An Evening with Sami Steigmann: Holocaust Survivor and Motivational Speaker

Sami Steigmann spoke at the Chabad Israeli Center of Atlanta on Wednesday night, May 13, 2026. AIC had brought him to Georgia for four days that week and asked schools, congregations, and community groups to host him too. The next night he spoke again on Zoom, for anyone who couldn’t be in the room.

He was born in 1939 in what is now western Ukraine. As a child in the Mogilev-Podolsky labor camp in Transnistria, he was used for Nazi medical experiments, and a German farm woman who smuggled him milk kept him alive. He went on to serve in the Israeli Air Force and build a life in the United States, and since 2008 he has spoken to more than 250,000 people.

AIC hosted him because very few people alive today were subjects of those experiments, and fewer still travel the country to talk about it. He speaks about resilience, the responsibility of memory, and confronting antisemitism today, with a framework he calls E.M.E.T.: Educate, Motivate, Empower, Tolerance. The flyer carried his own line: “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to be.”

The evening was free.