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Millersville’s University’s 40th Holocaust Conference will be held in April. This year’s theme is The Children of Survivors of the Holocaust and Genocide: Remembrance and Reflection, and will feature Yossi Klein Halevi, a prominent author, journalist, and son of a Holocaust survivor as the speaker for the Alan and Linda Loss Keynote Lecture on April 1.
Halevi’s talk, “The Commitments of the Son of a Survivor: How the Holocaust Has Shaped My Moral, Political and Spiritual Commitments,” will be held at the Winter Visual Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, April 1, at 7 p.m. and is free to attend.
This year’s conference takes a deeper dive into the question of how children of survivors, a unique type of witness, perceive their role and responsibility of preserving true testimony about the destruction of the Jewish people while processing the trauma experienced by their families. Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Dr. Ieva Zake says, “Klein Halevi’s perspective is an incredibly valuable source for a better understanding of how the shadow of the atrocity of the Holocaust continues to have a lasting impact on the Jewish experience worldwide.”
A screening of the movie “Kaddish” which is based on the story of Yossi Klein Halevi and his father, Zoltan, will be held at the Ware Center in downtown Lancaster on April 22 at 7 p.m., with a preceding panel discussion beginning at 6:15 p.m. featuring Dr. Jack Fischel, Dr. Victoria Khiterer, Rabbi Jack Paskoff, Dr. Jeff Mufson, and MU student Julia Fallows, and a post-screening Q&A with the film’s director, Steven Brand. You can request complimentary tickets to view the documentary at artsmu.com or by calling 717-871-7600.
Assistant Director of Campus and Community Engagement of the MU Office of Visual & Performing Arts and co-chair of the conference, Barry Kornhauser, states that this event is crucial to preserving the history of the Holocaust. “There are now only 245,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust still alive, and that number is reducing rapidly with the median age of survivors being 86,” he shares. “The memory of this tragedy is now largely a second-hand one, passed down to the descendants of these survivors, 2nd and 3rd generations entrusted to help keep their stories alive so that those stories and their lessons are not lost to future generations.”
Dr. Victoria Khiterer, a history professor and co-chair for the conference, adds “The children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors often more openly talk about the horrible experiences of their parents and grandparents during the Holocaust than the survivors themselves. Holocaust survivors were deeply traumatized by their experience and, for many of them, it took a long time to recover enough to be able to speak about it. It was especially difficult for Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, because society was not prepared to listen to them during the war and in the first post-war years.”
More information is available on the Conference on the Holocaust & Genocide webpage.
