Leni Yahil

Leni Yahil was born in 1912 in Düsseldorf

Leni Yahil was born Leni Westphal in Düsseldorf in 1912 and grew up in Potsdam. Her family descended from Moses Mendelssohn, and her father, Ernst Westphal, was a judge. She was a leader of the Jewish youth movement Werkleute.

She studied history in Munich and Berlin, but the Nazi rise to power in 1933 cut her studies short. In 1934 she moved to Palestine and later studied at the Hebrew University. She earned her master's degree in 1940 with a thesis on Tocqueville's idea of democracy.

She worked in the labor movement and the Histadrut, and in several roles at the newspaper Davar. In 1942 she married Chaim Hoffman, later Yahil, and they had 2 sons. Their son Jonathan was killed in the Six-Day War in the battle for Jerusalem.

From 1954 to 1956 she was academic secretary to Benzion Dinur. Her doctoral thesis on the Jews of Denmark during the Holocaust was submitted in 1964, and she taught in Israel and the United States. Her book The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry appeared in Hebrew in 1987 and in English in 1990.

She served on the editorial board of Yad Vashem Studies until 2004. She died in 2007.