Friday March 20, 2015
6:00 pm Shabbat dinner (Register here).
*Services 7:30 pm (please note the earlier time!)
Presentation during services Building a Museum: The Saga of Polish Jewry
While many Jews see Poland as a place of tragedy, it was also the center of Ashkenazi Jewish life for 800 years. The newly opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw tells a rich story of cultural vitality and resilience. Why is the Museum important and how will it change the way Poles and Jews see their own history and their relations with each other?
Saturday, March 21, 2015
11:30 Dairy Luncheon
12:30 Presentation: Cultural resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto: the Ringelblum Archive
During World War II Jews resisted not only with guns, but also with pen and paper. Even in the face of death they left “time capsules” full of documents that they buried under the rubble of ghettos and death camps. The Ringelblum archive in the Warsaw Ghetto consists of thousands of buried documents. But of the sixty people who worked on this national mission, only three survived. This will be their story.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
10:00 Bagels and coffee
10:30 Presentation: Vilna: the Jerusalem of Lithuania
Vilna, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” was a very special city. No other Jewish community in Eastern Europe inspired so many poems and stories. Vilna was the home of the great Vilna Gaon, but it also was the birthplace of the Jewish Socialist Bund, as well as the world capital of an imaginary country called “Yiddishland.” Religion and worldliness, Hebrew and Yiddish, tradition and modernity, all came together in this lovely, Jewish city.
About our Scholar in Residence
Dr. Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and has lectured and taught in Mexico, Lithuania, Russia, Poland and Israel. He has been a Visiting Professor at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Toronto and the Hebrew University. Since 2008 he has been serving as a consultant to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews which recently opened in Warsaw, Poland.
Professor Kassow is the author of several books including: The Distinctive Life of East European Jewry (2004), Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (2007), which received the Orbis Prize, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and has been translated into seven languages. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany.