The mission of this center is to provide programs and resources in order to remember the victims and the lives of their families,to educate the generations to
come about the ramification of prejudice, racism, anti-Semitism and stereotyping in any society, and to encourage an awareness of the value of diversity in a pluralistic society.
The Annual Holocaust Freedom Seder
Sunday, March 24th, 2013
MOTYL Chamber Ensemble
Concert Series
May 16, 2010, 1:00pm
The Art of Samuel Bak
Seminar and Exhibition Opening
March 10, 2011
10:00am - 7:30pm
Featuring lectures by
Dr. Lawrence L. Langer and
Dr. Gary Phillips
Workshop by:
Facing History and Ourselves
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The Strange Case of Edgardo Mortara
Lecturer:
Rabbi Dr. Charles G. Agin
April 17, 2011 at 1:00 PM
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The Miracle and Power of The Pen
YOM HASHOAH GUEST LECTURER
Ernest W. Michel, Author and Lecturer, Auschwitz Number 104995
May 1, 2011 at 1:00 PM
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SONG OF LIFE
March 13, 2011 at 1 PM
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The Annual Holocaust Freedom Seder
April 10, 2011 at 12:30
at the Student Union Building
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Armenian Cultural Awareness Weekend
May 13-15, 2011
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Lazar Kaganovich, the Wolf of the Kremlin, Stalin's Anti-Semite, My Uncle: A Family Story
Lecturer: Stuart Kahan
Sunday, December 5, 2010
1:00 PM
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An Orthodox Jewish Kibbutz in Northern Ireland: A Tale of the Kindertransport
Lecturer: Robert Sugar
Sunday, October 24, 2010
1:00pm More info
Abraham's Children
October 27, 2010,
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
To RSVP and additional information Please call 718.281.5770
The Annual Queens Borough-Wide Kristallnacht Commemoration
Sunday, November 7, 1:00 PM
At the Student Union Building
RSVP 718.281.5770 More info
Our Survivors, Our Authors
Join Us for a Presentation and Discussion!
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
1:00 PM More information
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness
Presenter:
Bonny V. Fetterman
Monday, November 15,
1:00 PM More info
“Samuel Bak on Time, Tradition and Tikkun Olam”
Lecture by Ayala Tamir
May 2, 2010, 10:30am
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“No One Ever Died Illegally in Auschwitz: The Nazi Obsession with Legalizing the Holocaust”
Dr. Harry Reicher
April 25, 2010, 1:00pm
The Nazi Holocaust represented the ultimate in sheer, brutal lawlessness. Yet the Nazi regime in Germany, went to extraordinary lengths to legalize what it was doing, thereby creating the oxymoron, pseudo-legal terror. This presentation will examine the perversion of the country’s legal system, in both its legislative and judicial aspects, and the conversion of both into savage instruments designed to discriminate against, ostracize, dehumanize, and ultimately eliminate certain classes of people, Jews first and foremost. This is a little-known dimension of the Holocaust, one that added another weapon to the armory trained by the Nazis against their victims, and that prompted the court in the trial of the Nazi lawyers and judges at Nuremberg to summarize, very powerfully: “The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.”
Yom Hashoah
Lecture Series
"Contemporary Genocidal Anti-Semitism in a Time of Silence"
Dr. Charles Asher Small
April 11, 2010, 10:00am
Annual Holocaust
Freedom Seder
March 21, 2010, 12pm
In 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, a United States Army chaplain assigned to the U.S. Third Army, Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner, and Yosef Dov Sheinson, a survivor of four years in a concentration camp, sought to create a Seder to celebrate the first Passover since the end of the war at one of the Displaced Persons (DP) camps near Munich. It was a most difficult undertaking.
How do you bring together the Jewish community that had almost been brought to the point of extinction by Hitler and his murderous henchmen and conduct a service celebrating a tradition of freedom centuries old?
How do you revive the spirit of a dispirited people?
Program to include, Cantor Susan Agin, Rabbi Charles Agin, Steve Berger, Holocaust survivor who assisted in printing of the Holocaust Hagaddah, Anita Weisbord, Holocaust survivor on Kindertransport.
"Non-European Jews During the Holocaust: The Long Reach of the Nazis"
Lecture by Dr. Mitchell Serels
March 14, 2010, 1:00pm
While most historians concentrate their research on the Holocaust in Europe, a long shadow was cast by the Nazi regime over North Africa, Japanese held areas in Asia, work camps and in Tunisia and Libya and non-European Jewish residing in France. Rabbi Dr. Serels has written extensively on the Jews communities of North Africa as well as their status in World War II and is known as author of the Sephardim and the Holocaust. He is a well-known contributor of research to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World.
“Anti-Semitism and Other Security Threats to the Jewish Community in the United States.”
February 7, 2010 1pm
Dr. Joshua Gleis
"Genocide Among the Flowers:Seymour Kaftan's Ponary Paintings"
Exhibition Opening Reception March 16,2010, 7:00pm.
RSVP: 718.281.5770 Exhibit to run through June 15,2010
This exhibit tells the story of Vilnius' Jews starting with the Nazi invasion, and including the Ponary tragedy. It does so through the visual images recorded by Seymour Kaftan—born Szepsel Kaftanjski—in 26 oil paintings. A Holocaust survivor—he was 15 years old when the Nazis invaded his hometown—Kaftan documented his personal ordeal, depicting the horrors of Nazi brutality, the loss of his entire family, and his own survival. Kaftan, like so many other survivors, did not share his horrible experiences even with his immediate family. Then, in the 1960's, without any prompting, he began to pour out his memories on canvas. Basically self taught in the use of oil, acrylic, copper and sheet metals, Kaftan later studied fine art at the City University of New York. He signed his work using his Yiddish name "Szepsel." Convinced that his English was poor, Kaftan, with the help of a friend whose English he judged to be better than his own, saw to it that short texts would accompany each of the paintings, helping to illuminate his artwork.
Kaftan's unique graphic testimony is complemented by black-and-white images of the Ponary grounds as well as texts from the Ponary Diary by Kazimierz Sakowicz. Sakowicz was a Pole who lived together with his wife in a frame cottage in Ponary's woods, next to the murder grounds, becoming an eyewitness to the atrocities. His diary, originally written in Polish, "is a unique document, without parallel in the chronicles of the Holocaust. It stands as a bystander's view of the activities of the Nazi extermination machine" (Yitzhak Arad in the "Preface" to the Diary) in Ponary, leaving a key testimony against the Nazi cover up that attempted to hide the crimes committed there.