Avrom Bendavid-Val

Avrom Bendavid-Val has worked as an expert in economic development and environmental management for 45 years. During his career, he traveled and worked in many countries in Africa, Asia, East and Central Europe, and the Middle East, and published several books in his field. In 1997, while working in Poland, he decided to visit the site of the vanished town of Trochenbrod, western Ukraine, where his father and grandfather were born. His father left the town in 1932, before World War II, as part of a wave of Zionist pioneers settling in the British Mandate of Palestine. Bendavid-Val wondered what the town had been like before it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942, but while it was still part of the Soviet bloc, it was all but impossible to visit. In 1997, he finally was able to visit the area where Trochenbrod had once stood and speak to survivors of the Holocaust. He became an impassioned researcher into the history of the town, and in 2010 published The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod. In 2015, his efforts were made into a documentary film, The Lost Town: Bringing Back Trochenbrod. He was a Research Associate at the Center for Development Policy, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and retired in 2007.