Lecture
Leon Duval
Thursday 10.09.2026
Leon Duval
Righteous Among the Nations
Thursday 10.09.2026
How to watch
This lecture starts on 10 September at 5:00pm (UK).
Summary
Maintaining a Jewish identity while in hiding or in a camp was hugely challenging, and extremely dangerous. The simple act of observing a Jewish festival was an act of defiance that brought with it huge risks because discovery could be fatal for both the Jews and for their rescuers. Parents who took the difficult decision to send their children into religious orders had to deal with the added trauma of not knowing if they would still acknowledge their Jewish identity after liberation. In this session we discuss how both rescuers and hidden Jews tried to observe the Jewish holidays and also hear some heartwarming stories about rescuers who assisted children to maintain their Jewish identity.
Leon Duval
Leon Duval was born in Johannesburg but moved to Australia with his wife and daughters in 1975. The Victorian culture confronted in the days before Australia became ethnically diverse prompted them to shorten their surname to Duval. An accountant by profession, Leon discovered that many of the clients he looked after were Holocaust survivors which prompted him to search for a greater understanding of his Jewish inheritance and the underlying causes driving antisemitism. After retiring from professional life and moving to Jerusalem, Leon undertook an extensive course to train as a guide for the Yad Vashem history museum and is now a committed amateur historian spending many hours researching the history of the Jews in Europe and that of his own family’s Lithuanian roots. His occasional blog appears on the Times of Israel platform and he recently published a book telling the story of a Kindertransport survivor.