Irene Eber (1929–2019)

Irene Eber was born to a Jewish family in Halle, Germany. She was 10 years old and living in her father's hometown of Mielec, Poland, when Nazi Germany invaded in World War II. The family hid in an attic when confined in the Debica Ghetto to avoid being deported to the death camp at Auschwitz. Irene chose to flee, against her father's wishes; she dug her way under a fence and took a train back to Mielec, where eventually a Polish family gave her shelter. She remained hidden in a space atop a chicken coop for nearly two years. After the war ended, she learned that she had lost her father, aunts and uncles, cousins, and childhood friends. She went alone to the USA to work during the day and study at night, learning English quickly. In 1965, at Claremont Graduate University in California, she earned a doctorate in Chinese. Then she moved again, this time to Israel, where she mastered Hebrew and raised two children on her own. She became professor and the inaugural Louis Frieberg Chair in East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and one of the founders of Chinese studies in Israel. Her teaching spanned Chinese history, philosophy, religion, and literature. Prof. Eber published numerous articles on classical Chinese novels, including her 1980 monograph, Voices from Afar: Modern Chinese Writers on Oppressed Peoples and Their Literature, a pioneering study still being cited today. She also translated the Old Testament of the Bible into both spoken and classical Chinese. Among her many other books were Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China (2008), which provided translations from German and Yiddish poems, diaries, letters, and short stories written in Shanghai that she had rescued from oblivion. In 2012, she published Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe: Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City. In 2014, she had the satisfaction of seeing the publication of a work she had completed some years previously: a German collection of writings on Chinese philosophy and literature by Martin Buber.
Less than a month before Prof. Eber's death, she published Jewish Refugees in Shanghai 1933–1947: A Selection of Documents. She also was the author of a Holocaust memoir, The Choice: Poland, 1939–1945, published in 2004.