The online commemoration will include formal remarks, a panel discussion about the symbolism of Auschwitz with Prof. Adam Mendelsohn, Jakub Nowakowski and Iris Singer, moderated by Mary Klug, with a virtual performance by Zola Shuman.

About the panelists:

Prof. Adam Mendelsohn is the director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town. He is also an associate professor and Head of the Department of Historical Studies. He is the author of Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army (2022) and The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (2014), and co-editor of Jews and the Civil War: A Reader (with Jonathan D. Sarna, 2010), Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History (with Ava Kahn, 2014), and Yearning to Breathe Free: Jews in Gilded-Age America (with Jonathan D. Sarna, 2022). He has co-curated exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Centre for Jewish History, and is a former editor of the journal American Jewish History and currently co-editor of Jewish Historical Studies.

Jakub Nowakowski is the director of the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre. He was born and raised in Kazimierz, the former Jewish district of Kraków. Coming from a non-Jewish family that lived in Kazimierz for generations, from an early age he was compelled to research the history of his neighbourhood. In 2007 he graduated from the Department of Jewish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, writing a thesis on Jewish resistance in Kraków during the Holocaust. In 2005 Nowakowski joined the staff of the newly opened Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków. Nowakowski served as the director of the Galicia Jewish Museum for 13 year before becoming the director of the CTHGC.

Iris Singer is an Austrian filmmaker and activist who has been telling the story of the Holocaust and survivors of the Holocaust – as well as organising events and tours to remind young people of the importance of history, and the most devastating genocides of the 20th century. She was the producer of Facing Auschwitz, a documentary that follows the journey of four young Austrians on their journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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