Fama Mor
(Rozental-Karpinovitch)
Fama (Fruma) born in 1946 in Poland among refugee Holocaust survivors who saw her as symbol of renewal and hope.
Ancestral Legacy
We founded Famanistot to carry forth the spirit - infused by Fama and her family's legacy - of the power of hope fuelled by art over darkness.
The trauma of the Holocaust haunts us still, three, four, and five generations later. Fama (Rozental-Karpinovitch) Mor was born within a year of the end of World War II. In a crowded house of survivors and refugees, she was a baby of hope, of the triumph of life over extermination. Initially marked for a desperate abortion, her mother, Miriam, who barely escaped death multiple times, through several concentration and labor camps, who experienced depravity like none documented before, couldn’t imagine bringing a new child into the infernal reality of her own youth experienced a mere year before. Fama’s birth was a beacon for collective communal renewal over ravaging loss. She, perhaps, unsurprisingly, dedicated her career to telling the story of life over death, of hope over despair.
As a Holocaust praxis scholar, educator, curator, researcher, and librarian, Fama’s work infused countless youths with a sense of purpose grounded in history. She curated innovative, provocative exhibits and provided meticulously researched inputs to inform films, shows, and narratives about modern history’s darkest times. She mentored school-age children and guided research by graduate students and post-docs, from Germany, Israel, and the United States. Fama elevated the stories and experiences of the dozens of survivors she grew up with and worked closely to document their personal Holocaust-related stories.
Fama’s family played literal center stage at the Vilna (Vilnius) ghetto.
Her aunt, Chayale Rozental, dubbed “wunderkind” and “songstress of the ghetto”, performed musicals penned by her brother, Leyb Rozental, a prolific playwright, songwriter, and poet, later murdered by the Nazis. Her father, Melech Karpinovich, a gifted artist and musician, survived the war painting sets and playing the piano for a travelling Roma theater. His family managed the popular, local Yiddish theater of Vilnius, then in Poland, before the war. The tree planted outside the theater hall to shade actors on rehearsal breaks still stands, a derelict reminder of that cultured past. After the war, Chayale continued to enthrall audiences in venues in Europe and in her new, adopted home of South Africa. Fama’s paternal aunt, Rita (Karpinovitch) Horowitz, brought her outsized personality and Yiddish-tinged humor to New York city, performing on stage and screen. Fama’s parents found safe haven in the fledgling, newly-established state of Israel. Her father and uncle, Melech and Avrom Karpinovitch, highly regarded Yiddish language authors, critics, and journalists, likewise sought to preserve the rich artistic Jewish culture now extinct in the once thriving cultural and intellectual center of their people in Vilna, aka Jerusalem of Lithuania.
About Fama (July 23, 1946 - December 20, 2018)
Fama Mor, child of the Rozental and Karpinovitch families of the storied, now vanished, Jewish Vilna (aka, Vilnius, Lithuania), devoted her life to preserving and telling the story of her family and through that the story of the Holocaust broadly and that of the Jewish people. She poured her love and passion for family, culture, heritage and history to her incalculable life work of preserving, teaching, archiving and sharing the past for future generation A polyglot born in Poland, facile in Polish, Yiddish, German, Hebrew, English, and French, when pressed, Fama started her career overhauling Tel Aviv University’s library system to better cater to multi-disciplinary and cross-departmental research needs. During her 13 years there, she also managed the Alfred Wiener Library collection, an extensive collection of Holocaust and Nazi era archives, including publications on the Third Reich, Europe around the two World Wars, and the Jewish communities in Europe.
After her move to the United States, Fama spent decades as an archivist and curator with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the famed Nazis “hunter”, and its then newly established Museum of Tolerance (opened in Los Angeles, California in 1993). She interviewed and documented life stories of Holocaust survivors, managed a vast archival collection of Holocaust records, personal narratives, and priceless artifacts. She curated haunting and transformative exhibits on the world that was, incorporating artifacts from survivors and camps, including Auschwitz, installed at the Museum of Tolerance. Thousands visit those exhibits annually.* Notably, she helped set up the Los Angeles showing of the landmark exhibit, The Enduring Spirit: Art of the Holocaust, the “first exhibition of artworks actually created in World War II concentration camps, prisons and transit stations, 'Enduring Spirit' packs tremendous force in the mere fact of its existence and the nature of its subject matter,” as described by the LA Times when it opened in 1996.
As an archivist and researcher, Fama consulted on requests for historical and archival materials for film, TV, media, and literary productions. She supported research for the Academy Award winner for best documentary, The Long Way Home (1997), featuring the struggle Jews faced after being released from WWII concentration camps and housed in displaced persons camps located on the same sites as death camps, surrounded by barbed wires, unable to leave, and mixed with ex-Nazi collaborators as camp assignment was done by country of origin. Other films Fama guided include Steal a Pencil For Me (2007), an unlikely true story of love imprisoned set in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; God Wears My Underwear (2005), a multiple award-winning short film tying the Jewish Holocaust to the genocide in Tibet in the 1950s through the experience of a gender-confused reincarnated soul; and Children from the Abyss (2000), a Steven Spielberg Shoah Visual History Foundation production telling the stories of children and teenagers who survived the Holocaust in the former Soviet Territories.
* Other exhibits Fama supported showcased the rights of children in words and pictures, Not Sold in Stores, an exhibit of toys ingeniously created by children living in countries affected by poverty, war, or natural disasters; Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops, 1820 to the Present; and Stealing Home: How Jackie Robinson Changed America.