Dov Forman | |
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Born | London, England | 6 December 2003
Known for |
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Relatives | Lily Ebert (great-grandmother) |
Dov Forman (born 6 December 2003) is an English author, spokesperson and social media creator. [1]
Forman is a religious Jew of Ashkenazi descent. He is the youngest of three children, one of Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert's 38 great-grandchildren, and lives in northwest London. [2]
Forman undertook his undergraduate studies in History and Religious Studies at University College London. [3] He was later employed by Conservative MP Robert Jenrick as a Senior Parliamentary researcher and then as Campaign Coordinator and Head of Digital for his leadership bid. [3]
At age 16, during the COVID-19 pandemic and amid a rise of antisemitism, Forman wanted to raise awareness of the Holocaust and anti-Jewish racism. He used Twitter to share his great-grandmother's story of surviving the Holocaust; his Tweets reached over 70 million Twitter users in 2020 and 2021. [4]
Forman has advocated new ways to teach young people about the Holocaust, and worked with the LADbible Group and Twitch.Tv to bring Holocaust survivors to their platforms. Forman was invited to speak about 'Social Media and Holocaust Commemoration' to the CEO of Google, at Oxford University and Cambridge University, and Dov has also spoken to more than 150 news outlets in over 30 countries. [5] [6] [7]
In November 2020, Forman spoke to a UK Parliamentary committee in favour of a UK Holocaust Memorial. [8] In February 2021, Forman set up a TikTok account to raise awareness among people his own age about the Holocaust and the consequences of hate. [9] Forman posted videos with his great-grandmother answering questions about the Holocaust and Judaism. In June 2021, the pair reached one million TikTok followers. [10]
Forman has worked on educational projects with several UK government departments - including the Foreign Office, [11] [12] Department for Education, [13] and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities - and international organisations, including the United Nations. [14]
In November 2021, Forman - with Jewish News - set up a private meeting and a tour of Kinloss synagogue with former Yorkshire County Cricket Club player Azeem Rafiq. Rafiq, who testified to Parliament earlier that month about anti-Muslim prejudice in Yorkshire, was later revealed to have used hateful language towards Jews on social media in 2011. Forman set up this meeting as part of Rafiq's reconciliation with the Jewish community. [15]
In March 2022, Forman was announced as a 'young spokesperson' for the USC Shoah Foundation, [16] the archive of Holocaust survivor testimonies initiated by Steven Spielberg in 1994.
Dov co-authored the memoir Lily's Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live, [17] [18] published by Pan Macmillan in the UK on 2 September 2021 and by HarperCollins in the US on 10 May 2022. [19] [20] Lily's Promise is a five-time Sunday Times bestseller and was the Waterstones and Daily Mail best history book of 2021. In March 2022, Lily's Promise (Lily's Belofte) became a bestseller in Holland. [21]
The United States edition of Lily's Promise is a three-time New York Times bestseller, debuting at number 2 - in its first week, and was chosen as the Costco US buyers' pick for May 2022. [22]
In a foreword to Lily's Promise, King Charles III (known then at publication as Prince Charles of Wales) paid tribute to Forman for his "engaging and effective use of social media". He said Forman had "demonstrated a determination to share his great grandmother’s story with a global audience". [23]
Forman delivered a TED Talk, titled: ‘Anything is Possible - The Accidental Gamechanger’, in August 2022, at a TEDx event with the theme 'Game Changers and Disruptive Thinkers.' [24]
In November 2021, Forman received the Points of Light award from the UK Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, for services to Holocaust education. [25] [26]
In March 2022, Forman - alongside his great-grandmother Ebert - was presented with the Jewish Care community award by Andrew Neil at the Jewish Care Topland annual community business lunch, hosted by the Topland Group. [27]
Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah, known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period. In Israel, it is a national memorial day. The first official commemorations took place in 1951, and the observance of the day was anchored in a law passed by the Knesset in 1959. It is held on the 27th of Nisan, unless the 27th would be adjacent to the Jewish Sabbath, in which case the date is shifted by a day.
The Last Days is a 1998 American documentary film directed by James Moll and produced by June Beallor and Kenneth Lipper; Steven Spielberg, in his role as founder of the Shoah Foundation, was one of the film's executive producers. The film tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, focusing on the last year of World War II, when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary and began mass deportations of Jews in the country to concentration and extermination camps, primarily Auschwitz. It depicts the horrors of life in the camps, but also stresses the optimism and perseverance of the survivors.
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
The March of the Living is an annual educational program which brings students from around the world to Poland, where they explore the remnants of the Holocaust. On Holocaust Memorial Day observed in the Jewish calendar, thousands of participants march silently from Auschwitz to Birkenau.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the genocide of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, an attempt to implement its "final solution" to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is a German-British cellist, and a surviving member of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz.
Holocaust trivialization refers to any comparison or analogy that diminishes the scale and severity of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The Wiesel Commission defined trivialization as the abusive use of comparisons with the aim of minimizing the Holocaust and banalizing its atrocities.
Eva Schloss is an Austrian-English Holocaust survivor, memoirist and stepdaughter of Otto Frank, the father of Margot and diarist Anne Frank. Schloss speaks widely of her family's experiences during the Holocaust and is a participant in the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive project to record video answers to be used in educational tools.
Eli Rubenstein is a Holocaust educator, writer, filmmaker, and activist. He is currently the religious leader of Congregation Habonim Toronto, a Toronto synagogue founded by Holocaust survivors, served as the Director of Education for March of the Living International since 1988, and currently serves as National Director of March of the Living Canada from 1988 to 2024.
Liliana Segre is an Italian Holocaust survivor, named senator for life by President Sergio Mattarella in 2018 for outstanding patriotic merits in the social field.
Renée Firestone is a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and educator, who became known for her fashion designs in the 1960s after she immigrated to the United States.
Lily Ebert was a British writer and Holocaust survivor, who in her later life became notable for her memoir, and social media videos and media appearances documenting her life as a survivor of the genocide.
Denise Holstein is an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor and Holocaust witness, who was liberated on 15 April 1945. As a Holocaust witness, Holstein tells her story in two books and in a documentary made by a student from the Lycée Corneille in Rouen. For almost fifty years, Holstein never spoke about her life before writing about it. As a Holocaust witness, Holstein visits school children, to describe and share her experiences.
There are several major aspects of humor related to the Holocaust: humor of the Jews in Nazi Germany and in Nazi concentration and extermination camps, a specific kind of "gallows humor"; German humor on the subject during the Nazi era; the appropriateness of this kind of off-color humor in modern times; modern anti-Semitic sick humor.
Gidon Lev is a Czechoslovakian-born Israeli dairy farmer and Holocaust survivor who was interned at the Nazi ghetto of Theresienstadt between the ages of 6 and 10. Of the 9,000 children imprisoned in or transported through Theresienstadt concentration camp, he is one of the more than 2,000 children estimated to have survived.
Tova Friedman is a Jewish American therapist, social worker, author, and academic born in Poland. She is a Holocaust survivor who was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Friedman taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later served as the director of the Jewish Family Service of Somerset and Warren Counties.
Edward Mosberg was a Polish-born American Holocaust survivor, educator, and philanthropist. During the Holocaust, he was held by the Nazis from 14 years of age in Kraków Ghetto, Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, Auschwitz concentration camp, Mauthausen concentration camp, and a slave labor camp in Linz, Austria, that was liberated by the US Army in 1945. Nearly all of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.
Miriam Malnik-Ezagui is an American nurse and TikToker known for making videos about her life and experiences as an Orthodox Jew living in Brooklyn, New York. Malnik-Ezagui is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivor Lilly Appelbaum Malnik.
Lilly Appelbaum Malnik is a Belgian-American Holocaust survivor who helped create the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was captured by Nazi soldiers in 1944, during the German occupation of Belgium, and was imprisoned at the Mechelen transit camp in Belgium, Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland, and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. She was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 by the British Army. Malnik's mother, two siblings, aunt and uncle, and grandaunt and granduncle were all killed during The Holocaust in Belgium. After World War II, she emigrated to the United States and was reunited with her father. She married Abraham Malnik, a Soviet Holocaust survivor, and they assisted in the founding of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With her granddaughter, the American social media content creator Miriam Ezagui, Malnik has made TikTok videos detailing life in concentration camps.
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