Syracuse University will host its first Holocaust education summit this week, bringing to campus professors and scholars from nine states and Washington, D.C.

‘The Symposium on Holocaust Education: A Tribute to Voices Lost’ includes workshops, a dramatic reading, art exhibits, film screenings and the regional Holocaust education summit.

Nov. 9 marks the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when German Nazis destroyed synagogues and homes, and took thousands of Jewish people into concentration campus. The symposium began Thursday with a lecture by James Conlon, a composer who spoke about his project, ‘Recovered Voices,’ and his attempt to raise awareness of the work of composers suppressed by the Nazi regime.

Alan Goldberg, professor emeritus in SU’s School of Education, invited Washington, D.C.’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to Syracuse to hold the first northeastern regional summit on Holocaust education.

‘What I’m finding is, even among a reasonably educated population, a real lack of awareness of both contemporary genocide and the issues of the Holocaust,’ Goldberg said.

The symposium will feature two film screenings and a photography exhibit, created in Italy with text translated to English by SU students studying in Florence. The photographs will be on display through April.

Students will present a reading of ‘The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff,’ a play written by Sigi Ziering, a Holocaust survivor and SU alumnus. He received a masters and doctoral degree from Syracuse in 1955 and 1958.

A video testimony of Ziering’s experience during the Holocaust is available through the SU Library’s Web site, as part of the Shoah Visual History Foundation Archive. Steven Spielberg established the archive in 1994 to collect testimonies of Holocaust survivors. SU is one of only 10 partner universities with access to the archives, which are another teaching tool and memorial for the millions of voices lost.

Ziering’s wife Marilyn co-sponsored the symposium and helped bring Conlon, the composer, to the university. She emphasized the importance of Holocaust education.

‘We never know what’s being destroyed when a life is destroyed,’ Marilyn Ziering said. ‘When we see images of the Holocaust we see bodies and we mourn the person, but we don’t think of what that person had to give us, whether he was a scientist, or an artist, or a musician or just a great humanitarian.’

jmterrus@syr.edu

Published on October 26, 2008 at 12:00 pm