“Jewish Life in Poland: Before, During and After the Holocaust”
The conference is free and open to the public.
Wednesday, October 26
Post-film discussion:
“Three Minutes: A Lengthening”
Who:
Glenn Kurtz, Ph.D. Stanford University in German Studies and Comparative Literature
Bio:
Glenn Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2014), which was selected as a “Best Book of 2014” by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. The Wall Street Journal praised it as “captivating,” and The Los Angeles Times described Three Minutes in Poland as “breathtaking.” A Dutch edition appeared in 2015.
Three Minutes-A Lengthening, a documentary film based on Three Minutes in Poland, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021 and has screened at the Telluride, Toronto, DOC NYC, and Amsterdam IDFA Film Festivals, among others. It is an official selection of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary is directed by Bianca Stigter, co-produced by Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen, and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It will have its theatrical release in spring 2022.
Glenn’s first book, Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music (Knopf, 2007; Vintage Books, 2008), was hailed by the New York Times as “a thoughtful and fluid meditation” and by Newsday as “the book of a lifetime.” Practicing was featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” with Scott Simon, “To the Best of our Knowledge,” WNYC’s “Leonard Lopate Show,” and elsewhere. Practicing has been translated into Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
From 2008-2015, he hosted “Conversations on Practice,” about the writing process and the writer’s life. Guests included Patti Smith, Jennifer Eagan, Martin Amis, Adam Gopnik, and many others.
He is a graduate of the New England Conservatory-Tufts University double degree program and holds a PhD from Stanford University in German studies and comparative literature. He has taught at Stanford University, San Francisco State University, California College of the Arts, and is currently on the faculty of The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University.
A 2016-2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and a 2019-2021 Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, in Orange County, CA, Glenn has appeared as a guest speaker across the U.S. and internationally. He lives in New York City.
Convener:
Robert P. Ericksen, Mayer Chair of Holocaust History, Emeritus, PLU
Bio:
Robert P. Ericksen is the author of Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2012) and Theologians under Hitler (Yale, 1985), which appeared in German, Dutch, and Japanese translation and was turned into a documentary film of the same name (Vitalvisuals.com, 2005). He is co-editor with Susannah Heschel of Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Fortress, 1999) and has served on the Board of Editors of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte since this journal was founded in 1988. He also is Chair of the Committee on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Thursday, October 27
Presentation Title:
“Prewar Jewish Life in Poland: The Best of Times and the Worst of Times”
Who:
Sheryl Ochayon, Project Director, Echoes and Reflections, International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem
Bio:
Sheryl Silver Ochayon holds a JD from Harvard Law School and a BA in History from the State University of New York at Binghamton. After working for many years as an attorney, she reinvented herself as a Holocaust educator, beginning by guiding in the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. She spent seven years working in Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies’ Educational Technologies Department, where she developed online courses taken by students all over the world, edited and contributed to the online e-newsletter, and created educational videos for the Holocaust Education Video Toolbox. Sheryl has represented Yad Vashem in different contexts both in the US and in Israel, speaking at seminars, international conferences and at the United Nations. Sheryl is currently Yad Vashem’s Program Director for Echoes & Reflections, a program that empowers American middle and high school educators to teach the Holocaust. Echoes combines the resources and expertise of three world leaders in education – the ADL, USC Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem.
Convener:
Beth Griech-Polelle, Associate Professor of Holocaust History and Kurt Mayer Chair of Holocaust Studies, PLU
Bio:
Beth A. Griech-Polelle, the Kurt Mayer Chair of Holocaust History, earned her bachelor’s degree at Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her doctoral advisor was Professor Omer Bartov. She is the author of Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (Yale University Press, 2002).
She is the co-editor with Dr. Christina Guenther of the book, Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008) and she is the editor of The Nuremberg Trials and Their Policy Consequences Today (NOMOS Verlag, Baden-Baden, Germany, 2008). In addition, she is the author of many chapters in books and numerous book reviews. She is currently under contract with Bloomsbury Academic Press, London, UK to write a textbook on antisemitism and the Holocaust.
She has presented papers at conferences all over the world, including at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel, the Belgian Academy of Rome, Rome, Italy, and The German Historical Institute in London, UK. She has participated in scholars’ workshops and seminars at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has given lectures in various venues including the Toronto Holocaust Education Week and at many synagogues. She is dedicated to educating the general public and has given lectures at historical societies, local high schools and junior highs, and at professional days for public school teachers. In addition to her public speaking, Dr. Griech-Polelle is an editor of the online journal, Contemporary Church History Quarterly and she is currently serving as guest editor of the Journal of Jesuit Studies special edition on Jesuits and communism.
Introduction:
Natalie Mayer
Presentation Title:
“Witnessing Memory, Trauma, and Survival: Lessons from Molly Applebaum’s Testimonies in Buried Words”
Who:
Sarah Calvin-Stupfel ’23, Mayer Summer Scholar, PLU
Bio:
Sarah Calvin-Stupfel, is majoring in Global Studies, Hispanic and Latino Studies, and Gender, Sexuality and Race Studies and minoring in History and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Their summer research was centered around the experience and narrative testimonies of Molly Applebaum, a Polish-Canadian Holocaust survivor whose diary and memoir were published in 2017 by the Azrieli Foundation in Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum. Contextualizing Molly’s experience within the broader history of the Holocaust as it happened in Poland, Sarah’s project explores the testimonial genres of diary and memoir. They take a close look at the similarities and significant differences between Molly’s two testimonies, asking critical questions about why testimonies might change over time, and about our roles and responsibilities as witnesses to survivor testimony.
Presentation Title:
“American Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution of European Jews”
Who:
Sage Warner ’24, Mayer Summer Scholar, PLU
Bio:
Sage Warner is double-majoring in History and Religion and is minoring in Critical Race Studies. She is currently participating in the Oxford IHON program and will be presenting her research which examined the relationship between Jewish Americans and the Holocaust, with a particular focus on what American Rabbis and the Jewish members of the film industry were sharing with their audiences. Her work included an examination of these leaders’ involvement with politics and how they engaged with American culture as a whole.
Convener:
Rona Kaufman, Associate Professor of English, Director of First Year Experience, and Director of the Writing Center, PLU
Bio:
Rona Kaufman is Associate Professor of English, Director of the First-Year Experience Program, and Director of the Writing Center at Pacific Lutheran University. Her areas of expertise include writing studies, literacy, creative nonfiction, and the English Language. She won a Faculty Excellence Award in Mentoring in 2016-2017 from PLU and the Graves Award in the Humanities in 2008. With Dr. Giovanna Urdangarain, she is working on a project about the Jewish diaspora in Uruguay, which includes gathering testimony from Jewish refugees and their children. Rona is also writing a series of essays about marriage, motherhood, and migration.
Convener:
Lisa Marcus, Professor of English, Director of Holocaust & Genocide Studies, PLU
Bio:
Lisa Marcus is Professor of English and a founding member of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at PLU, which she currently chairs. She also is a faculty affiliate in the Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies Program. At PLU she teaches a range of Holocaust related courses, such as The Holocaust in the American Literary Imagination, Anne Frank as Holocaust Icon, Sex, Gender, and Holocaust Literature, a senior seminar on History & Memory in US Slavery and Holocaust texts, and our foundational class, Introduction to Holocaust & Genocide Studies. She was recently selected to participate in the Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar on LGBT+ Histories of the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2021). Prior to that, she was a fellow at the 19th Annual Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization, The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, in 2014.
Presentation Title:
Polish Holocaust Survivor Stories
Who:
Dan Grunfeld, Author of “By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, A Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream”
Bio:
Dan Grunfeld is a former professional basketball player, an accomplished writer, and a proud graduate of Stanford University. An Academic All-American and All-Conference basketball selection at Stanford, Dan played professionally for eight seasons in top leagues around the world, including in Germany, Spain, and Israel. Dan’s writing has been published more than 40 times in media outlets such as Sports Illustrated, The Jerusalem Post, and NBC News. Dan earned his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2017 and lives with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works in venture capital.
Presentation Title:
Polish Holocaust Survivor Stories
Who:
Matthew Erlich, 1st generation survivor who will be sharing his mother’s story of survival in Auschwitz. Mr. Erlich is part of the Holocaust Center Speakers Bureau.
Convener:
Dee Simon, Baral Family CEO at the Holocaust Center for Humanity, Seattle, Washington
Bio:
Dee Simon, is the Baral Family CEO of the Holocaust Center for Humanity. A graduate of the University of Southern California’s business school, she has held positions with major corporations in the finance field and as a business consultant.
Dee has been working with the Holocaust Center for over 21 years. First as a volunteer, then a board member, followed by four terms as President of the Board. She joined the staff as Co‐Executive Director in 2006 becoming the Executive Director in 2012.
Dee serves on the board of the international Association of Holocaust Organizations.
Friday, October 28
Presentation Title:
“The Voice of Child Holocaust Survivors and the Politics of the Memorialization of the Holocaust”
Who:
Joanna Michlic, Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London
Bio:
Joanna Michilic is a social and cultural historian, and founder and first Director of HBI (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) Project on Families, Children, and the Holocaust at Brandeis University. Currently, she is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the UCL Centre for the Study of Collective Violence, the Holocaust and Genocide, UCL Institute for Advances Studies.
This January she will begin her appointment as a Hedda Andersson Visiting Full Professor in Holocaust and Contemporary History at Lund University. She is a recipient of many prestigious academic awards and fellowships, most recently Gerda Henkel Fellowship, 2017 – 2021. She is also a Co-Editor in Chief of Genealogy Journal. Her research focuses on social and cultural history of Poland and East European Jews, the Holocaust and its memory in Europe, East European Jewish childhood, antisemitism and nationalism in Europe and European Jewish heritage and education for civil society and against racism and antisemitism. She has written and co-written many publications, including: Neighbors Respond: The Controversy about Jedwabne, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, and Jewish Family 1939 –Present: History, Representation, and Memory. Her forthcoming new book on child Holocaust survivors from Poland will appear in English and German translation.
Convener:
Michael Artime, Assistant Professor & Department Chair, Political Science, PLU.
Bio:
Michael Artime, Assistant Professor & Department Chair, Political
Science, PLU. Michael has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University
of Missouri-St. Louis and is interested in the intersections between new
media and political behavior, voting and elections, and the institutions of
American government.
Presentation Title:
The Jewish Community in Poland: Contemporary Jewish-Polish Relations
Who:
Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, Beit Polska and Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland
Bio:
I have devoted myself to the revival and flourishing of congregations around the world, most recently Beit Polska, the umbrella organization of ten Progressive communities that grew out of Beit Warszawa in post-Communist Poland. In America, we are supported by Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland (JewishRenewalInPoland.org) and the World/European for Progressive Judaism.
My intensified engagement with out-of-way congregations began when I travelled to a community founded in the 1640s in Parimaribo, Suriname. Plans are afoot for a trip to Suriname, Curacao and Cuba.
For the last four years, I have served as spiritual counselor for a Jewish-inspired palliative and hospice center, Skirball Hospice. My work focuses on offering comfort and insight to people. I also frequently help patients develop life summary videos and ethical wills. The Skirball work is spiritually rewarding engagement.
Currently, I am assisting Rabbi Michael Roth in an experiment to revive Congregation Beth Ohr in Studio City. I am joined by Rabbi Robin Podolsky and Dr. Muriel Dance. We are having a ball.
Earlier, I served for 19 years as Chaplain and Hillel Rabbi for The Claremont Colleges. I received my smicha (ordination) from Hebrew Union College specializing in Cairo Genizah documents in Judeo-Arabic. I have studied the history of the Holocaust at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and also Higher Education at The Claremont Graduate University. From 1988 to 1990 I worked as a Mandel Jerusalem Fellow. I did my undergraduate work at Occidental College. I am the founder and spiritual leader of the Mifgash (HaMifgash), a gathering of adult learners who pursue Jewish learning and seek to apply it to the pressing issues of the day.
You’ll find a special section here with lecture and multimedia topics. I would enjoy an invitation from your community to teach and engage with your members. I hope you will take a moment to learn about potential topics for your synagogue, university class, or vacation learning community.
Presentation Title:
“Holocaust Survivors in postwar Poland”
Who:
Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Associate Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University
Bio:
Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, a native of Kraków, Poland, joined School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies in 2011. She is also affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies and the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Her research focuses on Polish-Jewish relations, antisemitism, and ethnic violence in Poland and in Polish-Jewish diaspora after the Holocaust. She teaches courses on the Holocaust, Modern Jewish History, East European Jewish History, History of Antisemitism, Poland in WWII, and Western Civilization, among others.
She is an author of two books on postwar Polish-Jewish history. Her recent publication, “Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia in 1944-1948” (Cambridge University Press, 2014), is a comparative study of the non-Jewish/Jewish relations in Poland and Slovakia after the Second World War. The book was the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award Finalist (2nd place) and a recipient of the 2015 Barbara Heldt Prize Honorable Mention. Her first book “Pogrom Żydów w Krakowie 11 sierpnia 1945 r,” a case study of the pogrom in Kraków in August 1945, was based on her awarded MA thesis and published by the Jewish Historical Institute in Polish in 2000.
She is a recipient of the 2016 Shofar Zakhor Award from the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors’ Association for “exhibiting and carrying the work of Holocaust education, Holocaust remembrance, and community interaction.” She has served as director for Poland for John J. Hartman’s non-profit Foundation of Remembrance and Reconciliation for the restoration of Jewish heritage in Poland. She has also received numerous grants and fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the YIVO Institute, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in New York, among others.
She currently works on the social history of the global postwar displacement of Polish Catholics and Polish Jews in the first twenty years after World War II (1945-1965).
Presentation Title:
“Navigating Difficult Histories in Polish Museums”
Who:
Erica Lehrer, Associate Professor of History and Sociology/Anthropology at Concordia University, Canada Research Chair in Museum and Heritage Studies, and Director of the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab at Concordia University
Bio:
Erica Lehrer is an anthropologist, curator, and academic specializing in post-Holocaust Jewish culture, museum studies, ethnography, and public scholarship. She is Associate Professor of History and Sociology/Anthropology at Concordia University, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Museum and Heritage Studies and serves as director of the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab at Concordia University.
Convener:
Rabbi Bruce Kadden, Lecturer in Judaism, PLU
Bio:
Bruce Kadden is a retired rabbi of Temple Beth El in Tacoma where he taught Judaism. He is the co-author, along with his wife Barbara, of Teaching Mitzvot: Concepts, Values and Activities; Teaching Tefilah: Insights and Activities on Prayer; and Teaching Jewish Life Cycle: Traditions and Activities. He has written articles for the website interfaithfamily.com, including, “Whose Wedding is it Anyway?” “Interfaith and Interfaithless Marriages”; “Why January 1 is Special: Even Jesus was Circumcised on the Eighth Day”; “What Jews and Christians Should Know About Each Other: An Important Primer on the Two Religions”; and “A Christian’s Guide to Passover.”
Presentation Title:
Commentary on “Raise the Roof“ film
Who:
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. She served as the Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Bio:
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is a scholar of Performance and Jewish Studies and a museum professional. Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, she is best known for her interdisciplinary contributions to Jewish studies and to the theory and history of museums, tourism, and heritage. She is currently Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition and Advisor to the Director at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Convener:
Paul Regelbrugge, Director of Education, Holocaust Center for Humanity, Seattle Washington
Bio:
Paul Regelbrugge is the Director of Education at the Holocaust Center for Humanity. Previously, he was an attorney before teaching in Chicago, Buffalo, and Spokane and Kent, Washington. Paul has received degrees from Kalamazoo College, University of Detroit Mercy and Michigan State University College of Law, and his teaching certificate from Northwestern University. He is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow, a Powell Teacher Fellow, and an Alfred Lerner Fellow. He is also the author of The Yellow Star House: The Remarkable Story of One Boy’s Survival in a Protected House in Hungary (Lulu, 2019).
