by Ida Akerman-Tieder 


And You Shall Tell Your Children is the synthesis that describes the process of passage from death to life — the secret of our inherited Jewish wisdom — using the author’s personal experience and the experience of all the people she came across in her practice and private life. It is the hope of someone who looks reality in the face and has the courage to say to a cruel foe, I won’t let you defeat my spirit. Focusing fundamentally on the People of Israel, the Land of Israel and the Torah of Israel, the real originality of this book is found in the professional and human analysis of the “pathology” of the survivor and the process of overcoming this handicap in order to rehabilitate oneself, enabling the reader to identify with this process when facing his or her own difficulties and — in spite of past ordeals — to build one’s present life in a positive way. 

The author, Dr. Ida Akerman-Tieder, was born in Berlin in 1927 and lived in France until she immigrated to Israel in 1990. She is a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, laying special emphasis on the importance of connecting with the roots of our people’s identity. 
"Escaped from Germany 
Escaped from the camps 
Parents deported 
Left alone 
Hidden to survive 
From there to the reconstruction 
– of a family, 
– a profession, 
– and a social and community life... 
– from Exile to Israel 
All my life was a struggle 
to pass from the register of death 
to that of life." 

Ida Akerman-Tieder wrote this book as a synthesis describing the process of a passage from death to life, using her own personal experience as a survivor of the Holocaust, and the experience of all the people she came across in her practice and private life, with the help of her professional knowledge. Ida believes that this enables the reader to identify with this process when facing his or her own difficulties and, in spite of past ordeals, to build one’s present life, in a positive way. 

Ida Akerman is a poet and has previously published three collections: Poèmes Roux, Paris, 1984; Poemes Roux Suite, Paris, 1988; and Evidences – Poemes Roux (Autre Suite), Jerusalem, 2009. 

Praise for And You Shall Tell Your Children: 

“In this book, a poignant personal history is fused with the destiny of a unique people. In a direct style, Ida Akerman gives us a narrative in which one finds the unfailing power of an authentic Jewish education capable of retrieving from the horrors of the cataclysm only sanctity and hope.” 
-Professor Binyamin Gross, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Bar Ilan University 


“We are greatly indebted to Dr. Ida Akerman for this moving and inspiring memoir. Reading her, one learns … even more about human fortitude and the depths of the Jewish soul.” 
-Professor Susan Handelman, Department of English, Bar-Ilan University 

“This is one of those rare books which combine unconditional faith and integral humanism, smiles and serenity, philosophy and feeling, attachment to one’s people and love of one’s family, a fixation upon heaven and overflowing benevolence to mankind, love of the good and horror of evil, and universal history and geography of the Holy Land.” 
-Rabbi Dr. Abraham Weingort, Teacher at the Heichal Eliyahu Yeshiva, Kochav Yaakov, Jerusalem and professor of Jewish law at the Sorbonne, Paris 


Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is followed by Yom Ha'atzmaut - Israel Independence Day. It is a natural progression in Jewish life - in Jewish history: Devastation followed by rebirth. 

Dr. Akerman's life story, And You Shall Tell Your Children, distributed by Urim Publications, is designed to fit these historical parameters, and more. She relates her experiences -- tales of death and devastation -- as they progress towards the miracles of survival and rebirth. The subtitle of her autobiography, "A Chronicle of Survival: Lessons of Life for Today," says it all. 

Published by Devora Publishing 
Softcover, 283 pages (includes 52 b/w photographs) 
ISBN 13: 978-193-4440-40-7 
publication: 2011