Speakers

Presentation Title:
“Who Will Write Our History?”

Who:
Director Roberta Grossman

Bio:
An award-winning filmmaker with a passion for history and social justice, Roberta Grossman has written, directed, and produced more than 40 hours of film and television. What sets her films apart are high production values, beautiful cinematic craftsmanship and inspiring protagonists. Grossman’s films tell stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in the name of justice. According to Grossman, “making a documentary is like pushing Sisyphus’ rock up a steep mountain. The only way to summit is to have a sense of personal responsibility to tell a story that would otherwise remain untold.”

Grossman wrote, produced, and directed Who Will Write Our History, about Emanuel Ringelblum and the secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, co-produced by Arte and NDR. Also in 2018, Grossman co-directed and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Seeing Allred, about women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. Seeing Allred premiered in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was described as “remarkably engaging (The New York Times), “utterly fascinating” (CNET) and “the perfect companion to the #MeToo movement (Variety). Grossman is currently producing All This Life: The Many Worlds of Roman Vishniac.

In 2014, Grossman directed Above and Beyond for producer Nancy Spielberg, about the American–Jewish WWII pilots who volunteered to fight for Israel in the 1948 War. That film won the audience award at more than 20 film festivals worldwide. Grossman’s 2012 Hava Nagila (The Movie), which used the song as a portal into 150 years of Jewish history, culture and spirituality, was the opening or closing night film at more than 30 film festivals. Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, Grossman’s 2008 film was shortlisted for an Academy Award, won audience awards at 13 film festivals, aired on PBS/Independent Lens and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy.

Grossman also produced Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning, which aired on PBS/American Masters in 2014, and executive produced On the Map in 2016 for director Dani Menkin. Grossman was the series producer and co-writer of 500 Nations, the eight-hour CBS series on Native Americans hosted by Kevin Costner. Her film Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action, aired on PBS in 2005.

Grossman is the co-founder with Lisa Thomas  of the non-profit production company Katahdin Productions. She is a three-time recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a panelist for the WGA Documentary Screenplay Awards. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, with a degree in honors in history, and she received an M.A. in film from the American Film Institute.

Moderator:
Robert P. Ericksen, Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies (emeritus)

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.

Presentation Title:
“Telling Their Own Stories: Jewish Victim Diaries and Archives in the Warsaw and Vilna Ghettos”

Who:
Dr. Amy Simon, William and Audrey Farber Family Endowed Chair in Holocaust Studies and European Jewish History

Bio:
Dr. Amy Simon holds the William and Audrey Farber Family Chair in Holocaust Studies and European Jewish History at Michigan State University. She teaches in James Madison College, the Department of History, and the Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel. She previously worked as a researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and regularly participates in workshops and conferences in the United States and Israel. Her work on Holocaust fiction, memoir, and diaries has appeared in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Jewish Historical Studies, and several edited volumes.

Presentation Title:
“Women in Resistance: Fierce Females – the Couriers”

Who:
Sheryl Ochayon, Yad Vashem, Israel, Echoes and Reflections Program

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.

Moderator:
Marit Trelstad, Professor of Constructive and Lutheran Theologies, Endowed Chair of Lutheran Studies, PLU

Bio:
Marit Trelstad is Professor of Constructive and Lutheran Theology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Her scholarly work combines feminist, process and Lutheran theologies and has focused on Christology, theological anthropology, the doctrine of God, and science and religion (including economics, geoengineering and ecology). As a contributor and editor, she published Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today (Fortress, 2006) and contributed to Transformative Lutheran Theologies (Fortress, 2010) and Lutherrenaissance: Past and Present (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015) along with several other journals and books.

Presentation Title:
Mayer Summer Research Fellow Presentation

Who:
Lottie Duran ’19

Majors: Politics & Government, Women’s & Gender Studies
Minor: Holocaust & Genocide Studies

Presentation Title:
Mayer Summer Research Fellow Presentation

Who:
Mathilde Magga

Majors:
Minors:

Moderator:
Natalie Mayer

Moderator:
Kirsten M. Christensen, Professor of German, PLU

Bio:
Kirsten M. Christensen earned her Ph.D. in Germanic Studies, with an emphasis on medieval and early modern literature and culture, from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998. Her research has focused on writings by medieval women mystics. In particular, she explores the often fraught relationships between women mystics and their male contemporaries to understand the ways gender relations impacted women’s theologies and religious communities.

Professor Christensen’s teaching interests include not only medieval and early modern literature, but also East German and post-Unification literature and film, and language pedagogy. Before coming to PLU, she taught at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Notre Dame. She is delighted to be part of PLU’s German program, which is large enough to offer a robust variety of courses to its majors, yet small enough to allow close collaboration and exploration between students and faculty. She is particularly grateful to be able to teach language and culture at PLU, whose commitment to global awareness and citizenship provides a deeply supportive environment for language students and faculty. ~Prism 2006

Moderator:
Lisa Marcus, Professor of English, PLU

Presentation Title:

Who:
Heather Klein, Yiddish Chanteuse and Cantorial Soloist

Bio:
American soprano and Yiddish chanteuse Heather Klein follows her passion of “painting pictures” with her voice – interpreting and inhabiting characters and bringing stories to life.

Heather is a classically trained soprano and performs Opera, Yiddish classical song, theater and folk music, as well as other styles. For the past decade, she has performed across the U.S., Canada and Europe, as a soloist and as part of various musical groups and opera companies.

Most recently Heather has worked with Sundance in Massachusetts, and New Music Group in New York City on a new Yiddish/English opera. She has also premiered the title roles in “Lilith the Night Demon” a modern Yiddish/English Opera on a west coast tour and at Ashkenaz, as well as the west coast premiere of Di Megile of Itsik Manger. She also premiered her other project: “Yiddish Spring” in honor of Yom HaShoah at the Contemporary Jewish Museum performing Yiddish songs with Veretski Pass, and working with her own Trio to expose a beautiful Yiddish song cycle: Mameloshn.

Klein premiered her new show about her grandmother’s immigrant journey called Shanghai Angel, written and composed by Klein and the music arranged by her collaborator Joshua Horowitz (Verestski Pass) The show premiered in February at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and is currently continuing performances. Most recently Heather performed in recital at YidStock this past summer with collaborator Joshua Horowitz at the Yiddish Book Center in New Amherst, Massachusetts.

Produced and researched, she has released two Yiddish musical albums, including, “Shifreles Portret: A Yiddish Art Song Project” with her “Inextinguishable Trio.” Some songs from the album are influenced by Klein’s recent residency in Budapest where she researched sheet music, collaborated in concert with Hungarian musicians and had her residency performance at the Balint Haz JCC and other venues throughout the country.

Heather performed Yiddish art song in New York City at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for many years in concert, and as a part of Sidney Krum Young Artist Series. Klein has been invited back to create her own program with colleagues. In addition, she played the role of Rosie in the world-premiere of “Ravensbruek Project,” a cabaret opera based on the Holocaust, before a sold-out theater in Boston.

Heather earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She most recently worked as a Cantorial Soloist and B’nei Mitzvah tutor at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, California and continues her cantorial work at Temple Sinai in Las Vegas where she also produces Yiddish Las Vegas; a Yiddish culture festival for the Las Vegas community.

—I have recorded two cd’s Mayn Yiddishe Velt and Shifreles Portret. All available online or through my website: Heatherklein.net

Presentation Title:
The Kalb Rescue Mission

Who:
Judith Cohen, Chief Acquisitions Curator
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Bio:
Judith Cohen is the Chief Acquisitions Curator of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is a graduate of Harvard University and received her MA from Brandeis. She originally came to the Holocaust Museum in 1995 to work on the exhibition “Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto” before moving to the Photo Archives where she served as director before becoming head of the curatorial acquisitions and reference branch. She has curated web exhibits and written and co-authored articles on the Museum’s collection entitled “Memento Mori: Photographs from the Grave,” “Three Approaches to Exploring the Höcker Album,” ”Jewish Ghetto Photographers,” “The Mantello Rescue Mission” and “Roman Vishniac: A Different Kind of Holocaust Photographer.”

Presentation Title:
“Hiding in Broad Daylight: Gender and Religion in the Story of a Dutch Rescuer”

Who:
Raymond C. Sun, Associate Professor of History at Washington State University (Pullman)

Bio:
Raymond C. Sun (“Ray”) is an associate professor in the Department of History at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. He received his BA in History with High Honors from Swarthmore College in 1982 and his PhD in modern German history from The Johns Hopkins University in 1992. His published scholarship includes work on German Catholicism, German war memory, and teaching about genocide. He is a former Chair of the History Department (2007-15) at WSU. In Spring 2018 Sun received the WSU Sahlin Award for Excellence in Instruction for his classes on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, comparative genocide, and the world wars. He is working to establish a Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at WSU. His current research is on female resistance and rescue in the Holocaust, including the subject of his presentation at this conference, Carla (Olman) Peperzak, a Dutch Jewish woman who as a teenager rescued @40 fellow Jews.

Presentation Title:
“Carla Peperzak and the Rescue of Jews in Holland”

Who:
Carla Peperzak

Bio:
Carla Olman Peperzak was born and raised in Amsterdam. She was sixteen
years old in 1940 when the nazies occupied The Netherlands. She is a Holocaust
survivor and persevered for three and a half years as an active resistance fighter in the Dutch Resistance. Primarily, Carla helped fellow Jews in hiding.

Carla and her husband, Paul (who she met after the war) lived all over the world. She moved to Spokane in 2004 following Paul’s death. During the last 10 years she has dedicated her life to educating people about the Holocaust. She is an official speaker for the Seattle based Holocaust Institute for Humanity. She was honored in 2015 by the state of Washington in Senate Resolution 8623 as a hero and a person who saved many lives.

Her memoir KEYS OF MY LIFE was published in 2018, and are available for
purchase.

Presentation Title:
“Quaker Relief and Rescue: Roswell and Marjorie McClelland’s Work in World War II Europe.”

Who:
Kelly Palmer, University of Tampa

Bio:
Kelly Palmer specializes in the history of modern Europe. She attended Michigan State University and her research and teaching interests include the history of France, the Holocaust and European postwar historical memory. Palmer is currently researching American intervention to rescue Jews during World War II through the lens of humanitarian Roswell McClelland, who represented the American Friends Service Committee and War Refugee Board in France and Switzerland. She teaches at the University of Tampa.

Moderator:
Heather Mathews, Chair & Associate Professor of Art & Design, PLU

Bio:
Heather joined the Department of Art and Design in 2007. She earned her B.A. in Art History and German from Hood College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.

Her specialization is the German art of the Cold War period, and she is interested in all aspects of German cultural and history. Her research and publications are focused on the role of the artist in public discourse in East and West Germany, as well as on the exhibition of contemporary art as a cultural and political force in the Cold War era and today. Her most recent work deals with contemporary art and cultural integration.

In addition to teaching on topics such as gender issues, identity, and memory in modern and contemporary art, Heather is Coordinator of the University Gallery (including the University Gallery Annex and the Karen Hille Phillips Gallery) and manages the University’s Permanent Art Collection.

Presentation Title:
“Jewish Rescuers of Jews in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and Chabannes”

Who:
Patrick Henry, Cushing Eells Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College

Bio:
Patrick Henry is Cushing Eells Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where he taught French and French literature from 1976-2002. He has published books on Voltaire, Camus, Montaigne, and La Princesse de Clèves. More recently, in 2007, he published “We Only Know Men:” The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (The Catholic University of America Press) which has been translated and published in France as La Montagne des Justes (Éditions Privat, 2010). In 2014, he published his edited volume, Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis (The Catholic University of America Press).

Presentation Title:
“Jewish Women in the Dutch Resistance”

Who:
Judith van Praag

Bio:
Writer/artist/performer Judith van Praag is a Second Generation Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands. She enjoys painting pictures with words and colors.

Before her immigration to the US in 1994, Judith worked as a theater designer for primarily immigrant theater companies. She created sets, costumes and props, visualizing stories of pretty much all minority groups, but her own. As the Arts & Lit writer to The International Examiner she covered the Asian American community in Seattle.

Judith is the author of “Creative Acts of Healing: after a baby dies” (Paseo Press 1999). At the time of publication, Ms. M. Susan, administrator to the special department for WWII Prosecuted at the Netherlands Consulate in Los Angeles, called the book a typical 2G story.

Judith’s column about loss, grief and recovery, “Eens een moeder, altijd een moeder,” (Once a mother, always a mother) was published by Dutch Internet magazine Ouders Online and continues to be read by young Dutch parents worldwide.

Growing up in isolation in the Dutch countryside, Judith often heard her father say, “Everyone is gone.” She took his remark quite literally. Looking for relatives seemed futile. Thanks to the Internet, email, and genealogical websites she has discovered an ever-growing network of relatives. And after decades of focusing on other people’s stories, she’s finally finding the courage to address the interlocked history of her close and extended family.

Moderator:
Rebecca Wilkin, Associate Professor of French, PLU

Moderator:
Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Bio:
Christopher R. Browning was the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill until his retirement in May 2014. Before taking up this position in the fall of 1999, he taught for 25 years at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Browning received his B.A. degree from Oberlin College in 1967 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968 and 1975 respectively.  He is the author of eight books: The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (1978), Fateful Months:  Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (1985), Ordinary Men:  Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), The Path to Genocide (1992), Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (2000), Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (2003), and The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (2004), and Remembering Survival. Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (2010).  He is also co-editor of Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland (2007).

Browning has served as the J. B. and Maurice Shapiro Senior Scholar (1996) and Ina Levine Senior Scholar (2002-3) at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.  He has been a fellow of the Institutes for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and on the campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  He has also received Fulbright, Alexander von Humboldt, DAAD, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation fellowships.  He has delivered the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University (1999) and the George L. Mosse Lectures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2002), as well as the lectures of the Bertelsmann Visiting Professorship at Mansfield College, Oxford University (2007). He is a three-time recipient of the Jewish National Book Award—Holocaust Category, for Ordinary Men, The Origins of the Final Solution, and Remembering Survival.  For this last book he is also a recipient of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.  He was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.

Browning has served as an expert witness in “war crimes” trials in Australia, Canada, and Great Britain.  He has also served as an expert witness in two “Holocaust denial” cases:  the second Zündel trial in Toronto in 1988 and in David Irving’s libel suit against Deborah Libstadt in London in 2000.

Presentation Title:
“A little spark of light before their death…”: Organized Soccer as Resistance
during Nazi Terror

Who:
Kevin E. Simpson, Professor of Psychology, John Brown University

Bio:
Dr Kevin Simpson currently serves as professor of psychology at John Brown University (AR) where he teaches a wide range of courses in Social, Personality, and Abnormal Psychology including courses in the Psychology and History of the Holocaust, Sport and Exercise Psychology and the Psychology of Genius.

Prior to returning to his alma mater in northwest Arkansas, he taught for 12 years at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. He has been a visiting professor in two study abroad programs in London and Vienna and for the latter appointment, Simpson taught on the genocidal legacy of National Socialism in Austria.

Dr Simpson’s research centers on themes of perpetration and bystander factors, propaganda, and pedagogical innovations in the teaching of the psychology of the Holocaust.  He has been a research fellow three times at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (2009, 2010, 2019) and a fellow in the 2011 Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization with the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University (Illinois).

Dr Simpson has published and presented widely to academic and popular audiences and his academic work has taken him to many concentration camps and Holocaust memorial sites in Poland, Germany, Austria, Ukraine, and the former Czechoslovakia.

During the spring 2019 semester, Dr Simpson completed a Fulbright Fellowship to the Slovak Republic where he taught graduate courses on the Holocaust and sport psychology at Comenius University in Bratislava and assisted with the installation of a memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Zilina, Slovakia.

Presentation Title:
“Orchestrating Resistance: The Jüdischer Kulturbund, 1933-1941 ”

Who:
Lexi Jason, MA Holocaust Studies

Bio:
Lexi Jason is proud to return to her undergraduate alma mater, where she earned a BFA in acting/directing and a minor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2017. She recently graduated from Royal Holloway University of London, where she earned her master’s degree in Holocaust Studies. Currently, Lexi lives in New York City, where she organizes the Speakers Bureau and is a Museum Educator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. lexijason.com.

Presentation Title:
“What, Exactly, Is Holocaust Related Music”

Who:
Nick Strimple, Professor of Practice, Thornton School of Music
Affiliated Faculty, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California

Bio:
Nick Strimple was educated at Baylor University and the University of Southern California, where he is a member of the faculty at the USC Thornton School of Music and affiliated faculty in the Jewish Studies Program at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Since 1998 he has also served as Music Director of the Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale.

Dr. Strimple’s scholarly activities have focused on choral music and music related to the Holocaust. Author of two critically acclaimed books, Choral Music in the Twentieth Century and Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century, he has also written numerous articles and contributed chapters to four other books, including the Cambridge Companion to Choral Music and the multi-award-winning Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis.  He has lectured at Yale University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, National University of Ireland Maynooth, Baylor University, University of Minnesota, Oregon Bach Festival, Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies and Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, among others. He served as a consultant for the Holocaust documentaries As Seen Through Their Eyes and the Oscar-nominated Prisoner of Paradise; his own music was used in the documentary 100 Voices: A Journey Home, a film in which he also appeared.

An active composer, Nick Strimple has written in virtually all genres, receiving commissions from numerous organizations and performers including the Vienna International Organ Festival, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the London Youth Choir. His recordings of classical American and Jewish music appear on Naxos and other labels, including three of the Grammy-winning Milken Archive of Jewish Music in America series (music by Max Helfman, Judith Lang Zaimont and Morris Rauch). He also has considerable experience in popular music, having served as arranger or director for Frank Sinatra, Rod Stewart, Air Supply and other leading artists.

In addition to his extensive catalog of compositions and recordings, he has conducted some of the world’s leading ensembles, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Chorus and Orchestra of the Polish National Opera, London Voices, Prague Radio Choir, Oratorio Society of New York, Slovak Radio Orchestra, the Ernst Senff Chor (Berlin), the Ensemble Vocal D’Aquitaine (Bordeaux) and the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra; and served for over thirty years as Director of Music at Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church and Music Director of the internationally acclaimed Choral Society of Southern California.

Please go to <nickstrimple.com> for more information.

Presentation Title:
“Defiant Requiem Documentary”

Who:
Murry Sidlin, Defiant Requiem Foundation, Conductor

Bio:
Murry Sidlin began developing the film Defiant Requiem in 2006 after several years of researching the legacy of Terezin and its unique message of courage and hope during the Holocaust. Maestro Sidlin also created the live concert-drama performance, Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin in 2002, which has now been performed 44 times in locations such as New York, Jerusalem, Budapest, Washington, Berlin, Boston and Prague, among many other major cities.

The film had its premiere at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and has since been seen in New York and Los Angeles in one-week theater runs, as well as at film festivals in Atlanta, San Diego, San Antonio, St. Louis, Cleveland, Palm Springs, twice in Vancouver, Boulder, and was aired nationally on PBS, BBC4 in the UK, in Brazil and recently on French TV. The film was nominated for two Documentary Emmy Awards in 2014, one for best feature length documentary and for best writing.

Murry Sidlin began his career as assistant conductor at the Baltimore Symphony, and then became the resident conductor of the National Symphony in Washington, DC. Before joining the Oregon Symphony as resident conductor, he was Music Director of the New Haven and Long Beach orchestras. As a guest conductor he has led the Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and St. Louis Symphony Orchestras; and the Colorado, Honolulu, Houston, San Diego, and San Francisco Symphonies; among many others. For thirty-three summers, he was a resident artist and conducting teacher at the Aspen Music Festival. He is the former dean of the school of music at the Catholic University of America, and is still associated with the University as a teacher of advanced orchestral conducting and music of the Holocaust Era.

He largely devotes his time now to the various educational activities of The Defiant Requiem Foundation as its President and Creative Director.

Murry is privileged to serve with Foundation board chair, Stuart E. Eizenstat, who has dedicated years of service to providing belated justice to Holocaust survivors.

Murry Sidlin received the medal of St. Agnes from Cardinal Dominik Duka of Prague for his work in illuminating the Terezin Legacy in 2011, and the Medal of Valor from the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles in June 2013.

Moderator:
Edwin Powell, Professor of Music; Director of Bands, PLU

Presentation Title:
“Kaytek” A Little Girl from the Warsaw Ghetto who became a Polish Resistance Fighter and decorated war hero’

Who:
Dr. Janet Brill, Edna’s daughter-in-law and author

Born:
09/15/1957, New York City

Education:
BS, Biology, University of Miami
M.S. Dietetics and Nutrition, Florida International University
Ph.D. Exercise Science, University of Miami

Professional Experience:
Nationally recognized nutrition, health and fitness expert and published author Dr. Janet Brill specializes in cardiovascular disease prevention and has authored three books on the topic: Blood Pressure DOWN; Prevent a Second Heart Attack and Cholesterol Down. Dr. Janet is one of the few worldwide experts on the Mediterranean Diet, having been published extensively on the topic in both the scientific and lay press.

Community Service:
Dr. Janet is dedicated to her field and to the broader goal of educating the public on heart health. She was a member of the Go Red for Women Executive Leadership Team in Philadelphia and is a longtime member of the Circle of Red and Cor Vitae. She volunteers much of her time, expertise and funds in support of the American Heart Association.

Presentation Title:
“Kaytek” A Little Girl from the Warsaw Ghetto Who Became a Polish Resistance Fighter and Decorated War Hero

Who:
Sam Brill, born: 01/06/1958, Petach Tikvah, Israel

Personal: Married to Dr. Janet Brill, 35 years, 3 children: Rachel 31; Mia 30; Jason 23.

Education: BA, Political Science, Dickinson College

Professional Experience: Sam Brill began his career in real estate at an early age, learning how to build homes from his father. Harry Brill built over 2500 multi-family apartment homes and over 300 single family homes in the Lehigh Valley, PA. In 1984, Sam and his newlywed wife moved to Coral Springs, Florida, where he began his own construction firm called Classic Homes of South Florida, Inc. and proceeded to build more than 300 custom single family homes, over a span of twenty-seven years. Sam and his family relocated to Pennsylvania in 2010 to assist his father in managing the remaining business entities, while at the same time branching out into commercial and industrial property ventures.

Community Service: As the son of holocaust survivors, Sam has spent much of his time and energy speaking about his parents’ experience and supporting Jewish organizations around the world such as: AJWS, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, Jewish Federation and The Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz “Lohamei Haghetaot” (where his parents met and married).

Moderator:

Rona Kaufman, Associate Professor of English, PLU

Presentation Title:
“My Father, Martin Baral: A Boy from the Krakow Ghetto”

Who:
Steven Baral, Legacy Speaker with the Holocaust Center for Humanity
Speakers Bureau

Bio:
Steven Baral is a graduate of Harvard University and has attended Holocaust
education programs at the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle , Yad Vashem in Israel, and more. Steven lives in Seattle and is an active member of the Holocaust Center Speakers Bureau, along with being a Vice President of the Holocaust Center’s Board of Directors, a business owner, and a father of four. Steven received the Holocaust Center for Humanity’s Voices of Humanity Award for his service to the Center in 2016. Steven is also a member of the Executive Board of the American Society for Yad Vashem.

Moderator:
Dee Simon, Baral Family Executive Director, Holocaust Center for Humanity, Seattle, Washington

Bio:
Dee Simon, is the Baral Family Executive Director 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.