2025 - Jack Mayer, author of Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project

IAUJC’s 2025 Holocaust Commemoration featured Jack Mayer, author of Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project.

Mayer, a retired pediatrician from Vermont, wrote the book after he learned about the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker who organized a rescue network of fellow social workers to save 2,500 children from death in the Warsaw ghetto.

The book also chronicles the group of high school girls from rural Kansas who stumbled upon a reference to the courageous work of Sendler, whose rescues had been suppressed after the war in communist Poland. The girls created a play about Sendler they called Life in a Jar for a school history project.

The play was first seen in Kansas and then spread across the United States and finally to Poland, where it turned Sendler into a national hero.

2024 - Ralph Berger, editor of the memoir, With Courage Shall We Fight

Ralph S. Berger's parents, Murray "Motke" Berger and Frances "Fruma" Berger, were Polish resistence fighters who joined the Bielski Brigade, a group of Jewish partisans who escaped from Nazis and survived in the forest in what is now Belarus.

Eventually, the brigade grew to 1,200 people who built a makeshift community in the forest and lived together for two years. Members of the brigade conducted sabotage operations against the Germans by blowing up rail lines, telephone lines and power plants. The partisans emerged from the forest after the Soviets liberated the area in 1944.

Ralph Berger, an arbitrator and mediator who graduated from Cornell University, coedited a book about his parent's experience, With Courage Shall We Fight: The Memoirs and Poetry of Holocaust Resistance Fighters Frances 'Fruma' Gulkowich Berger and Murray 'Motke' Berger. 

2023 - Severin Drix Discusses His Father's Experience in a Concentration Camp and in Hiding

Severin Drix, an Ithaca High School teacher, was born in a refugee camp outside of Munich, Germany. He helped his father, Dr. Samuel Drix, write his memoir, Witness to Annihilation: Surviving the Holocaust, which recorded his experiences during the war in Poland.

Dr. Drix was a 29-year-old physician working in the town of Morszyn, Poland, when Germany attacked the Soviet-controlled region in June 1941. After he moved to the Jewish ghetto in Lwów, he was rounded up and sent to the Janowska concentration camp on the outskirts of the city.

He survived 10 months of near starvation and backbreaking work at various labor sites that brigades of prisoners were sent to from the camp. After escaping from Janowska, Dr. Drix was hidden by a Polish couple in their barn attic for 13 months.

Dr. Drix moved to Brooklyn after the war and ,worked for the German Consulate in New York by examining Holocaust survivors making restitution claims for damage to their health during the Nazi persecution. He received the Officers Cross of the Order of Merit to recognize his contribution to strengthening relations between the United States and Germany.

A video of Severin Drix's presentation can be viewed here.

2022 - Celia Clement, editor of Three Sisters: A True Holocaust Story of Love, Luck, and Survival

Celia Clement's family would not have survived the Holocaust wihtout the help of multiple rescuers who aided them on a treacherous four-year journey from Leipzig, Germany to a refugee camp in Switzerland in 1942.

In 1938, seven members of her family had escaped from Germany just after Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass,  the wave of pogroms the Nazis unleashed German Jews. Their fight for survival included being imprisoned in French internment camps, hiding in a tiny tool shed and adapating to the deplorable conditions of a Nazi prison.

Clement, an Ithaca resident, edited and harrated a memoir about her family, Three Sisters: A True Holocaust Story of Love, Luck and Survival, published in 2020.

2021 - Rita Melen and Gale Halpern Discuss the Holocaust Education Speakers Bureau

Two second-generation survivors, Gale Halpern and Rita Melen, were honored for their work with the Holocaust Speaker's Bureau in Ithaca, which was founded in 2013.

Gale and Rita spoke about their parents' experiences fleeing Nazi Germany and their work on the speakers bureau, which provides speakers who give talks about their families' experiences in the Holocaust at area middle and high schools.

This commemoration was also a fundraiser for the Holocaust Survivor Initiative, which provides financial assistance to survivors living in poverty. The project, sponsored by the Jewish Federations of North America, has helped Holocaust survivors across the United States and Canada.

You can view a video of the event here.

 

2020 - When It Is Hard to Be Human: Lessons from the Rescuers in the Holocaust

Authors Eva Fogelman and Roald Hoffmann explored why some bystanders and perpetrators in the midst of totalitarian genocide were compelled to risk their lives and resist. They discussed the role of conscience and moral courage play in confronting hate today.  
       
Mykola and Maria Dyuk risked their lives to hide Roald Hoffmann with his mother Clara and other relatives in the attic of a schoolhouse to save them from Nazi terror from January 1943 until June 1944 in the village of Uniow, Poland.  Roald is the author of Something That Belongs to You (2015), an autobiographical drama. He is Professor Emeritus of Cornell and shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981.
 

Eva Fogelman wanted to know why a small minority of people will disobey authority in order to help others. She began a twenty-year study that led to her book, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (1994). Fogelman bases her findings on over 300 interviews with rescuers of Jews whose acts of courage either have been confirmed by those they helped or substantiated and honored by Yad Vashem. She is the founding director of the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers (now the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous).
 

Dan Schwarz, author of Imagining the Holocaust (1999), looks at the various contexts of documentary, testimony, fiction and art that contribute to our understanding of what is real and true about our understanding of the Holocaust and its impact on history, politics and mental health today.  

Read about the event at the Cornell Chronicle.
 

2019 - Gerd Korman, Deported from Germany and Sent on the Kindertransport

Gerd Korman, a professor emeritus of American history at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, was a child and teenager in Nazy Germany. His family was deported from Germany to Poland in 1938.

After being sent to a refugee camp near the German-Polish border, Korman's father made arrangements to sail aboard the St. Louis, the ship that was refused permission to land in Cuba and then the United States. He returned to Antwerp, Belgium on the St. Louis and spent the war years in Westerbork, a transit camp in the Netherlands. 

Korman's mother then arranged for Gerd and his brother to join the Kindertransport to England, where they were taken in by a family in Talaton.

After the war, Korman's family reunited in New York City. Korman's memoir, Nightmare's Fairy Tale: A Young Refugee's Home Fronts, 1938-1948, was published in 2008.

A video by James Bosjolie, of the lecture may be accessed here.

2018 - Lea Malek, Spared from Auschwitz

Lea Malek, who lives in Rochester, New York, was born in Janoshalma, Hungary in 1939. Her father died in a labor camp before her younger sister was born. Lea was 5 years old when her family was loaded onto cattle cars bound for Auschwitz.

Along the way, the train suddenly stopped and was split. A large landowner needed some slave laborers and the people in Lea's car were sent to work the farm instead of to Auschwitz. Lea would not have survived if that hadn't happened.

Only three Jewish children – Lea, her sister and one other girl - survived to return to their hometown in Hungary. Lea witnessed the brutality of the Hungarian revolution in Budapest at age 16.

She went to Israel in 1957 where she married and came to the United States in 1959. She retired from her well-known bakery in Rochester, "Malek's" and then began to speak about her experience.

2017 - Roald Hoffmann, a Hidden Child in Poland

Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and professor emeritus at Cornell, spoke about his experience as a hidden child in Poland during World War II.

Hoffman was 5 years old when he and his mother, two uncles and one aunt were hidden in the attic of a one-room schoolhouse in the village of Uniow, Poland. The family was sheltered in the attic for 15 months by a Ukrainian school teacher and his wife, who also hid them in a dirt bunker underground when police came to the school.

Hoffman's father, Hilel Safran, a civil engineer, was in a labor camp nearby but was killed by the Nazis when it was discovered that he and a group of friends were planning an armed escape from the camp.

As the Red Army marched into Poland in 1944, Hoffman and the surviving members of his family walked to the Soviet lines and freedom. Hoffman and his mother and stepfather eventually came to New York in 1949.

Hoffman is also an accomplished poet and playwright and has published four collections of poems. His play, Something That Belongs to You, published in 2015, recounts the story of his life as a hidden child.

2016 - Helen Levinson, Disgused as a Christian to Survive the Holocaust

Helen Levinson grew up in Lublin, Poland, as the youngest of three children. When the war broke out in Poland, she was caught during a raid and sent to the Majdanak, a concentration camp in Poland.

With the help of a Nazi guard who knew her father, Helen was able to escape from the camp wearing a Hiltler youth uniform. After finding her way home, her father gave her some money and a fake birth certificate that disguised her as a Christian named Helena Czerniakowska. She never saw her family again.

Helen fled to her childhood friend's house, where the girl's family hid her in a shed. At 14, she took a train with the money her father had given her and was forced to work for her survival.

After the war, she searched for her surviving relatives and found some aunts and uncles in Rochester, New York. She moved to Rochester in 1947 and became a dental hygenist.

She began speaking to students about the Holocaust after her rabbi showed her a book that claimed the Holocaust was a hoax. In her talk at Temple Beth-El, Helen read from letters she wrote as a young teenager, which painted a vivid picture of the fear, uncertainty, courage, and fortitude that accompanied her on her journey.

To view her talk on video, click here.
 
 

2015 - Marion Blumenthal Lazan, Survivor of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

Marion Blumental Lazan, a Holocaust survivor and author, spoke about her experiences in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the lessons she learned from the Holocaust. Lazan was 9 years old when her family was transported to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany, in 1944.

Her memoir's title, Four Perfect Pebbles: A True Story of the Holocaust, refers to her belief while imprisoned that if she could find four pebbles of the nearly the same size and shape, then all four members of her family would survive.

Though her father died of typhus after they were released from the camp in 1945, Marion, her mother and her brother moved to Holland, and a few years later emigrated to New York.

A speaker in schools and communities across the country, Lazan stressed the ideas of perserverance, determination, faith and hope in her talk at Temple Beth-El.

2010 - Commemorating the Holocaust: Affirming Community 

The Ithaca Area United Jewish Community gathered Nov. 7, 2010 to commemorate the Holocaust, affirm community and discover Ithaca's own Holocaust Memorial sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy.

The event coincided with the anniversary of Kristallnacht--the night of shattered glass--which marks the beginning of the destruction of the Jewish communities of Europe in 1939.

Harmonies of the VOICES Multicultural Chorus, led by Ithaca College professor Baruch Whitehead, filled the James L. Law Auditorium with Ani Ma'amin (I Believe), also known as the "Hymn of the Camps."

The Goldsworthy sculpture, located permanently in the Newman Arboretum of the Cornell Botanic Gardens,
was presented in a slide show by the Ithaca College Park Scholars, Class of 2014. The Ithaca Children's Choir sang Eli Eli, directed by Ithaca College Professor, Janet Glavan, with lyrics by Hannah Senesh.

Speakers in order of appearance: Dr. Chana Silberstein, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau (video), Professor Leopold Gruenfeld (video), Ruth Windmuller, Professor Emeritus Roald Hoffmann, Cornell President David Skorton and Lehman Alternative School student Hannah Feldshuh.

View a video of the event here.