Boston University students will be exposed to some lesser-known facets of the Holocaust this week during the Holocaust Education Committee’s annual Holocaust Education Week, according to HEC Treasurer Jina Moore.
The week will include nightly events between Monday and Thursday, ranging from a student discussion of growing up as the last generation with exposure to Holocaust survivors to a musical about the importance of art in concentration camps, said Moore, a University Professors program senior.
“Each event talks about an aspect of the Holocaust which isn’t really in the mainstream,” Moore said. “When you take a class, you don’t really deal with a lot of the things we’re going to deal with.”
The week is scheduled to start with a student discussion panel on Monday night, Moore said. Panel participants will be grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and will discuss how learning about their family history and interacting regularly with Holocaust survivors has affected their personal identity, Moore said.
She said they will also discuss the continued relevance of the Holocaust more than 50 years later.
“We thought of the student discussion after we did an evening where we talked about what brought us to the committee and why we spend so much time with it,” Moore said. “We realized it would be interesting to have a panel of students say why they think the Holocaust is still important.”
HEC President Marla Zeiderman, herself a survivor’s grandchild, will be one of the panelists.
Tuesday night, Holocaust survivor Irene Hofstein will discuss her flight from Nazi Berlin in 1939 and the difficulties of being accepted into another country during that time, Moore said.
She said a popular independent Dutch film about a young girl whose parents are Holocaust survivors will be screened Wednesday night. The film has made the trip through the independent film circuit and won several awards, according to Moore.
“We decided to do the film because so many people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have liked it,” Moore said. “It deals with a theme that’s not really talked about much, but it really resonates with the whole community.”
Claudia Stevens will perform the one-woman musical, “An Evening with Madame S,” on Thursday night, Moore said. The piece was written by Stevens and is about the survival story of a well-known Jewish singer and her time at Auschwitz, one of the most infamous death camps in Poland.
“Music in the camps is a very interesting issue because the people who performed were forced to do it,” she said. “The film raised a lot of interesting issues about musical life in the camps and in general.”
Moore said the biggest impetus behind the creation of the week was reminding people of the continued importance of the Holocaust today.
“We get asked a lot, why still the Holocaust?” Moore said. “We wanted this week to be a reflection on an answer to that question.
“There are still many lessons in the Holocaust that people can apply to situations both at home and around the world. We want people to learn something about the Holocaust and the relevance and importance it continues to have.”
Moore estimated this Holocaust Education Week to be the group’s 20th. Zeiderman, a College of Arts and Sciences senior, said Holocaust Education Week is a national tradition, with many other schools putting together their own education week.
The week was entirely organized by the seven members of the HEC, a task Moore said required hours of work. Moore said she has participated in organizing the week in each of her four years at BU.
Zeiderman said most of the HEC’s seven members have previously taken an active role in Holocaust education and participate in the week’s planning because they still feel the Holocaust can teach important lessons. Some members are even majoring in Holocaust-related subjects, she said.
“We work hard at trying to bring together our different focuses and applying them to reach out to the community,” Zeiderman said. “It’s all about teaching, learning and not repeating our past.”
The week is expensive to produce, Moore said. The group received funding for the programming from college governments, the Student Union and the Jewish Cultural Endowment.
“We got a lot of support, both financially and physically, from the student governments and a lot of student organizations,” Moore said. “We got a terrific response because I think this issue really resonates with a lot of other organizations. This was a pan-university effort — not just Jews and not just Hillel.”
HEC members are also working on the HEC’s annual event on Yom Ha’Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, when students will read the names of Holocaust victims for 24 consecutive hours on Marsh Plaza. That program is scheduled to take place from April 8-9.
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