Posted on 15 April 2011.
A talk by Holocaust survivor Manfred Katz of Statesville and an opening for the traveling exhibit “Faces of Resistance: Women in the Holocaust” will be on the program Wednesday, April 20, when Davidson College hosts a “Yom HaShoah,” or “Holocaust Remembrance Day.” The events are free and open to the public.
Mr. Katz will speak from 6 to 7 p.m. in the Miriam Canon Hayes Amphitheater at Davidson’s Alvarez College. The exhibition will be open in the Union Atrium from Wednesday through April 28.
The event coincides with a national effort led by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to promote Yom HaShoah and Holocaust awareness.
Co-sponsors include the Davidson College Chaplain’s Office, Davidson College Jewish Student Union/Hillel, Lake Norman Jewish Congregation, Davidson’s Office of the Vice President of Academic Affairs and the Davidson Dean of Faculty’s office.
“The event helps broaden Davidson’s global, cultural, and religious diversity,” said Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan, event coordinator and assistant professor of history at Davidson. “This event reminds us that ‘never again’ does not only pertain to the Holocaust or anti-Semitism, but to all genocides, which still occur across the world in various forms and manners.”
ABOUT MANFRED KATZ
Manfred Katz was born of Jewish parents in a rural German village. His parents tried unsuccessfully to leave Nazi Germany, but the Gestapo deported his entire family to a ghetto in Riga, Latvia, in December 1941.
Mr. Katz was subsequently separated from his parents and forced to work as a slave laborer in two concentration camps. After more than three years, Russia’s Red Army liberated him and a few others survivors. Having lost all of his immediate family members, he immigrated to the United States in 1946. After a long career in engineering, he settled with his wife in Statesville.
Mr. Katz hopes his life experiences will provide a lesson to others. “I offer the listener a first-hand experience of what happens as the consequence of an intolerant and hateful society,” he said in a Davidson College press release. “The Holocaust offers many lessons, which if learned, could make this a more tolerant world.”
EXHIBIT
The traveling exhibition, titled “Faces of Resistance-Women in the Holocaust,” was assembled by the research institute of Moreshet – The Mordechai Anielevich Memorial in Israel, and is on loan from the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust.
The exhibit combats the myth that the Jews of Europe went passively to their execution, providing a complex view of Jewish resistance and the crucial role that Jewish women played in the struggles against the Nazi onslaught.
For more information on the event, contact Prof. Pegelow Kaplan at 704-894-2284, or co-chair Rabbi Michael Shields at 704-252-7038.
