To mark Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Jewish Center of the Hamptons will have Deborah Dwork, director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the City University of New York Graduate Center, speaking after the 11 a.m. service on Sunday.
Dr. Dwork will explore the question of "Where and to whom did Holocaust survivors belong?" In the Nazi era, Jews had "preserved the hope that their families would be reunited. They presumed that when the Third Reich fell, the old structures and certainties would be restored." That was not to be the case, and in her presentation Dr. Dwork "traces the arc of survivors' lives as they learned they had erred."
The historian has been a mentor and friend to the center's rabbi, Joshua Franklin, and was the adviser for his college senior and master's theses. She is the author of "Children With a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe," "Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present," "Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946," and "Holocaust: A History." According to the Jewish Center, she is the "leading authority on university education in this field," and changed the academic landscape by "envisioning and actualizing doctoral training in Holocaust history and genocide studies" when she was the inaugural Rose professor of Holocaust history and founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Massachusetts.
