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Michaela Tork
We're very grateful to our dedicated and caring webmaster, Michaela Tork. She is a graduate from UCLA: School of Film, Television & Digital Media where she earned a B.A. in film production as well as a M.A. and a Ph.D. in film studies having written a dissertation about the visual representation of the Holocaust in autobiographical film and video.
"My dissertation topic has been motivated by my ongoing desire to come to terms with my cultural background. As a postwar German citizen having grown up with the burden of a collective guilt inherited from the Holocaust crimes, I have been preoccupied with questions as to how ordinary citizens willingly collaborated with the Nazi regime.
My dissertation is a psychoanalytic study of filmic works of mourning bearing personal testimony to the immense losses that the Holocaust has inflicted on survivors and generations to come. Indeed watching these cinematic testimonies filled me with empathy for the victims and their children and a wish to help them - and by extension others - to work through devastating traumatic memories. Moreover my deep friendship with a Holocaust survivor convinced me that I wanted to become a therapist.
Having realized that I did not want to pursue a career in academia, I completed a degree in psychological counseling at CGI - California Graduate Institute as well as a one-year program in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at LAIPS - Los Angeles Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies. For the past three years I have been working toward my license as a therapist at the Valley Community Clinic under the guidance of trained psychoanalysts.
Undoubtedly, for me the making of this website also represents a work of mourning. I am interested in preserving Jewish culture and am deeply concerned about the immense losses the Holocaust has brought upon the Jewish people.
I was shocked when as a teenager I found out about the Holocaust. I joined Aktion Suehnezeichen (Action for Reconciliation a German organization devoted to doing amends for the crimes of the Holocaust by sending young Germans to needy places in various countries.
Aside from my personal investment in the site, I envision the site's more general purpose as a documentary history project of a specific people in one of the oldest Jewish communities in Los Angeles. The life stories that these students have to share are important to hear for generations to come in that they provide vivid insights into the personal lives and times of their writers."
Please visit my personal website at:
Michaela plans to add more web pages of students, stories, photographs and video to the site as her busy schedule permits. Our class is made up of a wonderfully diverse cultural and ethnic blend of students and her website reflects this diversity.
Michaela has also completed a documentary video about a Holocaust survivor, Fred Klein and created a website for him at:
We are fortunate to have such a talented and caring woman with us!
Thank you, Michaela.
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