Program Videos

• A Living Legacy: Bringing 3rd Generation Stories of Survival into the Classroom
• Franci’s War: A True Story of Survival in Theresienstadt and Beyond
• Holocaust Fighters: Boxers, Resisters, and Avengers
• Rethinking the Dilemma of Bombing Auschwitz: Support, Opposition, and Reservation
• A Single Photograph Reveals a Crime of the Holocaust
• Recording of Conversation about the Artists Charlotte Salomon and Rahel Szalit (April 20, 2021)
• Forget Russia
• The Dramatic Story of a Jewish Lawyer Who Resisted the Nazi Regime
• Nazi War Criminals: Their Crimes and Fates
• A Sephardic Journey: The Jews of Salonica from the Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust
• Recovering the Past: Researching the Fate of One’s Family in the Shoah
• The German Churches in the Nazi Era and the Legacies of Antisemitism
• Hitler’s First Hundred Days
• British Fascist Women, the Anti-War Campaign and Antisemitism
• The German Churches in the Nazi Era and the Legacies of Antisemitism
• Teheran Children, Mikhal Dekel’s Talk, April 2, 2020
• Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets

A Living Legacy: Bringing 3rd Generation Stories of Survival into the Classroom

On the evening of December 16, The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies joined with 3GNY and their WEDU-We Educate initiative to present a preview of a workshop that we will be holding on May 17 under the title, A Living Legacy: Bringing 3rd Generation Stories of Survival into the Classroom.

Underlying the need for the workshop is the sad and inescapable circumstance that the number of survivors available to convey their experiences directly to students is dwindling. As a consequence, we wholeheartedly endorse the work of 3GNY to prepare the grandchildren of the survivor generation to assume the solemn responsibility of relating their grandparents’ stories to students and the general community. We stand behind 3GNY’s goal that by imparting the history of the Holocaust in a personal, approachable and factually accurate manner, students will also motivate students and others to confront the intolerance and prejudice that they encounter in their lives today. Furthermore, we envisage students being encouraged to explore how their own families’ stories shaped their lives and contributed to the broader narrative of our society as a whole. We hope you found hearing from Dave Reckess, Daniel Riff and Heather Lutz about their work and that of 3GNY in engaging students with stories and artifacts from their family histories worthwhile, and look forward to your joining us for the full workshop on May 17.

Dave Reckess

Heather Lutz

Daniel Riff

A Living Legacy: Bringing 3rd Generation Stories of Survival into the Classroom

Franci’s War: A True Story of Survival in Theresienstadt and Beyond

On November 16 at 7 P.M., E.T., renowned author and journalist Helen Epstein discussed her mother’s Holocaust memoir, Franci’s War, published by Penguin in 2020 with Gross Center Director, Dr. Michael A. Riff.

Franci Rabinek Epstein’s story starts in Prague with the German occupation of March 15, 1939 and continues with her deportation, in the summer of 1942, to Terezin, the former fortress town forty miles north of Prague that the Nazis transformed into a transit camp/ghetto. It would be the beginning of a three-year journey that would next take her to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and then, to slave labor camps in Hamburg, and, Bergen Belsen, where she was liberated by the British in April 1945, before finally returning to Prague.

Franci was known in her group as the Prague dress designer who lied to Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz, saying she was an electrician, an occupation that both endangered and saved her life. In this memoir, Franci Epstein offers her intense and candid account of those years. Franci’s War is the powerful testimony of one incredibly strong young woman who survived and was able to tell her story.

Helen Epstein is an arts journalist and the author or translator of ten books, including the non-fiction trilogy Children of the Holocaust, Where She Came From and The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma. Franci’s War has been published in nine countries, including Germany and the Czech republic. Her pioneering work on the inter-generational transmission of trauma, Children of the Holocaust, paved the way for hundreds of works by second-generation writers, artists and researchers and has been widely translated.

Helen Epstein

Kitty and Franci 1945

Holocaust Fighters: Boxers, Resisters, and Avengers

On November 10 at 7 P.M., E.T. the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies hosted Jeffrey Sussman who discussed his new book, Holocaust Fighters: Boxers, Resisters, and Avengers (Rowman & Littlefield, Oct. 2021) that tells riveting stories of victims who fought back against the Nazis. The lives of five boxers who were forced to fight for their lives while imprisoned in concentration camps are explored in depth, followed by the stories of those who managed to escape captivity and reveal the truth about the death camps. Sussman also depicts in fascinating detail the acts of the Avengers, a military unit that hunted down and killed Nazi war criminals. The final portraits are of the prosecutors who brought the Nazi leaders to justice, those same leaders who watched Jewish and Gypsy boxers beat each other for their own personal entertainment.

Holocaust Fighters is an incredible account of the many ways people resisted Nazi rule, providing moving portrayals of the resilience of the human spirit even in the face of incredible horror.

 

Jeffrey Sussman

Salomo Arouch

Harry Haft

Rethinking the Dilemma of Bombing Auschwitz: Support, Opposition, and Reservation

On October 20th at 4 PM, ET, Zohar Segev, professor of History at the University Haifa in Israel, presented new research into archival documents related to the work of American Jewish activists involved in the issue of bombing the camp, above all Leon Kubowitzki, who headed the World Jewish Congress’s Rescue Department. The archival documents reveal that Jewish and Zionist leadership requested that the U.S. not bomb Auschwitz and instead seek to examine other forms of military action that could be employed against the camp. The findings show us the importance of re-examination and reformulation of our knowledge and understanding regarding the Holocaust in light of new sources.

A Single Photograph Reveals a Crime of the Holocaust

On October 6 at 7 P.M., E.T., in conversation with Ramapo College librarian Christina Connor and Gross Center Director Michael A. Riff, Dr. Wendy Lower will share the gripping story of the photograph she discovered at the U.S. Holocaust Museum taken at the moment of the horrific murder of Jewish woman by a Ukrainian collaborator during the Holocaust. The image is at the center of Dr. Lower’s most recent book, The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed, published in February 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  In addition to Ramapo College’s Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the event’s co sponsors are the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center of Queensborough Community College/CUNY, The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the Florida-based Gross Family Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Recording of Conversation about the Artists Charlotte Salomon and Rahel Szalit (April 20, 2021)

(Co-sponsored with the Leo Baeck Institute, New York and in conjunction with the Carnegie Hall Festival, Voices of Hope)

The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Leo Baeck Institute, New York presented a conversation via Zoom between Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds, UK) and Kerry Wallach (Gettysburg College, PA) about the work and life of the German Jewish artist, Charlotte Salomon and East European-born Jewish artist and illustrator Rahel Szalit-Marcus. The program was chosen to be part of the 2021 Carnegie Hall Festival, Voices of Hope, on the resilience of artists and the life-affirming power of music and the arts during times of oppression and tyranny and was attended by an audience of more than 180 participants from all over the U.S. and overseas. Gross Center Director Michael A. Riff acted as moderator.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=210743937132464&ref=search

Griselda_Pollock

Kerry Wallach

Jerry Zaks

On March 31 in a presentation, “Bearing Witness for My Family: Surviving the Holocaust,” at a Holocaust Remembrance Day (YouHaShoah) Zoom program, organized by the Gross Center in association with the River Edge Cultural Center and the Friends of the River Edge Library, Jerry Zaks showed how anyone could join his effort to keep the memory of the Shoah alive by researching the history of their parents, or other family members, in the Holocaust and preparing a presentation on that experience that could be delivered in schools and in front of community groups.

https://www.facebook.com/julia.u.lee/videos/10165319043275597

Forget Russia

Dr. Lisa Williams, Ph.D., Professor of Literature at Ramapo College, discussed her recently published book, Forget Russia (Tailwinds Press, 2020) with Dr. Santamaría Laorden, Associate Professor of Spanish at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The program will be delivered virtually via Zoom on Thursday, March 18 at 7 p.m. and presented under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Forget Russia is a strong, stirring tale about Anna, a college student who during a semester in Moscow discovers details about her family that will change her life. She knows that her grandparents, who met and married in America, willingly returned to Russia in 1931 with their little girls—Anna’s mother and her younger sister—then fled back to the United States.  The book’s narration alternates among time periods revealing painful memories of the past and experiences of the present that shape the future. Williams is an experienced writer who uses her craft to mold a passionate story that has much to tell about being part of a family with a rich and complicated history as well as coming of age in contemporary Russia and America.

The Dramatic Story of a Jewish Lawyer Who Resisted the Nazi Regime

On Thursday, March 4, Dr. Douglas Morris, Esq., Ph.D., a legal historian and a criminal defense attorney for indigent clients in New York City., discussed his recently published book, Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with Dr. Mia Serban, Associate Professor of Law & Society at Ramapo College. Attorney and legal theorist Ernst Fraenkel was one of twentieth-century Germany’s great intellectuals who worked within Nazi Germany actively resisting the regime, both publicly and secretly. Pursuing a dual track, he represented political defendants in court, while engaging in dangerous resistance work underground.

Nazi War Criminals: Their Crimes and Fates

On Thursday, February 18 , Dr. Daniel Lee, author of The SS Officer’s Armchair: Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi (Hachette, 2020) and Senior Lecturer in Queen Mary University London’s School of History and, and Philippe Sands, Q.C., author of The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive (Knopf, 2021) and renowned International Human Rights attorney and Professor of Laws and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, discussed “Nazi War Criminals: Their Crimes and Fates.”

Philippe Sands

Dr. Daniel Lee

A Sephardic Journey: The Jews of Salonica from the Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust

On Thursday, February 11, UCLA History professor Sarah A. Stein, author of Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019) and physician Dr. Joe Halio, who as President of the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture was responsible for the recent re-publication of Dr. Albert Menache’s Birkenau (Auschwitz II), Memoirs of an Eyewitness: How 72,000 Jews Perished, discussed  “A Sephardic Journey: The Jews of Salonica from the Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust.” The Ottoman port of Salonica, which became part of Greece in 1913 and is known as Thessaloniki today, was home to a large, diverse and influential community of mostly Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors found refuge there following the Spanish Inquisition.

Recovering the Past: Researching the Fate of One’s Family in the Shoah

Mr. Zaks will conduct a presentation on researching the history of one’s family in the Holocaust titled, “Recovering the Past: Researching the Fate of One’s Family in the Shoah.” He will also discuss his endeavor with Gross Center Director, Dr. Michael A. Riff. The program will be delivered virtually.

After retiring from a successful career in the technology sector, Zaks began a quest to research and document the history of his parents’ experiences before and during the Holocaust. He will show how anyone can join his effort to keep the memory of the Shoah alive.

He will relate how he used excerpts of his parents’ testimonies and Nazi documentation to tell the story of their lives before WWII, how they survived multiple concentration camps and death marches, and how they eventually rebuilt their lives in America.

The German Churches in the Nazi Era and the Legacies of Antisemitism

On Friday, November 6^th, Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand, Acting Director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust in the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, in conversation with Gross Center Director Michael A. Riff, explored the religious landscape in Germany and how the Christian churches responded to the rise of Nazism. She contextualized Nazi antisemitism within the long history of Christian anti-Judaism in European society.

Hitler’s First Hundred Days

Professor Peter Fritzsche of the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, discussed his recent book, Hitler’s First Hundred Days. When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Basic Books), with Ramapo professor Sam Mustafa, Ph.D., who teaches German History and is the author of several books in the field. Fritzsche’s probing account reveals how, in the spring of 1933, Germany went from being a deeply divided republic to a one-party dictatorship.

British Fascist Women, the Anti-War Campaign and Antisemitism

On October 23, Julie Gottlieb, Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield (UK), with Gross Center Director Dr. Michael A. Riff, discussed the outsize role women played in Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists of the 1930s. Dr. Riff’s role was supposed to have been filled by Ellen Ross, Ph. D., Professor Emerita of History and Women’s Studies at Ramapo College, but technical difficulties prevented that from occurring. However, her questions formed the basis of the discussion led by Dr. Riff.

The German Churches in the Nazi Era and the Legacies of Antisemitism

On Friday, November 6^th, Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand, Acting Director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust in the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, in conversation with Gross Center Director Michael A. Riff, explored the religious landscape in Germany and how the Christian churches responded to the rise of Nazism. She contextualized Nazi antisemitism within the long history of Christian anti-Judaism in European society.

Teheran Children, Mikhal Dekel’s Talk, April 2, 2020

Mikhal Dekel
Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019)
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324001034
https://www.amazon.com/Tehran-Children-Holocaust-Refugee-Odyssey/dp/1324001038

Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets

Elissa Bemporad
Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/legacy-of-blood-9780190466459?prevNumResPerPage=20&prevSortField=1&start=120&lang=en&cc=us
https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Blood-Pogroms-Ritual-Soviets/dp/0190466456/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Bemporad&qid=1588952323&s=books&sr=1-1