Rabbi Joseph Polak

Rabbi Joseph Polak was born in 1942 in The Hague, Netherlands, and is a toddler-Survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. He was a prisoner in the Westerbork and Bergen- Belsen concentration camps and lost his father and 30 other relatives during the Shoah. After the war, he and his mother eventually emigrated to Montreal, Canada, and then in 1967 settled in the U.S.

Rabbi Joseph Polak is a “Dayan” (Rabbinical Court judge), and serves as the Chief Justice of the Rabbinical Court of Massachusetts

His memoir, After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring, won the 2015 National Jewish Book Award for Biography and Autobiography. It has received extraordinary critical acclaim and is taught in university courses on Holocaust literature alongside the works of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. The memoir is scheduled to be published in Hebrew translation by Yad Vashem.

Rabbi Polak is graduate of Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University and of the Rabbinical College of Canada (Lubavitch) both in Montreal. He has pursued post-ordination studies in jurisprudence at the Harry Fischel Institute for Advanced Rabbinical Studies in Jerusalem.

For forty-six years, Rabbi Polak served as a university chaplain, first at Ohio University and then at Boston University. In 1995 he received an Honorary Degree from Boston University for his years of moral teaching and example, the only university chaplain so honored at the time.

Rabbi Polak and his wife Reizel reside in Brookline, MA. They have five children and twenty grandchildren.