Holocaust remembrance conference to focus on Warsaw, heroine

The 34th Greater Lafayette Holocaust Remembrance Conference will take place Saturday through Tuesday (April 11-14), opening with a film about a social worker's work in saving nearly 2,500 Jewish children in Warsaw, Poland, and continuing with the presentations about the Warsaw ghetto before, during and after World War II. Most events are at Purdue, and all are free and open to the public.

With the theme "What Remains," conference speakers will examine not only how the Warsaw ghetto developed but also how Jews and non-Jews today honor its prewar life and what memories, ruins and artifacts still exist.

The GLHRC schedule starts with a Hallmark movie, "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," a Polish Catholic social worker who led an underground drive to smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto. It will be shown at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the Krannert Building's Krannert Auditorium (Room 140). The 2009 film, rated PG, lasts 95 minutes, and children are welcome when accompanied by an adult. A discussion will follow. The film will be repeated at 5 p.m. Sunday.

Sunday's events also will be in Krannert Auditorium, beginning at 1 p.m. A full schedule and description of speakers and topics is at www.glhrc.org. Here is a summary:

* 1:30 p.m.: Opening ceremonies. Rabbi Audrey Pollack of Temple Israel opens the conference with memorial prayers, followed by a memorial candlelighting ceremony involving any area residents who are Holocaust survivors, their children or grandchildren. Proclamations by the mayors of Lafayette and West Lafayette set the week ahead as Holocaust Remembrance Week in Greater Lafayette. The conference co-chairs, Sarah Powley and Lowell Kane, will then present three local educators with grant checks as recipients of the Rabbi Gedalyah Engel Education Award. The award is named in honor of the late Hillel Foundation director who founded the conference in 1981.

* 2:30 p.m.: Michael Meng, associate professor of history at Clemson University and the conference's Rabbi Gedalyah Engel Lecturer, will speak on "Layered Memories in Postwar Warsaw: Muranów as a Ruin."

* 3:30-5 p.m.: Exhibition of World War II artifacts, the Nazi Postal Collection, showing stamps, book covers, postcards, letters, bank-note forgeries and manuscripts from concentration camps and European Jewish ghettos. Danny Spungen, a philanthropist, collector and philatelist, hosts this exhibit, which is owned by the Florence & Laurence Spungen Family Foundation of Santa Barbara, Calif.

* 3:45 p.m.: Norm Conard from the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes in Fort Scott, Kansas, and Jack Mayer, writer and practicing pediatric physician in Middlebury, Vermont, will speak about Mayer's book "Life in a Jar—The Irena Sendler Story." They will discuss finding out about Sendler and doing the research and publication processes for the book.

* 5-6:35 p.m.: The film "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler" will be reshown.

* 7:30 p.m.: Holocaust survivors, local residents Prof. Anna Berkovitz and Prof. Fritz Cohen, will share personal stories in conversation with Danny Spungen.

On Monday evening, McCutcheon High School students will present the play "Life in a Jar" at 7 p.m. at the school's Dan Kinsey Auditorium. The director is teacher Stella Schafer. Attendees should park near and use the front entrance of the high school, 4951 Old U.S. 231, Lafayette. McCutcheon first presented the play in 2009, then in 2011 in Indianapolis, and then with support of the Milken Center, on Midwestern tour with a rotating cast. Donations to the Life in a Jar Foundation will further Holocaust education and benefit the elderly in Poland.

On Tuesday, the conference will close with a 4:30 p.m. workshop for educators on teaching about the Holocaust. The workshop will be held in Purdue’s Discovery Park in the Discovery Research Learning Center in the Hall for Discovery and Learning Research. The workshop, supported by Purdue's James F. Ackerman Center for Democratic Citizenship, has reached its capacity of 50 registrants. Conference leaders consider encouraging such teaching in the schools to be a priority.

Other Purdue units providing support are the Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Office of the Vice Provost for Student Life, College of Education, College of Liberal Arts, Department of History, LGBTQ Center, and Jewish Studies Program.

Local sponsors include the endowment of the Sam and Edith Chosnek Memorial Fund; the Jewish Federation of Greater Lafayette; and Subway of Lafayette, owned by Bauer Inc.; Hillel Foundation; the Sons of Abraham synagogue; and Temple Israel.