Sara Bender

Sara Bender was born in 1948. She studied Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, where she completed her bachelor's and master's degrees.

She went on to doctoral research at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, supervised by the historians Israel Gutman and Yehuda Bauer. Her dissertation, completed in the mid-1990s, dealt with the Jews of Białystok during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Bender joined the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa in 1998, first as an associate professor and later as a professor, and was an emeritus member of the faculty in her later years. Her research focused on Jewish communities in Poland and eastern Europe during the war: life and leadership in the ghettos, Jewish resistance and youth movements, Jewish partisans in the forests of Lithuania and western Belarus, the forced labour camps of the Radom district, and relations between Jews and Poles in towns and villages under German occupation.

Her first book, Facing Death: The Jews of Białystok in World War II, was published in Hebrew by Am Oved in 1997 and in English by Brandeis University Press in 2008. In 2002 she held a Matthew Family Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where she studied captured German records for her project on Kielce. In Enemy Land: The Jews of Kielce and the Region, 1939 to 1946 was published by Yad Vashem in 2012 and in English translation by Academic Studies Press in 2018. Her book on Jewish forced labourers in the Radom district appeared from Pardes in 2022.

At Yad Vashem she was managing editor of the Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations and associate editor of the Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. She also edited Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, and in the 1990s she guided Israeli youth delegations to Poland.

Bender lived in Tel Aviv. Her family's death notice named her children Merav, Michal and Irad, her sister Dvora, and her grandchildren.

Sara Bender died on 31 October 2026, aged 78. Her family announced her death in a notice published on the Israeli memorial site Avelim, and her funeral was held at Kiryat Shaul cemetery in Tel Aviv on 1 November 2026, with the family sitting shiva at her home in the city. The cause of death was not made public. Former colleagues from Yad Vashem and from the youth delegations to Poland remembered her as a brilliant scholar and a gifted guide.

Bender's books on Białystok and Kielce are standard community histories of the Holocaust in Poland, drawing on an unusually wide range of German, Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish sources and on survivor testimony. Her work on the Righteous Among the Nations helped to document the people who risked their lives to rescue Jews, and her research on Polish and Jewish relations, including the Kielce pogrom of 1946, remains part of continuing scholarly and public debate.