Rabbi Professor Daniel Hershkowitz
Minister of Science and Technology of the State of Israel
Mathematics, The Technion, Haifa
Daniel Hershkowitz was born in Haifa, where he was ordained by its two chief rabbis. He received the degrees of BSc, MSc, and DSc in mathematics at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He taught mathematics there from 1971 to the present, with the exception of 1983-1986 and 1988-1989, when he was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His main professional field is linear algebra and matrix analysis, including inverse eigenvalue problems, combinatorial spectral theory, matrix stability, nonnegative matrices and their applications. In 2002 and again in 2005 he was elected president of the International Linear Algebra Society. In addition, he heads and participates in many academic committees and forums in Israel. He is the editor-in-chief of the Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra and a senior editor of the journal Linear Algebra and Its Applications. In 1982 he was awarded the Landau Research Prize in Mathematics; in 1990, the New England Academic Award for excellence in research; in 1990, the Technion’s Award for Excellence in Teaching; and in 1991, the Henri Gutwirth Award for Promotion of Research. The recipient of numerous national and international research grants, Professor Hershkowitz has published over eighty articles in professional mathematics journals.
Parallel to his academic career, Daniel Hershkowitz serves as the rabbi of the Ahuza neighborhood of Haifa and is active in many areas of religious life in Israel. Elected to head the Jewish Home political party in 2008, Rabbi Professor Hershkowitz was appointed Minister of Science and Technology in the current Netanyahu government. As a member of the Knesset he is active in the lobby to increase tolerance between the religious and secular sectors of Israeli society. Married to Shimona, who is a principal of a special education high school, they have five children.
Repressed Memory and Holocaust Survivors
Rabbi Professor Daniel Hershkowitz
Researchers have studied the ways in which the formation of memory of the Holocaust changes in different countries, especially those with a local population known to have taken part in the extermination of the Jews, but not many people have researched the change caused in 2004 by uploading the Yad Vashem list of names of the dead.
Various studies have revealed that in the testimonies given through the decades by Holocaust survivors, the memory of children who were killed is blocked because it is too terrible to bear. Studies show that in the early years the testimony papers that survivors filled out characteristically lacked testimony about their lost children, and in later years had an abundance of testimony about these children. There are survivors who could not testify about their children who testified about their parents and their other close and distant relatives. The on-line database of names helped fill in the void, sometimes decades after the incomplete testimonies had been given.
My talk will focus on the connection between the repressed memory of the children that Holocaust survivors lost and the contribution made by the on-line database of names in building a new memory of the Holocaust.