Olga Stern
Olga Stern was born in Polana, Czechoslovakia in 1929. When the town was annexed by Hungary, Olga's father lost his job, and the family lost their home. After her father's death in 1942, her mother moved to Budapest to find work and later sent for the children. Following the German occupation in 1944, Olga and her mother lived in an apartment building under Swedish protection through the efforts of Raoul Wallenberg. The city was liberated by the Russians in January 1945.
Olga and her sister returned to Czechoslovakia and later were able to come to the United States to study. She remained in New York, married another Hungarian survivor and had two daughters. She tells the remarkable story of her husband Stanley's Holocaust experiences in her interview. After Stanley was deported from Budapest to Buchenwald, he found one part of a tefillin in a bonfire. Then a gypsy came through the barracks offering to sell the second part. Stanley exchanged it for a sweater. Now he had a complete tefillin. He and all the other men in his barracks lined up to take their turn putting on the tefillin to say their morning prayers.
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Featured speaker: Ron Kronish & Respondents: Rabbi Bob Kaplan and Sheikh Moosa Drammeh Ron Kronish, Founding Director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), Ron Kronish is now an independent scholar, educator, speaker, and writer. “Profiles in Peace,” his new book on Israeli and Palestinian Peacemakers. Rabbi Dr. Ron Kronish is an independent scholar, writer, blogger, lecturer, teacher and mentor. For the past several years, he has been a Library Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. From 1991-2015, he served as the Founder and Director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), which was Israel’s premier interreligious institution during those years. He was educated at Brandeis University (BA), Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the editor of Coexistence and Reconciliation in Israel: Voices for Interreligious Dialogue (Paulist Press, 2015) and the author of The Other Peace Process: Interreligious Dialogue, A View from Jerusalem, (Hamilton Books 2017). He currently teaches courses about Interreligious Dialogue and Peacebuilding at the Schechter Institutes for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, in the Department for Adult Education and for the Drew University Theological School (via zoom) in Madison, NJ.
Adi Rabinowitz Bedein, Activist & Holocaust Education. Adi is a young activist who lives in Israel and is a tour guide at Yad Vashem, she will lecture on: “Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust- True Heroism.” Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust During the Holocaust the Jewish people were facing 3 options: Passivity, collaboration and Resistance. In my lecture about Resistance during the Holocaust I discuss the meaning of the Jewish resistance- a story about Strength and true Heroism which can teach us so much that is relevant for our everyday life.