Virtual Events - Kupferberg Holocaust Center

In 1988, while visiting Częstochowa, Poland, Harry Rapaport made a remarkable discovery: a trove of Torah scrolls hidden in the attic of a wartime factory that had previously been a Jewish ritual bathhouse. Although heavily damaged, these religious artifacts are a living memorial to the local Jewish communities who perished during the Holocaust. Come learn about how one of these scrolls found its way to the Kupferberg Holocaust Center, and the yearlong process involved to both restore and remount this powerful historical artifact.

Join us for a conversation with acclaimed poet Ilya Kaminsky, whose poems bear witness to our times and create a space for empathy and compassion in resistance to oppression. Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).

In 1933, with almost twenty years of service as professor at the Prussian Academy of Sciences and researcher at Humbolt University of Berlin, and under targeted threat from the Nazi regime, Albert Einstein fled Germany. With the aid of the Academic Assistance Council, he and his family took refuge first in Belgium, then England, before his appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In this presentation, Michael Shara, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNY) professor and curator of the 2002 landmark AMNH exhibit, “Einstein,” will discuss Einstein’s experiences as a refugee and his political and humanitarian activism.

In 1945, a group of survivors in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp opened several schools for the growing number of orphaned and displaced children at the camp. To help their young charges heal, the teachers encouraged them to write and speak about their traumatic wartime experiences. Recently uncovered notebooks of child testimonies together with fragmentary archival collections scattered across multiple repositories tell the story of this early documentary effort. Join Dr. Regina Kazyulina and Dr. Christopher Mauriello, Directors of Salem State University’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, for a discussion about this history and the teachers who did everything in their power, despite their own wartime traumas, to ensure the children’s stories and voices would not be forgotten.

The Weeksville Heritage Center is a historic site and cultural center in Central Brooklyn that uses education, arts, and a social justice lens to preserve, document, and inspire engagement with the history of one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America. Join Dr. Raymond Codrington, Weeksville’s President and CEO, and Irvin Weathersby, Jr., author of In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space (Penguin Random House, 2025), for a conversation about memory, historic preservation, as well as the connections of cultural heritage institutions to the local communities in which they are based.