Lecturer: Robert Sugar
Sunday, October 24, 2010 1:00pm
In the springof 1939, the Jewish community of Belfast, Northern Ireland leased an abandoned farm for twenty years that was to serve as both a training farm and refuge for Zionist pioneers (halutzim) from Germany and Austria. That May, thirty young men and women of the orthodox Bachad movement arrived to begin their training as pioneers headed for Palestine. The next group to arrive that summer was thirty children of the Kindertransport. By the beginning of the war, with the arrival of twenty older refugees, the farm was a full-fledge community of eighty. It was renamed the Refugee Settlement Farm, Millisle, in Northern Ireland. Located on seventy acres, the farm became a success.
Among the children on the Kindertransport was eight-year-old Robert Sugar from Vienna. Initially placed in the Belfast Jewish Refugee Hostel, he was shortly transferred to the Millisle Refugee Farm on the seacoast of County Down. He attended school in Millisle and in his spare time worked in the fields. Robert would go on to win a scholarship at a prestigious Grammar School. This experience in this self-sustaining Jewish farming village, the separation from his family, and his nine years as a member of the Millisle Farm formed his future and presents a unique and compelling story.
Robert Sugar has served as a graphic artist and book designer in leading New York publishing houses. He leads his own design studio, Book-works. He has written extensively in designing educational media for programs in Jewish history.
Lecturer: Stuart Kahan, Former U.S. Member Central Intelligence Agency
Sunday, December 5, 2010 1:00 PM
This is a family story of Stuart Kahan and his uncle Lazar Kaganovich, vice premier under Joseph Stalin. Kahan's Aunt Rosa was married to Stalin and raised his daughter, Svetlana. Another uncle was Commissar of Aviation. Uncle Lazar, as Kahan calls him, was second-in-command to Stalin, orchestrated the purges that caused the deaths of 20 million, built the famed Moscow subway, created the KGB, and was the only Jew in the hierarchy and the most anti–Semitic one of all.
Stuart Kahan traveled to Russia with his father in the 1980s and spoke at great length with his infamous uncle. He was subsequently tossed out of the county and listed as persona non-grata. Kahan details why his Uncle Lazar, Stalin's second-in-command, was so anti-Semitic and what he thought of the Holocaust. This provides a rare glimpse into the anti-Semitic terror brought to bear by Stalin.
Mr. Kahan has been a journalist for forty-nine years including writing for The New York Times and the Philadelphia Bulletin, as well as being editor-in-chief at McGraw-Hill and business editor at Barron's Educational Services. He holds degrees from the Pennsylvania State University and Oxford University. He is the author of sixteen books and specializes in writing about financial services, wealth management and financial, estate, and retirement planning.
Please RSVP at (718) 281-5770.
Lecturer: Steve Berger
There is a very moving Yiddish song entitled "Where Shall I Go"? which became all the more poignant after World War II when hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors roamed Europe or temporarily resided in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps wrestling with this very question. There was no answer. Home appeared not to be an option as in too may cases it no longer existed. And so began a migration of survivors seeking a new home. The U.S. was one answer; to many others, Palestine was the location of choice. Those survivors who selected Palestine (it was not as yet referred to as Israel), undertook a journey that allowed them to escape from the ravages of the Holocaust only to be faced with the harsh immigration restrictions of the British White Paper.
Steve Berger, a slave laborer from Hungary, became an integral part of a group of dynamic and committed men and women not defeated by the Holocaust and ready to finally bring the remnants of the Jewish people to their own country. With military precision these men and women crisscrossed the world marshalling both human and material resources to bring those who had survived the inferno of the Holocaust and now resided in DP camps to "the promised land." This major operation known as the "Bricha" was designed to put pressure on the British and the world, to openup Palestine, and return the Jews to their homeland.
Now a resident of Queens and a volunteer at the Kupferberg Holocaust Center, Steve Berger relates the story of the Bricha and the clandestine operations that transpired to give the survivors of Europe a free nation.
"Samuel Bak on Time, Tradition and Tikkun Olam"May 2, 2010, 10:30am
Lecture by Ayala Tamir
April 25, 2010, 1:00pm
Lecture by Dr. Harry Reicher
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.”
April 11, 2010, 10:00am
Lecture by
Dr. Charles Asher Small
Dr. Charles Asher Small, Director and Founder of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA) will speak about the Revolutionary Iranian Regime, Hamas and Hezbollah and the silence in the United States.
February 7, 2010 1pm
Lecture by Dr. Joshua Gleis
March 14, 2010, 1:00pm
Lecture by Dr. Mitchell Serels
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.
Sunday, December 6, 2009 at 1 PM
“You will meet people who think like you do,” states the brochure distributed by Camp Siegfried, one of the many summer camps created by the Nazi party. While this was a typical summer camp run by the Nazis, it stands out for the uniqueness of its location YAPHANK, LONG ISLAND!
Established by the Nazi-American Bund to spread the word of Nazism in the United States, the camp attracted a wide following of pro-Nazi Americans. On summer weekends as the Long Island Railroad pulled into the Yaphank station, they were greeted by over 40,000 such comrades who marched up the Nazi-named streets of the camp, chanting the Horst Wessel Lie with the chilling words
When Jewish blood drips from the knife
Then will the German people prosper
Coupled with this robust singing, these summer troopers would parade down the Nazi-named streets of the camp.
While it was short-lived, Camp Siegfried demonstrates the significant feeling of pro-Nazi America prior to the start of American involvement in the war.
Marvin D. Miller is an instructor of History at Suffolk Community College. His publications include, Wunderlich’s Salute, the Story of Camp Siegfried and Terminating the Socially Inadequate. He has also lectured on Holocaust Loot: Stolen Art and Bank Assets, The Spanish Civil War and Americans and the Armenian Genocide.
Friday, December 4, 2009 , 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Special Guest Speaker
Dr. Cynthia L. Kamikazi
Followed by Panel Discussion Including:
Galen D. Kirkland, Commissioner, NY State Division of Human Rights
Dr. Sarah Danielsson, Assistant Professor of History, QCC
Dr. Emily Tai, Associate Professor of History, QCC
Click Here for More Info