Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life

Join us for a conversation between Sarah Kaminsky, author of Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life, and renowned Attorney at Law Mel Urbach, who assisted in recovering several billion dollars for WWII victims during the last two decades, and has unforgettable cases and stories.

Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life is the gripping story of Sarah’s father, a brilliant forger, and his thirty-year battle against injustice that began during the Holocaust. Critics have called it riveting, thrilling, precise and touching, written like one of the best spy novels, and one of the most captivating books of the year.

As a young Jewish teenager in France, Adolfo Kaminsky was recruited by the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. Due to his expert knowledge of dyes and his artistic craft in reproducing documents, he soon became the primary forger in Paris, creating papers that saved an estimated 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children from certain death. Kaminsky, who was interned with his family in the French concentration camp Drancy, avoided deportation to Auschwitz because they had passports from Argentina, where they had first emigrated from Russia, before moving to France. After the war, Adolfo Kaminsky’s human rights efforts shifted to other areas of the world where freedom was at stake. For the next twenty-five years he lived a double life – working as a professional photographer and secretly producing counterfeit documents. One of his first assignments was for the Haganah to create papers so that homeless concentration camp survivors could settle in Palestine. This real-life story offers a rare look into the personal sacrifices that Kaminsky endured, the effect of his political commitments on his family, and motivation, and his unending hopes for justice in an increasingly violent world.

In English. Free and open to the public with RSVP to rsvp.jafaorg@gmail.com


 

Sarah Kaminsky is a French actor, screenwriter and the author of Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life, which has sold over 12,000 copies in France alone and has been translated into Italian, Hebrew, German, Spanish, Turkish, and Arabic. The New York Times produced a video about Adolfo Kaminsky (now ninety-years old) and it appears on their website, with an Op-Ed essay. Watch in Times Video.

Mel Urbach is a renowned attorney at law , who assisted in recovering several billion dollars for WWII victims during the last two decades, and has unforgettable cases and stories.

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