User:Chanceygardner

David Silberman was born in Preili, Latvia in 1934. His family fled the town just one day before the murder of nearly all its Jewish inhabitants. Around 1958, David Silberman decided to collect testimonial material from survivors from the Holocaust. This was relized clandestinely because the Soviet authorities frowned on activites and written works that made a differentiation between Jewish and Soviet (i.e. non-Jewish) victims. An activist for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel, David Silberman was one of the leading persons to organise a hunger strike in Moscow at the beginning of the seventies, he underwent questioning by the KGB, and a search of his apartment. Finally, after the hunger strie he was granted permission to emigrate to Israel.

He is now an American citizen and has many other books in Russian and English. One of these, entitled "Like a Star in the Darkness", ISBN 979-9984-280-6 describes the story of Janis (Zhan) Lipke, a Latvian patriot who helped and saved around 50 Jews from certain death during WWII. This righteious man was honoured in Jersualem where his name was inscribed in the "Golden Book" of the Jewish nation as "Righteous among the Nations."