The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre

Why Should We Care? The Holocaust and Public Humanities with Professor Björn Krondorfer
2023-04-27 20:00 - 22:00 UTC | Online
3rd session of The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry
“The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry” is an 8-part series that will engage with scholars and experts who grapple with themes related to Holocaust studies. The series will explore the multifaceted discipline of Holocaust Studies through different lenses. Our experts will challenge us to understand the causes, impacts, and legacies of the Holocaust.
Professor Bjorn Krondorfer will discuss his experiences with Public Humanities projects that help connect students, teachers and the general public to connect to the history and legacy of the Holocaust.
Prof. Krondorfer is Regents’ Professor and the Director of the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University. As Endowed Professor of Religious Studies, he also teaches in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies. His field of expertise is religion, gender, and culture, and (post-) Holocaust and reconciliation studies. His scholarship helped to define the field of Critical Men’s Studies in Religions. . He has curated the art exhibitions Wounded Landscapes (2014) and Echoes of Loss: Artistic Responses to Trauma (2018). In 2019, he has been awarded a one-month residential fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute on the theme of “truth and reconciliation.”
This programme is in partnership with Classrooms Without Borders, Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Generations of the Shoah, and Liberation75.
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Film Screening: Red Land
2023-05-07 15:00 - 17:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
A film by Maximiliano Hernando Bruno that concentrates on Istria after the armistice of 8 September 1943. Norma Cossetto emerges as a key figure – a young Istrian woman, daughter of a fascist official, student of the University of Padua, barbarically raped and murdered by Tito’s partisans – chosen for this brutal crime only because she was guilty of being Italian.
The film screening will be preceded by a virtual address by Dr Stefano Pilotto, Professor of International Relations at the MIB Trieste School of Management.
RSVP to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

Art workshop with Elias Mendel: Touching the Archive
2023-05-17 10:00 - 12:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
A creative engagement with your family stories
The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Sylt Foundation, and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung invite you to an interactive art workshop and memory discussion with artist Elias Mendel. The workshop will include a guided tour of his current exhibition, Letters to Yesterday – a collection of work that examines the artist’s German Jewish history through his interventions in an extensive family archive. This will be followed with the opportunity to explore your own family archive through a creative engagement with bought material.
Please bring a story, song, recipe or photo from your family – something that reminds you of ‘home’- to work with.
RSVP to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

International Museum Day 2023 tour of the JHGC permanent and temporary exhibitions
2023-05-18 12:30 - 14:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
In celebration of International Museum Day 2023, the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre is offering a free tour of our permanent and temporary exhibitions.
RSVP to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

“Holocaust Cinema: How ‘A Film Unfinished’ Questions Archival Footage” with Annette Insdorf
2023-05-18 20:00 - 22:00 | Online
4th programme in the series ‘The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry’
“The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry” is an 8 part series that will engage with scholars and experts who grapple with themes related to Holocaust studies. The series will explore the multifaceted discipline of Holocaust Studies through different lenses. Our experts will challenge us to understand the causes, impacts, and legacies of the Holocaust.
The growing genre of Holocaust Cinema includes films made by members of the third generation of survivors in Israel. Annette Insdorf will discuss two exemplary documentaries: “Numbered” (2012, Dana Doron & Uriel Sinai, Israel, 55 minutes) focuses on the tattoos of Auschwitz survivors – who view their numbers in unique ways – as well as the process of recording and representing survivors. “A Film Unfinished” is directed by Yael Hersonski (2010, Israel, 88 minutes). She juxtaposes archival footage of the Warsaw Ghetto – taken by Nazis throughout May 1942 – with a contemporary interrogation of whether images can be trusted.
Annette Insdorf is Professor of Film at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and Moderator of the popular “Reel Pieces” series at Manhattan’s 92Y, where she has interviewed almost 300 film celebrities. She is the author of the landmark study, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel); Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski; Francois Truffaut, a study of the French director’s work; Philip Kaufman, and Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has. Her latest book is Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes, currently in its fourth printing.
This programme is in partnership with Classrooms Without Borders, Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Generations of the Shoah, and Liberation75.
Click here to register.

Elias Mendel's "Letters to Yesterday"
2023-05-21 14:30 - 17:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
Join the JHGC and Sylt Foundation for a talk by Elias Mendel about his art and creative process, and a presentation of his artworks made throughout his residency with the Sylt Foundation in May 2023.
This collection of work examines the artist’s German Jewish history through his interventions in an extensive family archive. In recent years Elias and his father Gideon Mendel have become the custodians of a vast collection of documents, letters, objects, and photographs.
In response to the uncovering of his family history, Mendel embarked on a photographic interrogation of Germany’s Holocaust memorial culture. This journey through personal family history is multifaceted and tragic. It deals with the spaces in between: the silences, the complications, and the unspoken. This is a story of one family but is a universal tale, written in different languages, in various documents, across disparate continents and fractured peoples.
This archive traces the Mendel family history in Germany – from the 18th Century through to the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, bourgeois life in the Weimar Republic, the Holocaust – and then life in apartheid-era South Africa.
Elias Mendel is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across mediums of photography, animation, and drawing. His practice delves into identity, migration, and generational trauma, and emerges from his own personal family archive.
RSVP to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

Special Talking Memory programme marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
2023-05-21 20:00 - 22:00 | Online
The webinar will include a round table discussion about Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Israel with guest speakers: Tamar Herzberg from Yad Mordechai, Noam Leibman from Moreshet, and Anat Bratman-Elhalel from Ghetto Fighters’ House.
This will be followed by keynote speaker, Dr. Avinoam Patt discussing The Battle of Warsaw’s Jews: The Afterlife of the Revolt.
On April 23, 1943, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency delivered the news of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, relaying a report received in Stockholm the day before with the headline “Nazis Start Mass-Execution of Warsaw Jews on Passover; Victims Broadcast S.O.S.” The timing of the revolt, taking place in the spring of 1943, the deadliest year of WWII for European Jewry, influenced the manner in which it was reported, interpreted, and understood. Through an examination of the ways in which the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was reported in April and May of 1943, we can begin to understand how and why the event was transformed into both a symbol of Jewish resistance, Jewish sacrifice, and Jewish martyrdom during and after World War II. Soon after the revolt was suppressed in May 1943, representatives from the Jewish Labor Bund in New York and the Zionist movement in the Yishuv began to dispute both the heroes of the revolt and its true political and ideological significance. While historians have generally seen the politicisation of the revolt occurring after the war, with the first encounter of the survivors with their new homes, the polemics of 1944 between the Bund and the Labor Zionists (with the role of the Revisionists left out of early narratives) makes clear that within one year of the revolt, the battle for credit in Jewish public opinion meant the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was too great a symbol to relinquish to the political enemy. By the first anniversary after the Uprising (April 19, 1944) Jewish communities organized solemn commemorations in New York, London, Tel Aviv and elsewhere to recall Warsaw as a “fortress of freedom” and as the “Masada of Warsaw.” Responding to this politicization during the war, it was the surviving ghetto fighters themselves who would play a critical role in writing their own “three lines in history.”
This programme is in partnership with the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv, Moreshet Holocaust & Research Centre, Yad Mordechai Museum,
Classrooms Without Borders, Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, and the Rabin Chair Forum at George Washington University.
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Book Launch: Winnie & Nelson Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg
2023-05-25 18:30 - 20:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
Join the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Jonathan Ball Publishers, and Book Dealers for a launch of Jonny Steinberg’s newest book Winnie & Nelson Portrait of a Marriage. The scholar and award-winning author of Midlands and The Number, will be in conversation with Professor and researcher at WISER Hlonipha Mokoena, about his latest book.
Jonny Steinberg (born 22 March 1970) is a South African writer and scholar. He is the author of several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy. Two of them, Midlands (2002), about the murder of a white South African farmer, and The Number (2004), a biography of a prison gangster, won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. In 2013, Steinberg was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.
About the book: One of the most celebrated political leaders of our time, Nelson Mandela has been written about by many biographers and historians. But in one crucial area, his life remains largely untold: his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
During his years in prison, Nelson grew ever more in love with an idealised version of his wife, courting her in his letters as if they were young lovers frozen in time. But Winnie, every bit his political equal, found herself increasingly estranged from her jailed husband’s politics.
Behind his back, she was trying to orchestrate an armed seizure of power, a path he feared would lead to an endless war. Jonny Steinberg tells the tale of this unique marriage – its longings, its obsessions, its deceits – making South African history a page-turning political biography.
Winnie and Nelson is a modern epic in which trauma doesn’t affect just the couple at its centre, but an entire nation. It is also a Shakespearean drama in which bonds of love and commitment mingle with timeless questions of revolution, such as whether to seek retribution or a negotiated peace.
Steinberg reveals, with power and tender emotional insight, how far these forever-entwined leaders would go for each other and where they drew the line. For in the end, both knew theirs was not simply a marriage, but a struggle to define anti-apartheid policy itself.
RSVP to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

"I am Ella" Book Launch at Issy’s Café and Gifts
2023-05-28 12:00 - 14:00 | Issy’s Coffee & Gift Shop, 1 Duncombe Road, Forest Town, 2193, South Africa
The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Kwela Books, and Issy’s Coffee & Gifts invite you to join author Joanne Jowell in conversation with third generation Holocaust survivor Courtneigh Cloud Bernstein, in launching I am Ella.
Ella Blumenthal’s story of surviving the Holocaust and building a new life in faraway South Africa is a lesson in resilience, attitude and – perhaps unexpectedly – joy. From the dying embers of the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration camps; from Poland to Paris, Palestine and eventually Cape Town; from stateless refugee to community pillar, Ella’s 100 years of life have been nothing short of herculean. “I am Ella” is the staggering tale of a real-life superheroine.
Joanne Jowell is the author of the bestselling biographies, On the Other Side of Shame: An Extraordinary Account of Adoption and Reunion (Macmillan, 2008) and Zephany: Two mothers, one daughter. An astonishing true story (Tafelberg, 2019). She lives in Cape Town with her husband and three children. I am Ella: A remarkable story of survival, from Auschwitz to Africa is her seventh book.
RSVP to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

Reckonings | Film Screening
2023-05-30 18:30 - 20:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
It’s been said that it felt as if the souls of the six million who were murdered during the Holocaust were in the room with them when the meetings began. They met in secret to negotiate the unthinkable – compensation for the survivors of the largest mass genocide the world had ever known. Survivors were in urgent need of help, but how could reparations be determined for the unprecedented destruction of a people and atrocities suffered by millions? Reckonings explores this fascinating true story set in the aftermath of the Holocaust and leading to the ground-breaking Luxembourg Agreements of 1952.
Directed by award-winning filmmaker Roberta Grossman (Who Will Write Our History) and commissioned by the German Ministry of Finance and the Claims Conference, the film is the first documentary feature to chronicle the harrowing process of negotiating German reparations for the Jewish people. It takes viewers from the halls of power in Bonn, West Germany, where fierce debate raged over how to pay wartime debts, to the streets of Jerusalem, where horror about any talks with Germany led to violent protests and a mob storming the Knesset. It profiles Jewish and German leaders who risked their lives to meet in a hidden castle near the Hague to negotiate the impossible . It captures the anger on one side, the shame on the other, and the anguish for all as talks broke down and failure seemed imminent. And it honours the behind-the-scenes figures who forged ahead to continue negotiations, knowing the compensation would never be enough but hoping it could at least be an acknowledgement, a recognition and a step toward healing.
Filmed in six countries and featuring new interviews with Holocaust survivors, world-renowned scholars and dignitaries and the last surviving member of the negotiating delegations, Reckonings powerfully illustrates how political will and a moral imperative can join forces to bridge an impossible divide. By confronting the past, the German and Jewish leaders charted a better future for a desperate and traumatised people. Their actions led to the first time in history that individual victims of persecution received material compensation from the perpetrators.
RSVP to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

Members only walkabout of Eva’s Story: The Promise (closed event)
2023-06-04 15:00 - 17:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre invites you to an exclusive walkabout of our returning temporary exhibition Eva’s Story: The Promise led by JHGC Founder and Director, Tali Nates, with video testimony by Eva Schloss.
You are invited to explore the story of Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss and her brother Heinz and his artwork. Born in Vienna in 1929, Eva’s family fled after the Anschluss to Holland and after it too was occupied, went into hiding. During his time in hiding, Heinz quelled his fears by writing poetry and painting. They were all betrayed and deported to Auschwitz. Eva and her mother survived but her father and brother were killed just weeks before liberation.
Please note that this event is only open to JHGC Members, contact Shirley Sapire on shirley@jhbholocaust.co.za before the event to find out more about membership.
RSVP to shirley@jhbholocaust.co.za

Ethics and Education as Practices of Freedom with Professor Pedro Tabensky
2023-06-06 18:30 - 20:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
Adolf Eichmann was a good careerist and a terrible human being. He understood what was demanded of him to succeed professionally in his time. But as Hannah Arendt famously put it in her report on his trial in Jerusalem, he was thoughtless; the inner dialogue central to agential existence was largely absent from his life. Had he been born today, he may have become a successful CEO, banker, politician, or whatnot.
I will argue that mainstream educational institutions globally, and South Africa is no exception, are fostering the mass production of potential mini-Eichmanns. Why so? Because they are, for the most part, training individuals to cater to the needs of the status quo thoughtlessly. We must reconsider what it means to be truly educated. Following John Dewey and others, I will argue that education is the practice of freedom. Eichmann may have been good at making the trains run on time, but he lived a machine-like existence, lacking the reflective capacities that make us truly human.
Pedro Tabensky was born in Santiago, Chile, to refugee parents. His mother is a Holocaust survivor born in Hungary two weeks before the final stage of the final solution. His father, of Polish Jewish ancestry, is a refugee of the Chinese revolution. He has lived a peripatetic life since the age of three, ending up in South Africa in 2001 and meeting his wife, with whom he has two children. Tabensky is the founding director of the Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics (AGLE), Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University (South Africa). He is the author of Happiness: Personhood, Community, Purpose and of several articles and book chapters. Tabensky is also the editor of and contributor to Judging and Understanding: Essays on Free Will, Narrative, Meaning and the Ethical Limits of Condemnation; The Positive Function of Evil; and, coedited with Sally Matthews (his wife), Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions. He has a book, published in 2023 by Routledge, titled Fanon and Camus on the Algerian Question: An Ethics of Rebellion, and is commencing work on another book provisionally titled Ethics and Education as Practices of Freedom coming out with Lexington, probably in 2026.
RSVP: dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

Uncovering Memory - Book Launch
2023-06-11 12:00 - 14:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
Uncovering Memory: Filming in South Africa, Germany, Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina
How can we remember events that we have not experienced but are somehow intertwined in our DNA? How can we go back to actual places of memory and engage with the act of remembering? How can we make the invisible memory that is locked in space and place visible? Hence the tool, the camera. How can we use a still or moving image to translate our experiences, emotions and interactions with the past?
Uncovering Memory is about the role of film in memory and remembering, and how to uncover memories. It takes you on a journey of interactions with historical, political, cultural and personal memory.
Tanja Sakota is an artistic researcher, writer, filmmaker and Associate Professor at the School of Arts, Film and Television Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Terry Kurgan is an artist and a writer based in Johannesburg. Her book, Everyone is Present, was shortlisted for the Photo Arles Book Prize (in France, 2019), selected as a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards (New York, 2019) and won South Africa’s premier non-fiction literary prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award (2019).
RSVP to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

German Professionals and the Holocaust with Dr. William Frederick Meinecke Jr.
2023-06-15 20:00 - 21:30 | Online
5th programme in the series ‘The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry’:
German Professionals and the Holocaust with Dr. William Frederick Meinecke Jr.
“The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry” is an 8-part series that will engage with scholars and experts who grapple with themes related to Holocaust studies. The series will explore the multifaceted discipline of Holocaust Studies through different lenses. Our experts will challenge us to understand the causes, impacts, and legacies of the Holocaust.
The most significant perpetrators of the crimes committed during the Holocaust are well known: Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, as well as the SS, among others. But less known are the contributions of “ordinary” people—doctors, lawyers, teachers, civil servants, officers, and other professionals throughout German society—whose individual actions, when taken together, resulted in dire consequences. Put simply, the Holocaust could not have happened without them. This programme will explore the motives and contribution of ordinary German professionals and their contribution to the Nazi racial agenda and to Nazi crimes.
William Frederick Meinecke Jr holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland at College Park. The title of his dissertation was, Conflicting Loyalties: The Supreme Court in Weimar and Nazi Germany 1918-1945. In 1992, he joined the staff of the Wexner Learning Centre of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, working on a number of programmes and books. In June 2000 he joined the staff of Museum’s Education Division. For the last twenty years Meinecke Jr has worked with law enforcement officers, judges, prosecutors and attorneys in the Law Enforcement and Society: Lessons of the Holocaust training programme. He is currently working in the Museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education on programming for the Initiative on the Holocaust and Professional Leadership.
This programme is in partnership with Classrooms Without Borders, Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Generations of the Shoah, and Liberation75.
Register Here.

International Day Countering Hate Speech
2023-06-21 09:00 - 12:00 | Apartheid Museum, South Africa
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Wartime Commemoration of the Iasi Pogrom
2023-06-25 20:00 - 21:30 | Online
Wartime Commemoration of the Iasi Pogrom: Yitzhak Benditer’s Synagogue Memorial Plaques and The Iasi Pogrom
One of the Most Brutal Chapters in the History of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust
With H.E. Dr. Radu Ioanid, Ambassador of Romania in the State of Israel, Greta Barak, Ghetto Fighters House, and Lyonell Fliss, Holocaust child survivor of the Iasi pogrom.
The first programme in this series will focus on the pogrom of Iasi that took place on June 29, 1941. Greta Barak from the Ghetto Fighters’ House will present a memorial tablet from the museum’s archive that commemorates the names of the worshippers at one of the synagogues in Iasi (Jassy) who were massacred in the pogrom that took place there.
Dr. Radu Ioanid, Ambassador of Romania in the State of Israel, will give a presentation on why the Holocaust in Eastern Europe is still a forgotten one, including the pogrom in Iasi. As he will show, this pogrom was a major outbreak of violent anti-semitism, yet it was neither isolated nor fortuitous; rather, it was part of a long series of mass murders committed by Romanian fascists. The pogrom was organized by the SSI (the Romanian Intelligence Service) in co-ordination with the General Staff of the Romanian Army. At least 6,000 Jews were murdered in the town of Iasi and another 2,600 perished in two death trains. The perpetrators were Romanian soldiers, gendarmes and police mobs from Iasi, and German soldiers. The Iasi pogrom was followed by the systematic deportation and extermination of the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina, and by the extermination of Ukrainian Jews from Transnistria.
The programme will conclude with the personal testimony of Lyonell Fliss, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Johannesburg today. He was 6 years old at the time of the pogrom in Iasi. His relatives were murdered there and on the death trains. Last year, he received the highest medal of honour from the Romanian government.
The series is in participation with A.M.I.R. Organization, Romanian Cultural Institute in Tel Aviv, the Wilhelm Filderman Centre for the Study of Jewish History in Romania, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania, Classrooms Without Borders, Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, and the Rabin Chair Forum at George Washington University.
Register here.

Curating and Graphic Novels
2023-06-26 13:00 - 15:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
Curating and Graphic Novels:
Using approachable media in curating forced labour and the Holocaust with Professor Ruth Leiserowitz
The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and the German Historical Institute in Warsaw invite you to a talk by Professor Ruth Leiserowitz where she will explore the curation of the new Jewish Museum in the Kaliningrad Synagogue’s permanent exhibition. This will include examples of how the events of forced labour and the Holocaust could be transposed understandably through media such as graphic novels.
Professor Ruth Leiserowitz is Deputy Director at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and professor for East European History at the Humboldt University, Berlin. She is also the curator of the permanent exhibition in the new Jewish Museum in the Kaliningrad Synagogue.
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Critical Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics, and Aesthetics of 1915
2023-06-27 19:00 - 21:00 | Online
Book Discussion: Critical Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics, and Aesthetics of 1915
Critical Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics, and Aesthetics of 1915 brings together the multifarious publications of the scholars in the network “Workshop of Armenian-Turkish Scholarship (WATS)”.
The book will be published in August and the following book discussion will be significant in contextualising the book within contemporary debates in memory, trauma and genocide studies.
Moderator:
Tali Nates is the Director/ Founder of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and chair of the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation (SAHGF).
Presenters:
Elyse Semerdjian is currently Professor of History at Whitman College and the incoming Kaloosdian-Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.
Elisa Von Joeden-Forgey is an Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College and the Co-President of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention.
Andrea Petö is a Professor in Gender Studies at the Central European University and a Doctor of Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Hülya Adak is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at Sabancı University and works on trauma and memory studies.
Fatma Müge Göçek who was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey is a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan where she works on violence and social change in the Middle East and the world at large.
Arlene Avakian is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Lion Woman’s Legacy: An Armenian American Memoir among other publications.
David Kazanjian is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Egemen Özbek is the Academic Coordinator at the Academy in Exile at Universität Duisburg-Essen.
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Live stream and Q&A with Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter
2023-07-26 19:30 - 21:00
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Exhibition Opening: I See Something You Don’t See
2023-08-07 17:00 - 19:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
RSVP essential to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

Being at Double Risk: Women's Survival in the Holocaust
2023-08-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
RSVP is essential to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za

Fundraising performance of 'Do I Win or Do I Lose?' at the Theatre on the Square
2023-08-13 14:45 - 17:00
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The Demjanjuk Affair in Israel: Remember to Forget
2023-08-29 17:30 - 19:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung invite you to a seminar by Dr Tamir Hod on the Demjanjuk affair of the 1980s and 1990s. Dr Hod will explore the trial and eventual acquittal of Ukrainian-American John Ivan Demanjuk. Demanjuk was extradited to Israel on suspicion of being “Ivan the Terrible” a notorious concentration camp guard at Treblinka.
Dr. Tamir Hod is a historian in the field of World War II and the Holocaust, as well as the impact of Holocaust remembrance on Israeli society. His doctoral thesis was about the Demjanjuk trial in Israel, under the guidance of Prof. Hanna Yablonka, which was also the title of his first book. Dr. Hod researched the role the Ukrainian collaborators played in the Treblinka extermination camp. At the moment, Tamir is working on a book about the Nazi Crimes Investigations Unit in the Israeli Police. The unit, which was founded in 1960, was mainly comprised of Holocaust survivors and contributed greatly to various trials against Nazi criminals and their collaborators in many countries around the world. Dr. Tamir Hod teaches at the Tel Hai Academic College and at the Western Galilee Academic College.
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Opening of Chayela Rosenthal: Wunderkind of the Vilna Ghetto Theatre
2023-09-19 17:00 - 20:00 | Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 1 Duncombe Rd, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa
Opening of Chayela Rosenthal: Wunderkind of the Vilna Ghetto Theatre accompanied by a film screening of The Paper Brigade. Members only walkabout at 5pm, Opening and film screening at 6 for 6:30pm.
Please join us for the opening of Chayela Rosenthal: Wunderkind of the Vilna Ghetto Theatre, which focuses on Chayela Rosenthal, a remarkable talented performer who was one of the few survivors of the Vilna Ghetto. Known as the “Wunderkind of the Vilna Ghetto,” Chayela survived the labour and concentration camps and a death march to the Baltic Sea. After liberation, she joined the State Yiddish Theatre and gained recognition, eventually performing in major European capitals and settling in Cape Town.
The opening will be accompanied by a film screening of The Paper Brigade, an award-winning Belgian documentary which tells the moving story of the resistance group “The Paper Brigade”, a group of Jewish writers, scholars, and librarians who desperately tried to rescue Jewish cultural treasures in Vilnius during the Nazi occupation.
RSVP for the walkabout or become a member at dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za
RSVP for the opening to pretoria@diplobel.fed.be

Jewish Studies and the Holocaust
2023-09-21 20:00 - 22:00 | Online
The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry, 6th programme: Jewish Studies and the Holocaust
“The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry” is an 8 part series that will engage with scholars and experts who grapple with themes related to Holocaust studies. The series will explore the multifaceted discipline of Holocaust Studies through different lenses. Our experts will challenge us to understand the causes, impacts, and legacies of the Holocaust.
The sixth lecture in this series focuses on Jewish Studies and the Holocaust. Presenting will be Prof Shirli Gilbert, the director of the Sir Martin Gilbert Learning Centre, a professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London, and the co-editor of Jewish Historical Studies. She holds a D. Phil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the Holocaust and its legacies, modern Jewish identity, and Jews in South Africa.
Joining Prof Gilbert is Prof Adam Mendelsohn, director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research at the University of Cape Town, and Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape Town. The Centre, the only of its kind in Africa, conducts research focused on Jews in southern Africa, past and present.
The final presenter is Prof Yael Siman, associate professor, academic coordinator of the graduate program in social and political sciences at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She is a member of the Mexican National Council of Science and an affiliated researcher of the Centre for Advanced Genocide Research. She has investigated the displacement and migration trajectories of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Mexico.
This programme is in partnership with Classrooms Without Borders, Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Generations of the Shoah, and Liberation75.
Register here: https://cwbpgh.org/event/the-holocaust-as-an-interdisciplinary-tapestry-7/

Vatengesi – Hannah’s Dance
2023-10-10 18:30 - 20:00 | Goethe-Institut, 119 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, South Africa
This dance performance uses the story of Hannah’s Dance and the Kulturbund’s plan to save Jewish dancers during World War II as a starting point explore contemporary issues in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Movement, mask work, song, poetry and metaphors come together to create a magical piece of ritual theatre exploring healing from political trauma.
RSVP: https://forms.gle/2TTmAirEsDNenm6s6

Nation Takes Action: Commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the Rescue of the Jews in Denmark During the Holocaust
2023-10-15 20:00 - 22:00 | Online
We are honoured to have the Ambassador of Denmark, H.E. Thomas Winkler to open this special commemoration programme about a most incredible act of rescue. Almost all of the seven thousand Jews living in Nazi occupied Denmark, managed to escape the Holocaust. What made Denmark the exception to the systemised horror? Bo Lidegaard, a historian who has researched the subject, presents a new explanation of the rescue based on more than ten years of historical research. Dr. Judith Goldstein, Founder and Executive Director Emeritus of ”Humanity in Action”,will introduce us to the work of the non-profit organisation, including the production of the animated documentary ”Voices in the Void”, which is part of the film series Traces: Portraits of Resistance, Survival and Resolve. We will have the opportunity to see a screening of the film during the programme. Afterwards, Rabbi Jair Melchior, Chief Rabbi of Denmark, will share the story of his grandfather, Rabbi Bent Melchior z’l, who was rescued on one of the boats to Sweden, and enlighten us about Denmark and the Danish society today, in relation to the moral lessons and insights gained by learning about this unique example of rescue during the Holocaust.
This programme is in partnership with the Embassy of Denmark in Tel Aviv, Humanity in Action, the Danish Jewish Museum, the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Classrooms without Borders, and the Rabin Chair Forum at George Washington University.
Register Here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrduyrrDgsG9enoLgn2AxpwcpxWowsNJcQ

Gendering the Holocaust with Prof Andrea Pető
2023-10-26 20:00 - 22:00 | Online
“The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry” is an 8 part series that will engage with scholars and experts who grapple with themes related to Holocaust studies. The series will explore the multifaceted discipline of Holocaust Studies through different lenses. Our experts will challenge us to understand the causes, impacts, and legacies of the Holocaust.
The seventh lecture in this series focuses on women and the Holocaust. Research on women and the Holocaust developed driven by the political strategy formulated by Joan Ringelheim in 1983 that in failing to recognise that men and women suffer differently we “lose the lives of women for a second time”. Andrea Pető analyses the consequences that the scholarship on women and the Holocaust followed the same epistemological route as women’s history writing in general. It started to collect the facts – making women visible and collecting evidence – and establish the history of women’s participation in, for example, the ghetto and among the Jewish resistance movements building up a considerable scholarship by now. The talk closes by analysing the causes and actors of the recent illiberal challenge on Holocaust Studies and its consequences on gendering the Holocaust. She will also explore the causes and actors of the recent illiberal challenge on Holocaust Studies and its consequences on gendering the Holocaust.
This programme is in partnership with Classrooms Without Borders, Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Generations of the Shoah, and Liberation75.
Andrea Pető is Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her works on gender, politics, Holocaust and war have been translated into 23 languages. She edited three pioneering books in the field of Jewish Studies with Louise Hecht, Karoline Krasuska Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges. IBL, Warsawa, 2015., and with Szapor, Judith, Hametz, Maura, Calloni, Marina, Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe 1860-2000. The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012., with Helga Thorson The Future of Holocaust Memorialisation. Confronting Racism, Anti-Semitism, and Homophobia Through Memory Work. Tom Lantos Institute, Budapest, 2015. Her recent monographs are: Women in the Arrow Cross Party (Palgrave, 2020), Forgotten Massacre, Budapest in 1944 (DeGruyter 2021). She the editor-in-chief of East European Holocaust Studies (DeGruyter). In 2018 she was awarded the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values and 2022 University of Oslo Human Rights Award. She is Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Register Here: https://cwbpgh.org/event/the-holocaust-as-an-interdisciplinary-tapestry-8/

From Darkness to Freedom: Honouring the 80th Anniversary of the Courageous Tunnel Escape from the Novogrudok Ghetto
2023-10-29 20:00 - 22:00 | Online
On September 26, 1943 about 230 Jews accomplished a daring escape from the Novogrudok (Navardok) labor camp in Belarus (White Russia) via an underground tunnel dug by the inmates over a period of several months. In this programme, we will focus on this less known escape.
Lady Gilbert give the opening remarks. Afterwards, Dr. Silberklang will present the broader picture of Jewish resistance in the ghettos. Betty Cohen, whose mother, Fania Dunetz Brodsky, was one of the escapees, will examine the survivors’ choice to rebuild their lives, where they did so, the legacies they left behind, and the families they created. Tamara Vershitskaya, founder of the Jewish Resistance Museum in Novogrudok, will take us on a virtual tour of the exhibition. Debra Brunner, CEO of the Together Plan, will discuss the organisation’s work in Belarus, including the “Making History Together” project that promotes Holocaust commemoration. Our program will conclude with a special commemoration in honour of all those who were involved in the escape.
This programme is in partnership with The Together Plan, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, Jewish Small Communities Network, Qesher, the Jewish Tapestry Project, DIALOG International Charitable Organization, Jewish Religious Union (Belarus), Jewish History Association of South Wales/Cymdeithas Hanes Iddewig De Cymru, Classrooms Without Borders, Rabin Chair Forum, and the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre.
Register Here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMkc-yurjktHdZtIKssgd8K4THtnEQ5TRSb

Museums and Memorials with Dr Mirjam Zadoff
2023-11-16 21:00 - 23:00 | Online
Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry series: Memory Studies: Museums and Memorials with Dr Mirjam Zadoff
“The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry” is an 8 part series that engages with scholars and experts who grapple with themes related to Holocaust studies. The series explores the multifaceted discipline of Holocaust Studies through different lenses. Our experts challenge us to understand the causes, impacts, and legacies of the Holocaust.
The final lecture in the series looks at memory studies focusing on museums and memorials. Dr Mirjam Zadoff, the Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, and lecturer at the University of Munich, will explore the relationship between memory studies and the Holocaust.
This programme is in partnership with Classrooms Without Borders, the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Generations of the Shoah, and Liberation75.
Register here: https://cwbpgh.org/event/the-holocaust-as-an-interdisciplinary-tapestry-9/
