Draft:Racheli Kreisberg

Dr. Racheli Kreisberg An entrepreneur, genealogist, researcher, and tour guide, was born in 1966 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Simon Wiesenthal and Cyla Wiesenthal nee Muller are her late maternal grandparents. She visited her grandparents often in Vienna and was impressed by the work of Simon Wiesenthal. She joined him to the Jewish Documentation Center on the Salztorgasse 6 in Vienna and to the inauguration of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles in 1992. During one of her visits to her grandparents, she started to research the family tree of the Wiesenthal and Muller families and to commemorate the 89 family members who were murdered during the Holocaust. This research led her to interesting finding: i) Simon Wiesenthal's family was from Skala Podolska, Galicia, nowadays in the Ukraine; her grandmother's family Dick is related to the family of Sigmund Freud. She developed 17 Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony for some of the murdered family members. Upon the passing away of Simon Wiesenthal on the 20th of September 2005 in Vienna, Dr. Kreisberg started to actively commemorate the life and legacy of Simon Wiesenthal. These activities include i) the development of the Simon Wiesenthal Commemoration Wall of Facebook (2013-); ii) the development of an innovative technology platform which enables the identification of the houses in which Simon Wiesenthal's family lived in Skala Podolska and in Vienna via the "Simon Wiesenthal Genealogy Geolocation Initiative", which is part of the Simon Wiesenthal RECHT webpage she developed together with Yossi Beck; iii) The inception of idea to develop the Simon Wiesenthal Prize during a 2018 meeting with Wolfgang Sobotka, the president of the Austrian Parliament. She takes active part at the Award Ceremony for the Simon Wiesenthal Prize. [1] [2] iv) presenting the life and legacy of Simon Wiesenthal at different occasions, such as at the Holocaust Center Milwaukee [3], at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies [4], at the Jewish Museum Vienna, and at the Olami school Holocaust Memorial (April 2023). Since 2022, Dr. Kreisberg has been developing and guiding Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust commemoration tours in Vienna in cooperation with the Austrian Parliament. These tours involve schools, such as Bundesgymnasium und Bundesrealgymnasium 14 (BRG14).

References

1. ^ https://www.wiesenthalpreis.at/the-prize 2. ^ https://www.nationalfonds.org/announcement/award-ceremony-of-the-2023-simon-wiesenthal-prize 3. ^ https://holocaustcentermilwaukee.org/events/nazihunter/ 4. ^ https://simon-previous-issues.vwi.ac.at/images/Documents/Coming-to-Terms/2017-1/2017-1_Coming-to-Terms_Kreisberg/CTT_Kreisberg01.pdf