“By reading this memoir and savoring its wisdom and lessons, perhaps we can assume a degree of [Joseph’s] burden and confer meaning upon it by sharing its insights with our children and grandchildren.”
—ROBERT KRELL, MD, professor emeritus, department of psychiatry, University of British Columbia
About Rabbi Joseph Polak
Rabbi Joseph Polak is a “Dayan” (Rabbinical Court Judge), and serves as the Chief Justice of the Rabbinical Court of Massachusetts, which enacts religious divorces and conversions for the greater Boston Jewish community, and hears cases brought before it by people wishing to resolve family or business disputes through Jewish law. The court also adjudicates matters of family law for the family law court system of the State of Israel, and rules on moral and ethical questions including medical ethics. It is also a Court of Arbitration in Massachusetts.
Author
Rabbi Polak is a writer – his memoir, After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring, won a National Jewish Book Award for Biography and Autobiography. The book has received extraordinary critical acclaim, and is taught regularly in university courses on Holocaust literature alongside the works of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel.
Scholar
His academic articles have appeared in English and Hebrew in scholarly journals throughout the world including Commentary, The Lancet, Surgery, Tradition, Judaism, Jewish Law Studies and many others, including in books and essay collections. His Op-Eds have appeared in the Boston Globe and the Montreal Gazette.
He has also published extensively about Nazi medicine as well as about rabbinic responsa written in the ghettoes and concentration camps.
Rabbi Polak has been a scholar-in-residence at hundreds of universities, community centers and synagogues in the United State, Canada and Israel.
Medicine and the Holocaust
There are two areas where medicine and the Holocaust come together to which Rabbi Polak has attempted to contribute: The Vienna Protocol and The Pernkopf Dilemma.
Lecturer
Rabbi Joseph Polak has been a a guest on various panels and presented numerous talks.
Child Holocaust Survivor
Rabbi Polak is a toddler-Survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. He was a prisoner in two concentration camps, during which period he lost his father and over 30 relatives.
