Fair Lawn shul to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day
The Fair Lawn Jewish Center / Congregation B’nai Israel will hold a program on Sunday, January 29, at 10 a.m., to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and to honor the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
Dr. Thorin Tritter, formerly the museum director of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County and now the executive director of the Fair Lawn Jewish Center/Congregation B’nai Israel, will lead the program. The talk is not only about the conditions in Auschwitz, but the experience of the American and other Allied soldiers who came face to face with the horrors of the Holocaust for the first time in 1945 as they began to liberate the concentration camps. Topics will include what the American public learned about the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 and what the American GIs knew of Nazi atrocities in the spring of 1945 as they liberated Buchenwald and Dachau.
Dr. Tritter will explore liberation from the perspective of these Allied soldiers and discuss the way liberation changed them, as well as the people they rescued.
Dr. Tritter, who was born in England and grew up in America, is a historian and educator who has lived in Bergen County for 18 years. He received his BA in American history from the University of Chicago and an MA and Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. He taught American history and American studies at Princeton University for six years and then became a research fellow at the University of London. He also was the executive director of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.
The Fair Lawn Jewish Center holds one of the 1500 Holocaust memorial Torah scrolls that were saved from towns all over Czechoslovakia and were later brought to England before being loaned out to synagogues across the world.
This program is free and open to the public. For more information and reservations, email info@fljc.com.
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