exist together with my loving and beloved family, my husband Michael and our three children, Yasmin, Oriel, and Itamar. In many senses, works such as this one are written for our children and future generations, for whom we wish a much happier history. ...

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