Star Tribune
Dora Zaidenweber, Holocaust survivor and educator, dies at age 99
As a survivor of the Holocaust, Dora Zaidenweber felt a responsibility and an obligation to share her story.
Over many decades, she told thousands about finding the hope to endure Auschwitz’s horrors — giving her testimony across the Midwest at schools and museums, over Zoom and, just six months before she died on Sept. 21, before Minnesota legislators at the State Capitol.
“Mass murders can happen, and people have to understand to learn to live with each other,” Zaidenweber, who was 99, told lawmakers in March. “It is only through understanding and education that they know who their neighbors are, who the people they are living with and learn to live with.”
Ultimately, state lawmakers passed an education bill that included requiring Minnesota students to learn about the Holocaust and other genocides starting in 2026.
“Dora was a force that winter day, there’s no doubt in my and my JCRC colleagues’ minds that her words, her presence, and her voice changed minds in that packed Capitol hearing room,” said Laura Zelle, director of Holocaust education for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. “I will remember Dora not only for the darkness she endured, but for the light she brought into the world, ensuring that the lessons of history will guide us toward a more compassionate and just future.”
Zaidenweber was born in Radom, Poland. Along with her immediate family and her future husband, Jules, she survived being forced into a Polish ghetto and sent to Nazi forced labor and death camps. Her extended family did not survive, and her mother died just after the war. In 1950, Jules, Dora, her father and her brother David all immigrated to the United States and settled in Minneapolis.
Two years after coming to America, despite having her high school education cut short by the war, she earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of Minnesota.
For several years, Zaidenweber, who worked as an accountant and raised two children, didn’t talk much about what she experienced during the war, said her grandson Jonah Krischer. When her eldest was in high school, however, she started sharing her story.
“Once she started speaking, she never stopped,” he said.
Zaidenweber’s indomitable spirit is on display in a video captured in 1982, as she speaks to a teacher’s workshop at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. The filmed testimony is now part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection.
“When you’re living in an Auschwitz, with the chimneys going all the time, and thousands of people — and you see from the compounds the trains coming in every day, and nobody coming out, other than this fiery smoke — it becomes a fallacy to hope that there might be a day when they will even let you out of that godforsaken place, that you might tell anybody what was going on there,” she tells the room of educators.
“You know, it takes an incredible amount of fortitude to even dare to hope that you will survive.”
For her family, which grew to include five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, Zaidenweber was a “warm and loving” matriarch who held them together. Krischer remembers spending every other Sunday at his grandparents’ house in St. Louis Park with his brother as a kid, learning to play bridge and never missing an episode of “60 Minutes.”
“She always made the same meal of chicken and noodles, and we always got a little bowl of chocolate chips for dessert,” he said.
After they grew up, Zaidenweber scheduled a day for each grandchild to give her a call. Krischer’s was Tuesday. “She would pick up the phone with ‘Happy Tuesday!'” he said. “And if I forgot and called a day late, she would say ‘Happy Tuesday on Wednesday!'”
Even as she was losing her eyesight in recent years, Zaidenweber worked with her family to translate from Yiddish into English and publish a memoir that her father, Isaia Eiger, wrote about his time at Auschwitz.
After Zaidenweber’s testimony in March, as her daughter was wheeling her out of the room in her wheelchair, Zaidenweber raised her hand and asked Zelle if she could meet the governor, Zelle recalled. A few months later, Gov. Tim Walz thanked Zaidenweber personally at a JCRC event, she said.
“Dora’s wish was granted,” she said.
Zaidenweber is survived by her children, Rosanne Zaidenweber and Gary Zaidenweber, her five grandchildren and her five great-grandchildren. Services have been held.
A St. Paul man who was in critical condition following a fire last week at his home in the Battle Creek neighborhood has died, marking the city’s eighth fire death this year.
According to a news release from the St. Paul Fire Department, the man was found unconscious in the basement of a house on Nelson Street early in the morning of Oct. 17, after fire crews had extinguished a fire at the two-story residence. Paramedics undertook life-saving measures before taking him to the hospital.
No one else was injured in the fire, which was found to have been accidental and started in the engine of a car parked in the tuck-under garage. The fire was confined to the garage, but heavy smoke filled the house. Smoke detectors enabled others in the house to exit safely, officials said.
That hasn’t ebbed with Simpli-Fi. The startup incorporated in 2018 as a company based out of Florida that integrated technology systems together in commercial buildings to work as a single unit. But business sputtered when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Campbell had to make staff cuts to his team of 16 employees. He called it one of “the worst times” of his life.
“But during that time is where we made a pivot,” Campbell said.
He set out to find a new technology, eventually spotting NASA’s electronic nose thanks to Brown Venture Group, a St. Paul based firm that supports Black, Latino and Indigenous tech startups. Campbell’s brother, Paul Campbell, is a partner at the firm but said he recused himself from the investment decision.
Chris Campbell was skeptical of the electronic nose’s capabilities at first but sprung for a commercialization license after spending a year researching the technology. By this past summer, he had moved the company to Minnesota and specifically the Osborne building because both are “known for device creation,” he said.
Simpli-Fi’s sensor packs some of the science of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry — which require huge machines — into a sensor the size of a dime, Campbell said. Using nanotubes, the sensor picks up metabolic qualities in the air and breath, he said.
For now, the company is focused on the C. diff-sensing Provectus Canary device, which scans the air around a hospital patient to detect the bacteria that causes the infection, which has gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea. The company is working toward the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval for using the sensor to detect various diseases.
A Minneapolis man was sentenced Friday to 20 years in prison for murdering his neighbor in their North Side apartment building last year.
Walter Lee Hill, 59, had pleaded guilty on Monday to second-degree intentional murder. He will get credit for having served nearly a year in jail.
Police were called to the Gateway Lofts on W. Broadway Avenue last November on a report that someone was shot. Officers found Donald Edmondson, 60, dead on the floor of his apartment with a gunshot wound to the chest.
A video camera in the hallway showed Hill knocking on Edmondson’s door, reaching into his sweatshirt pocket and firing his gun once. Hill then left in his Lexus, which officers found near Elliot Park downtown.
They spotted Hill walking nearby, asked for his ID and arrested him when he said something to the effect that they had the right guy.
A witness told police they saw Hill shoot Edmondson, and another said there had been an ongoing dispute between the two. Two days before the murder, Hill had called police because he believed neighbors were breaking into his apartment.
In a statement, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Edmondson “should still be alive. A violent act committed with such disregard by Mr. Hill has taken him from his family. This sentence delivers accountability and protects our community, and I hope it brings some measure of peace to Mr. Edmondson’s loved ones as they attempt to move forward with their lives.”
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