LECTURE
Monday, February 16
Bush Conference Center, Beckman Hall 404
Michael Berenbaum, Ph.D.
Memory's Youngest Voices: Children of the Holocaust
7 p.m.

Chapman University’s Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education presents Dr. Michael Berenbaum, one of the world’s foremost scholars of the Holocaust and currently a visiting professor at Chapman, who will discuss the experience of children in the ghettos and concentration camps. Approximately 1.5 million Jewish children died in the Holocaust, in ghettos and concentration camps, in slave labor and death camps, in hiding and on death marches. Those who survived did so by sheer luck and by demonstrating a physical and emotional strength beyond their years.

Many of these children were too young to speak—but not too young to remember. These memories, sometimes unspoken for decades, would scar their souls and shape their lives. After the war, child survivors faced enormous new challenges. Many felt rage at the loss of their families and guilt at surviving. Some buried their memories; others struggled to find words to convey experiences that defied description.

In this lecture, one of the world’s foremost scholars of the Holocaust, Dr. Michael Berenbaum, speaks of the children of the Holocaust and their search to give voice to their memories. Dr. Berenbaum is Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University. He is the inaugural holder of the Gold/Weinstein Family Visiting Professorship in Holocaust History and Jewish Studies at Chapman University. Dr. Berenbaum is the author or editor of sixteen books and scores of scholarly articles. Among his books are The World Must Know, now in its second edition; A Promise To Remember:The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors, and Not Your Father’s Anti-Semitism. He served as project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation, and for three years was president and chief executive officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, now the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Most recently, he was the executive editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica (Second Edition).

He has consulted in the development of many museums and libraries, including the Sala and Aron Samueli Library at Chapman University, and is currently the senior consultant and project director for the Illinois Museum of the Holocaust in Skokie and Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City. Among the many films and documentaries on which he has consulted are the 1995 Academy Award-winning Best Short Documentary One Survivor RemembersThe Last Days, and the 2001 Emmy Award-winning HBO film Conspiracy. His books will be on sale at this event, and a book signing will follow the lecture. Admission is free. Information: (714) 532-7760 or ambloom@chapman.edu.