Toby Kirsch
Brief History
Toby Kirsh was born in 1911 in Warsaw, Poland. Not long after she was born, however, her family moved to Belgium. In 1933, German Jews began to flee to the country, following Hitler's rise to power. On May 10th, 1940, the German Army marched into Belgium, and after only seventeen days of fighting, conquered the country. Mrs. Kirsh's husband, David Kirsh, had been forced to give up his schooling after the German invasion, and soon after, he joined a Belgian resistance group (Mouvment National Belge). Mrs. Kirsh and her husband fought and hid from the Nazis until they were able to move - with the support of the resistance group - to the Ardennes region of Belgium in 1941. Here, Mrs. Kirsh took on the responsibility of transporting children out of danger in Brussels to safe shelters and houses elsewhere. During the next four years, Mrs. Kirsh and her husband saw very little of one another. Mr. Kirsh moved constantly, fighting with the resistance, and Mrs. Kirsh spent many of her days transporting children to safety. During her time helping the resistance, Mrs. Kirsh saved about 60 children. After liberation by US troops in 1945, Mrs. Kirsh and her husband moved back to an apartment in Brussels. Mrs. Kirsh gave birth to her first daughter, Estelle, two years later. Not long after, they obtained visas and moved to the United States, where Mrs. Kirsh and her husband had their second daughter, Regina, in 1950.
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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.