Support for strongmen and conflict leading to war and genocide in eastern and central explored

On September 14, 2018, a rapt audience of 100 heard Bard College faculty member and researcher Helen C. Epstein speak about “Another Fine Mess: the US role in Africa's Wars.” With degrees in Physics (UCal//Berkeley), Molecular Biology (Cambridge/UK), and Public Health (London), Epstein moved to Uganda in 1993 in search of an AIDS vaccine and taught molecular biology. In the process, she came to view the U.S. preoccupation with terrorism and its naïve dealings with strongmen as being at the root of much of the turmoil in eastern and central Africa.

Her talk, which afterwards elicited a bevy of questions and comments, was based on her 2017 book, Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror, published by Columbia Global Reports. Among other periodicals, Epstein has been a contributor to The Guardian,The New York Review of Booksand The Nation.

Ethnic Division in Post Genocide Bosnia- Herzegovina Deconstructed

Covering another topic again in the news, on October 19, Dr. Azra Hromadžić, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University, spoke about “Youth and State Making in Post-Genocide Bosnia-Herzegovina,”

Through examining the behavior of Croatian Catholic and Bosnian Muslim students at the leading high school in the town of Mostar in the northwestern part of the country, Hromadžić showed how mandated initiatives designed to encourage reunification and institutionalized by power-sharing combined to harden the separation between the two communities.

Hromadžić depicted a school riven by self-imposed segregation, in which the only time the students met was while illicitly smoking in an upper-floor toilet. In the wider community, dysfunction engendered by the hardening of ethnic division has reached the point, she noted, at which young people in Bosnia-Herzegovina see their only hope for a better future in leaving their country for Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe.

A native of Bosnia, Azra Hromadžić completed her Ph.D., as well as her master and bachelor degrees in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie in the anthropology of international policy in the context of state-making in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is the author of Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2017.

Recital in Commemoration of the 80^thAnniversary of Kristallnacht Held at Temple Beth Haverim Shir Shalom

A concert commemorating the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, was held on October 21, 2018 at Temple Beth Haverim Shir Shalom . It was held under the auspices of the Temple and the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The concert featured the Madison String Quartet, pianist Itay Goren and baritone Steven Scheschareg in a unique program that will include Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon, Shostakovich's Piano Trio no. 2, and works by Samuel Barber, Max Brand, Hermann Leopoldi and Veniamin Fleishman. Also participating in the program is Cantor David Perper, who has served Beth Haverim Shir Shalom for 13 years.

The MADISON STRING QUARTET, founded in 1999, has been praised for its energetic performances and inventive programming. The quartet has as its core mission the championing of Latin American works, as well as collaborations with composers in its home state of New Jersey. MSQ’s most recent release is a CD featuring the works of New Jersey composer Dave Rimelis. The Quartet has performed in concert series all across the U.S., and has been the quartet-in-residence for the Kenai Peninsula Orchestra’s summer music festival in Alaska since 2008.

Pianist ITAY GOREN'S playing has been praised by audiences in the U.S., Asia, the Pacific and Europe, most recently in a summer music festival in France where a newspaper article quoted an ecstatic audience member describing Mr. Goren's rendition of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition as "dazzling." He has performed hundreds of solo and chamber music concerts and appeared as soloist with orchestras in the New York metropolitan area. This season, Goren will maintain a very busy concert schedule with solo recitals in New York City, Boston, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and will premiere composer Randall Svane's Piano Sonata, written and dedicated to him. In summer 2019, Goren will travel to Germany for performances of Brahms B major Piano Concerto with the Tübingen Academic Orchestra conducted by Philipp Amelung.

STEVEN SCHESCHAREG has made a name for himself with his striking stage presence, strong voice, wide-ranging artistic capabilities, and is winner of the prestigious George London Prize of the Vienna State Opera. Following his early successes in Austria at the Landestheater in Linz, and the Neue Oper Wien in Vienna, he has been invited to sing in theaters in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Austria, Poland and China. He has performed under conductors Dennis Russell Davies, Michael Tilson Thomas, Hans Graf, Michael Gielen, Kent Nagano, Nicholas Harnoncourt and others. Because his family was forced to leave Austria after the Nazi takeover of 1938, a personally important project is his CD recording “Lieder der Vertriebenen” with Lieder by Schönberg, Zemlinsky, Schreker and Max Brand.

Following their engagements in the NYC area this fall, the MSQ, Itay Goren and Steven Scheschareg will perform in January 2019 at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna and at a concert series in Wernigerode, Germany.

Anne Frank’s Stepsister, Eva Schloss, Tells Story

Eva Schloss, the stepsister of Holocaust victim and diarist, Anne Frank, shared her story, including her account of the publishing of Anne's famed diary on October 23 in the Ramapo High School Auditorium. The program was held jointly with the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Chabad of NW Bergen County and the Ramapo-Indian Hills School District.

In 1938, Germany invaded Austria forcing many Jewish families to flee for their lives in the face of Nazi persecution. Among the refugees was eight-year old Eva Geiringer, whose family fled first to Belgium and then toHolland, where she met German-Jewish refugee, nine-year old Anne Frank (later to become famous for her diary which has gone on to sell over 30 million copies in 70 languages.)

Attracting an audience of about 600, the program featured a conversation between Rabbi Chanoch Kaplan of the Chabad of NW Bergen County and Ms. Schloss that covered topics from her childhood in Vienna and her first encounters in Amsterdam with Anne to her survival in Auschwitz and eventual resettlement in London, where her widowed mother married Otto Frank, Anne’s father. Altogether, it was a highly informative and emotionally-laden evening that kept the audience, as diverse in background as it was in age, in rapt attention. Ms. Schloss, despite all that she lived through in the Holocaust, seemed not in the least bitter and always to have had a positive attitude towards life tinged with a good sense of humor.

Ms. Schloss (Left) is pictured above with fellow Auschwitz survivor Bella Miller and Rabbi Kaplan.

Sadly, while Eva and her mother survived Auschwitz, Anne did not. Anne’s father who had survived the concentration camp internment went on to marry Eva’s mother, cementing their destiny as stepsisters. Eventually, Eva made her way to England where she married Zvi Schloss and raised three daughters. She worked as a studio photographer and ran an antiques shop.

Since 1985, Eva Schloss has devoted herself to Holocaust education and global peace. She has authored two books, had a play written about her life, and recounted her wartime experiences at more than one thousand speaking engagements. In 1999, Eva signed the Anne Frank Peace Declaration along with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and the niece of Raul Wallenberg, a legendary figure who rescued thousands of Jews in Budapest.

New Research Explores aspects of the Holocaust in POland and Ukraine

A series of three lectures explored various aspects of the Holocaust in Poland. Afternoon and evening programs on October 30 were on “A Tale of Two Diaries from the Lodz Ghetto” and “Gender and the Daily Lives of Jews Hiding in Nazi Occupied Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.”

In the former, Professor Robert Shapiro of Brooklyn College compared and contrasted the diary of a teenage contemporary of Anne Frank with that of a cynical, well educated, middle-aged husband and father who manages to survive together with his wife and daughter from the arrival of the Germans until the arrival of Soviet troops who found barely 800 surviving Jews from a prewar Jewish community of almost a quarter million.

In the evening, Professor Natalia Aleksiun of Touro College examined how the hidden Jews of Eastern Galicia passed the time together, cared for one another, worked out survival strategies, and divided resources and labor during their concealment. Furthermore, she showed how fear and the oppressive conditions of life in hiding gave rise to behaviors and interactions in which gender issues were integral.

The infamous 29/30 September 1941 massacre of approximately 33,771 Jews in Babi Yar, a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, was the subject of a talk by much-respected Holocaust historian Dr. Martin Dean on November 2, 2018. Representing one of the most horrible chapters in the “Holocaust by bullets,” German forces carried out the atrocity with help of local Ukrainian collaborators. In peeling back the multiple layers of the massacre, Dean discussed the myriad events encompassing the Holocaust in Ukraine that led to the establishment of 750 camps and ghettos and resulted in the murder of 1.5 million Jews by German, Hungarian, Romanian and local police units, Dean is currently an advisor to the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center’s Scientific Committee.

Otoman Leader and architect of Armenian Genocide Talaat pasha Subject of talk

Talaat Pasha (1874–1921), the Interior Minister and leader of the triumvirate that ruled the late Ottoman Empire during World War I and arguably the father of modern Turkey, was the subject of the final program of the Fall Semester. Held on November 13 in cooperation with the Armenian National Committee of New

Jersey, Dr. Hans-Lukas Kieser, associate professor in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle in Australia and adjunct professor of history at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, presented a lecture about his recently published book, Talaat Pasha Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide(Princeton University Press, 2018).

Dr. Kieser provided a mesmerizing portrait of a man who maintained power through a potent blend of the new Turkish ethno-nationalism, the political Islam of former Sultan Abdulhamid II, and a readiness to employ radical "solutions" and violence. From Talaat's role in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to his exile from Turkey and assassination in Weimar Germany, Kieser restores the Ottoman drama to the heart of world events. As Kieser shows, Talaat wielded far more power than previously realized, making him the de facto ruler of the empire, whose policies and actions led to the Armenian Genocide and the eventual founding of the Turkish Republic.

Teachers Workshop Explores connection between experience of jews fleeing Holocaust with plight of refugees today

On November 15, the Center cosponsored an Echoes and Reflections teachers’ workshop with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the USC Visual History Foundation and Israel’s Yad Vashem. Having the title, “Jewish Refugees & the Holocaust: Connecting the Past with Today,” the program began with a session conducted by Esther Hurh, a highly seasoned education program consultant, curriculum developer, and trainer, who pointed out the similarities between the barriers to immigration and the unwillingness of the free world to accept refugees during the Holocaust and today’s migrant and refugee crisis.

Over lunch, Joan Halperin, a retired supervisor from the New York City Department of Education, showcased the curriculum she prepared based on her book depicting her family’s flight from Nazi-occupied Belgium, that eventually resulted in her family resettling in the United States. A key role in their trek across half the world was played by the Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who issued some 30, 000 visas to Jews fleeing the tyranny of the Third Reich and was recognized as "Righteous among the Nations" by the Israeli Remembrance Authority, Yad Vashem.

In the afternoon session, which was unfortunately cut short by a sudden snow storm, Sedda Antekelian, the Armenian Genocide Education and Outreach Specialist on USC Shoah Foundation’s Education team, modeled and explored the participatory and student-driven multimedia learning activities embodied in the Foundation’s iWitness visual testimony function. This tool enables educators to bring into their classrooms stories of citizens from many countries and their experiences as survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides.

Support for strongmen and conflict leading to war and genocide in eastern and central explored

Ethnic Division in Post Genocide Bosnia- Herzegovina Deconstructed

Recital in Commemoration of the 80^thAnniversary of Kristallnacht Held at Temple Beth Haverim Shir Shalom

Anne Frank’s Stepsister, Eva Schloss, Tells Story

New Research Explores aspects of the Holocaust in POland and Ukraine

Otoman Leader and architect of Armenian Genocide Talaat pasha Subject of talk

Teachers Workshop Explores connection between experience of jews fleeing Holocaust with plight of refugees today

Support for strongmen and conflict leading to war and genocide in eastern and central explored

Ethnic Division in Post Genocide Bosnia- Herzegovina Deconstructed

Recital in Commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht Held at Temple Beth Haverim Shir Shalom

Anne Frank’s Stepsister, Eva Schloss, Tells Story

New Research Explores aspects of the Holocaust in POland and Ukraine

Otoman Leader and architect of Armenian Genocide Talaat pasha Subject of talk

Teachers Workshop Explores connection between experience of jews fleeing Holocaust with plight of refugees today

Recital in Commemoration of the 80^thAnniversary of Kristallnacht Held at Temple Beth Haverim Shir Shalom