Holocaust Seminar Explores Bearing Witness Into the Future

The Jewish Community Board of Akron announces the annual Holocaust Seminar: bearing witness into the future - a holocaust seminar for teachers and other interested adult learners. The seminar is Monday, Oct. 8, from 4-8 p.m. on the Schultz Campus for Jewish Life.

Dr. Mark B. Cole, an associate college lecturer in history, Cleveland State University will present the keynote: “The Holocaust: Perpetrators and Bystanders.”

Cole’s lecture will begin to untangle the complex historical paradox about perpetrators and bystanders. “Despite the fact that the majority of Germans never voted for the Nazi Party, nor were they aggressively anti-Semitic before 1933, they nonetheless perpetrated the Holocaust or stood idly by as it happened,” Cole writes.

Professor Cole specializes in modern Europe and Germany, focusing on Nazism and the Holocaust. He has presented his research at the Maltz Museum and across the United States, and in Germany and Israel. He has been a fellow of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., and the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University.

The seminar will feature “Why We Speak: Survivor Panel” with three generations of survivors each sharing why it is so important to them to have present and future generations “bear witness into the future.”

Other sessions feature historical background (with Esther Hexter), hands-on encounter with historical resources (with Barb White), and sharing discoveries from resources with teachers as they consider how to bring challenge to students to bear witness (featuring seminar attendees, with Barb White and Sam Chestnut).

This is the twenty-third Holocaust seminar led by the Jewish Community Board of Akron with The Lippman School serving as co-sponsor since 2013. The Akron Summit County Public Library has assisted throughout. A grant from the Rose & Lawrence Schwartz Holocaust Education Fund with ALEF, the Akron Legacy & Endowment Fund, Jewish Community Board of Akron, Inc. provides funding support.

Registration fees are $18 with box supper (dietary laws observed); or $12 for seminar alone. Registration deadline is Wednesday, Oct. 3. For information or registration form contact Sheri Galat, 330-869-2424, or register online

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