Esther Farbstein

Esther Farbstein was born in 1946 in Jerusalem

Esther Heine was born in Jerusalem in 1946 to a Gerrer Hasidic family. Her father was Rabbi Yehuda Leib Heine, and she is a great-granddaughter of Rabbi Avraham Mordechai Alter, the fourth Rebbe of Ger. After World War II, her family home often hosted Holocaust survivors with nowhere else to stay.

She studied at Bar-Ilan University and earned a master's degree in Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984. Her thesis, supervised by Yehuda Bauer, dealt with the rescue of Hasidic leaders during the Holocaust. For many years she taught at the Horeb Girls School in Jerusalem.

She founded the Center for Holocaust Studies at Michlalah Jerusalem College and headed it. Her work relies on documents rather than oral tradition, and she has questioned conclusions of both secular and religious historians. With Nathan Cohen she built a database of rabbis' Holocaust memoirs found in the prefaces of religious books.

Since 2010 she has been academic adviser to Ganzach Kiddush Hashem. She retired from running the center in 2023 and became an outside adviser. In June 2023 she was appointed to the board of the Claims Conference on behalf of the Israeli government.