May 4 - Yaffa Eliach Lecture

Dr. Racelle Weiman, Director of The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education, and Rabbi Hanan Balk of the Golf Manor Synagogue proudly announce their successful effort to bring the world-renowned scholar, Professor Yaffa Eliach to the Cincinnati area. Eliach, a scholar and author, is known best as the creator of The Tower of Life, a photographic exhibit at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Through the generosity of Sam and Rachel Boymel, the compelling voice of Eliach will be heard during Holocaust Awareness Weeks 2003: Women and the Holocaust. Eliach presents her keynote lecture, Women of Valor, Women of Pain on Sunday evening, May 4 at 7:15 p.m. at the Golf Manor Synagogue, 6442 Stover Avenue.

Her presentations will address women’s experiences in shtetls, ghettos concentration camps and in the resistance. She targets the experiences of women who rebuilt their lives after the Holocaust. Eliach speaks about how the position of women changed dramatically during the Holocaust and post-Holocaust emigration by looking at family, culture, and economic life.

The Combined Generations of the Holocaust of Cincinnati and The Center are deeply appreciative to the Boymel family for Eliach’s role in this year’s community wide annual Yom HaShoah Memorial Service. This service is held at Adath Israel Synagogue this year on Sunday, May 4 at 2 p.m., for families and the general public.

Eliach has devoted her life and career to Holocaust education and has received many awards for this dedication. She was the founder of the first Center for Holocaust Studies in the United States and was a member of President Carter’s Holocaust Commission. She serves as Professor of History and Literature at the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College as well as the President of the Shtetl Foundation. Eliach’s work has great significance for the Boymel family whose own personal history, is that of shtetl life in the Ukraine.

The following day, in the generous spirit of interfaith and inter communal work, Prof. Eliach will lecture in the Cintas Center Ballroom at Xavier University on Monday, May 5 at 4p.m.The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Hebrew Union College and the Brueggeman Center on Interfaith Relations at Xavier University, partner for a third annual lecture. This lecture follows a cordial reception open to the public in Eliach’s honor beginning at 3p.m. Professor Eliach has been invited to serve as the first Jewish occupant of the Father Brueggeman Chair in Fall 2003. The Brueggeman Center focuses on developing understanding across religious boundaries through programs that build communities and strengthen cultural values.

These events are free and open to the public.

Holocaust Awareness Weeks 2003: Women and the Holocaust is a community-wide Holocaust Education effort which brings programs in music, film, food, lecture, art, and theater to all facets of the greater Cincinnati community. These programs give voice to women survivors, resisters, and rescuers whose distinctive stories have been neglected, humanize the Holocaust by focusing on the details of individual experiences, and promote the core values of tolerance, justice, hope, pluralism, and empowerment. The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion is committed to programs invigorating the community with an awareness of the Holocaust as distinct for women, their roles and challenges, and the inability to overcome powerlessness.