November lanterns and white snowflakes mark the opening of the holiday season in Brookline, and the start of the First Light Festival. Throughout the year, residents also discover the “Hidden Talents” of little-known local artists on local cable television, and enjoy the springtime Washington Square Music Fest. They behold the 18-foot tall, four-sided Victorian clock that set the pace for many others in the region, and shop in an invigorated Washington Square district (often referred to as the “Paris of Brookline”). And they’ve had their jewelry and watches repaired, obtained unusual items from around the world, and received beautiful pieces designed especially to their own tastes and personalities.

Behind all this is town wonder woman Barbara YONA Soifer (she says that YONA is her middle name; the Belgian government would not allow Jewish names on birth certificates after World War II). At the age of ten, her father, Emanuel, handed her a watch, told her to take it apart and put it back together again. This was a family tradition that inducted the children into the family’s watchmaking business. Soifer passed, and named the store, at that time located at 33 Court St. in Boston's old Scollay Square, “The Little Swiss House.”

The original Copper Kettle, now Starbucks, was then Patten’s Restaurant; she, sister Ava and parents Emanuel and Mala would eat there on special occasions after work. “I always ordered the Shirley Temple,” she recalled. In 1963, the Boston Redevelopment Authority forced the store to relocate - the site is now a veterans’ center - to its current location at 1618 Beacon St. in Washington Square, Brookline. Today, the Little Swiss House/YONA Jewelry Design Gallery is also managed by her husband, Robert Amaral.

Emanuel Soifer, a Holocaust survivor from Ukraine who was descended from a line of Hungarian Hasidic rabbis, witnessed his entire family shot and buried alive. Aided by a resister, he hid in hayfields, swamps and woods in nine countries while himself saving lives through the underground movement. His testimony about a Polish war criminal, Smokla, was used in the Nuremburg Trials. Soifer’s mother survived under false Polish papers. Tragically, they died young in the U.S., but their accomplishments and resolve are personified in their older daughter.

Soifer, who was born in Antwerp, Belgium, arrived in Brookline on the Queen Elizabeth II at the age of five. She was naturalized at age 16, and graduated from Brookline High School in 1964 as a member of the National Honor Society. “Many of my classmates were children of Holocaust survivors,” she recalled. “We were called the ‘gifted class,’ who were given the chances our parents were robbed of.”

I still feel that I’m living my parents’ unfulfilled dreams,” she continued, noting that although she never took a formal jewelry course, she inherited her father’s mechanical acuity and her mother’s artistic genes (Mala’s brother, Zwi Kanar, who lives in Tel Aviv, is a student and was a lifelong friend of mime Marcel Marceaux). “There was a foundation,” she said, “but I'm completely autodidactic. I was exposed to much repair work in my apprenticeship with my father and with other jewelers from age ten on. I know design directly and instinctually, by communicating and watching the client.”

She became a jewelry designer by challenge, when over 20 years ago, an actress handed her some gold and said, “make me a ring.” Soifer has been working in precious materials ever since. “I examine how a piece broke, and remake it with that in mind,” she said. Soifer has traveled through Europe and Israel, where she has relatives on her mother’s side (her father’s relatives live in Argentina). She purchased her store stock of watches, jewelry and beauty products from the Dead Sea and Jerusalem.

In addition to the festivals and the Victorian clock, erected in 1994 following a campaign of street fairs, fundraisers and bronze plaque donations, she has served as Vice President of the Brookline Chamber of Commerce (she is still VP of Washington Square for the Chamber); Vice President of Brookline Access TV, where she is Executive Producer of “Hidden Talents;” Board Member of Boston Children’s Theatre; and is currently Vice President of the nonprofit Washington Square Merchants Association. She’s planning this year’s Washington Square Music Fest (past fest videos air regularly on BAT). She is also helping install a cupola across the street. “It used to be the top of a gasoline station that was torn down to make the parking lot for the Fireplace restaurant, and is a historic artifact,” she said.

Soifer says it was simply second nature for her to become a civic activist, and give back to the community that had welcomed her family.