Ruth Dreifuss was the first Jewish member of the Federal Government of Switzerland and the first female President of the country. When she became President of the Confederation in 1999, she was the first Jew and the first woman to hold the office.

Born in 1939, Rachel Ertel is a translator and an essayist. She remains one of the most prolific translators from Yiddish to French and dedicated her life to the survival of Yiddish culture in France and America.

Minna Regina Falk was a historian, writer, and professor who is remembered for her work on German history. She became the first female full professor in New York University’s history department in 1963.

Jessica Feingold devoted more than forty-five years of her life to carrying out the goals of the Jewish Theological Seminary. She edited fifty books that originated at the institution, while also serving in many different administrative positions.

A Polish-born writer who survived the Holocaust, Ida Fink published several collections of short stories and a novel that explore the experiences and after-effect of the Holocaust. Her subtle and nuanced writing brings memory and imagination to bear on a traumatic past.

After Paulette Fink’s husband, serving in the French Army, escaped capture, Fink and her family fled to the unoccupied zone of France and joined the Resistance, hiding Jewish children and helping them escape. Despite her husband’s death, Fink continued working with the Resistance and the Jewish Brigade. When the war ended, she continued her work with refugees before settling in Minneapolis.

Gisi Fleischmann was a steadfast and brave fighter in the underground resistance to Nazism during World War II. Many times, she refused to escape Slovakia to safety and instead chose to stay and fight for her people to the bitter end.

From the French Revolution to the twenty-first century, Jewish women in France have undergone radical legal, political, cultural, and religious transformations. Seizing upon the increasing number of opportunities available to them, both as Jews and as women, Jewish women have left their marks on all areas of French society.

Anne Frank is famous for the diary she wrote during the Holocaust, in which she describes her life while hiding in an Amsterdam attic. She was caught and perished in Bergen-Belsen. Her diary, which is often part of school curricula, has become one of the central symbols of the Holocaust and human suffering.

Mary Frank was a sculptor and painter inspired by dance, photography, and the moving body. Born in London, Frank immigrated to the United States in the 1940s and danced with Martha Graham and studied art at the American Art School in New York. Frank imparts a sense of the timelessness and her work, and her sculptures have been described as sensual, sublime, poetic and profoundly moving, placing her among the foremost figurative artists of our time. 

German-born Recha Freier founded Youth Aliyah in 1933, which assisted in sending Jewish European teenagers to Palestine prior to World War II to be trained as agricultural pioneers on kibbutzim. Although she was responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of Jewish youth, Freier’s efforts were not officially acknowledged until 1975, when she was eighty-three years old.

Gisèle Freund was a European intellectual and writer, a sociologist, a historian of photography, a socialist, a Jew, and one of the world’s greatest photographers.From her photographs of a rally in Berlin to her insightful portraits of Evita Perón, Freund captured the early twentieth century. In 1991, she was the first photographer honored with a retrospective at the Musée National d’art Moderne.

Carl Friedman was a Dutch writer who published several international bestsellers about the Holocaust and second generation trauma. Though writing from a Jewish perspective, in 2005 it was revealed that Friedman did not have a Jewish background. The controversy marred Friedman’s literary career.