Date: November 5, 2018
Time: 7:30 PM
Location: Temple Israel, 1301 Prince of Wales Dr., Ottawa, ON K2C 1N2
Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The number is staggering. It is the equivalent of almost seven Ottawas. How can we represent the magnitude of this crime without reducing the victims to mere numbers? How can we show, as Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg said so well, that “There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times”? How do we convey that these were real people with real lives and families. In this presentation, I will discuss how personal items can turn the huge numbers of victims back into individuals and return their humanity, based on three case-studies: personal items discovered near shooting pits in Ukraine; damaged photographs from Poland; and a piece of mica from the Theresienstadt Glimmerwerke (mica works).
Robert M. Ehrenreich is Director of National Academic Programs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to joining the Museum, Dr. Ehrenreich was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution; a research associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana; a senior staff scientist at The National Academies; and an associate research professor at George Washington University. He is the author or editor of four books, an international journal, and over 30 articles and reviews on the Holocaust, Holocaust studies, and European history and prehistory. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Ultimate History Project, an advisor to the WAVE Trauma Centre in Northern Ireland, and an External Examiner for Queen’s University, Belfast. Dr. Ehrenreich was awarded an A.B. from Harvard University and a D.Phil. from Oxford University.
A program of the Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies and Temple Israel in cooperation with the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship (CHES)
