Sonja Pieck’s book about Germany’s Green Belt, the once-militarized Iron Curtain border between the former East and West Germany, begins with the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ professor back in her homeland, walking with an ornithologist along part of the huge conservation corridor.

As they walk, she turns and notices a cluster of crosses fashioned into an ad hoc memorial beneath a small stand of oak trees. A wooden sign at the memorial explains that it commemorates the lives of two border guards who had been killed there. 

At that moment, Pieck had an epiphany: If not for the Green Belt’s management approach, the formerly militarized corridor would have simply reverted back to forest, and the deaths there could never have been honored in this way. The simple memorial had created a narrative about the lives that had been lost there, and the loss and pain that connected others to this spot.

“Somebody had written a poem to remember the dead and put it under glass, right next to a carefully arranged wreath of flowers” recalls Pieck, the Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝. “That was perhaps one of the pivotal moments of my research, where things just fell into place. It deeply moved me, this relationship between love, grief, memory, and conservation.”

Last month, Pieck’s book about the Green Belt, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) earned a PROSE Award in the category of Environmental Science and a higher-order award for excellence in physical sciences and mathematics, one of just four “super-category” winners in the Association of American Publishers’ annual awards program.

Pieck sets aside industry jargon to turn the book with the heady name into one that reads like a good novel. From the start, Pieck said the goal was clear: To get the book’s overarching message that conservation on wounded land must engage with memory — the memory of humans, animals, and the Earth — beyond academia to the international conservation community.

“At its core, it’s a story about people and their love for the land,” says Pieck. “I wanted to speak to the practitioners and conservationists, but also broadly to historians and artists and even people who are coming in from the mental health side — professionals who are thinking about questions about truth and reconciliation or about repair work more broadly.” 

Her message in Mnemonic Ecologies already has resonated beyond academia. In June she will speak on a panel of scholars about the Green Belt effort at a world heritage preservation symposium co-hosted by UNESCO and the Critical Global Studies Institute in Seoul, Korea.

In Korea, the demilitarized zone is about 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide. There, too, nature is taking back the built environment. As in Germany, the Koreans “have experienced the sort of ecological irony of endangered species settling in and near the demilitarized zone. They want to take a similar conservation approach. So they’re in discussion with German conservationists, and drawing on people like me to help think about history, memory, and heritage in the age of ecological crisis.”

Much of Mnemonic Ecologies is an in-depth case study of how the Green Belt aided in Germany’s larger nationwide reckoning with its decades-long partition, socialist dictatorship, and challenging reunification. In creating the 866-mile swath of open land with the nation’s history in mind, the effort demonstrated how conservation, when approached as a community effort, can protect threatened species and habitats as well as serve as an opportunity for reparation and healing after civil unrest and war.

Done well, she said, conservation can create space for psychological well-being by embracing a sense of place, and what that place might mean to different groups of people, as Pieck explains in her book: 

“Working the terrain of grief need not be the sole responsibility of the conservationist but rather should be facilitated by broader coalitions than usual. Science-based conservation NGOs are used to working with local partner organizations, but especially in landscapes of post violence, it is time to draw in new allies such as historians, post-war documentation centers, mental health professionals, pastoral care workers, victims organizations, museums, artists, theater groups, storytellers, poets, and peacemakers — in other words, those who understand how to care for the living by honoring their dead.” 

Pieck identifies broad lessons from the German Green Belt experience  that might be applicable to other projects worldwide, including the United States. “I think one can argue that the entire United States consists of wounded land, given the history of land theft, genocide, and slavery,” Pieck said.

At the end of the book, a chapter on global mnemonic ecologies looks at wounded land more broadly, including at some of the most biodiverse places in the world that also have been arenas for some of the worst conflicts of the 20th and 21st century, places like the Balkans, Colombia, and Cambodia. Pieck said these places also are facing the tension between memory, memorialization, pain, grief, loss and the need for conservation to protect rich biodiversity. “Local communities need to decide how best to do that based on their unique situation. There are inspiring examples worldwide where people are already engaged in this kind of care-work.” 

Pieck’s research spanned nine years, including six summers in her native Germany doing fieldwork along different stretches of the Green Belty, which became a gratifying and enjoyable experience.

From there, the writing flowed easily. “I had thought about this topic for so long, and I had accumulated so much evidence and so much scholarship on it that the writing process itself felt good,” she said. 

 “It is a story of ecological revival. It’s beautiful that something healing could come out of the pain. That gives me so much hope.”

“It’s full circle,” says Elizabeth Rynecki ’91, “which is fabulous.”

A rhetoric major at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ and a student of that department’s late, legendary professor Robert Branham, Rynecki returned to campus this week at the invitation of a rhetoric class — students organizing the 2019 ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Film Festival.

Produced by students in professor Jonathan Cavallero’s course “Film Festival Studies,” was the latest festival to screen Rynecki’s 2018 documentary, Chasing Portraits. The film recounts her efforts over two decades to track down artwork created by her great-grandfather, a prolific observer of his Jewish community in pre-war Poland, and then lost during World War II.

“It all started at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ for me, and this film is linked together with that,” says Rynecki. “I had always loved documentary film, and Branham just stoked that interest from angles that I had never really thought about before.”

Elizabeth Rynecki ’91 catches up with Bill Hiss ’66 before the screening of her film Chasing Portraits in Olin 104. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

The film is a companion piece to Rynecki’s 2016 book, , a memoir that Kirkus called a “wonderful story beautifully told.” As she was growing up in northern California, the Rynecki home was filled with artwork by her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki. The paintings depicted people at work and play, in family settings, during religious observances and celebrations.

Moshe produced some 800 paintings. At the outbreak of World War II, he stashed caches of the work with people he knew around Warsaw, sharing the paintings’ whereabouts only with his wife, Perla, and son, George.

When the Nazis imprisoned Warsaw’s Jews in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, Moshe chose to “stay with his people” (in George’s words) and go into the ghetto, while the rest of the family went into hiding elsewhere in the city. Moshe is believed to have perished in the Majdanek death camp after the 1943 Ghetto Uprising.

Perla and George, along with George’s wife and son — Elizabeth’s father, Alex — survived the war. At war’s end, with Warsaw in ruins, Perla was able to recover only one group of 120 paintings.

Moshe Rynecki’s painting of a wedding tells its story despite the damage inflicted on it.

In 1999, Elizabeth built an , believing those were the only artworks of Moshe’s to survive the war. But to her surprise, the website sparked responses from collectors and curators who knew about dozens of other surviving works.

Her book and film depict both her international quest to visit and document as many of those paintings as she could, and the family dynamics around Moshe’s art. The film, in particular, “isn’t about the Holocaust,” she explains. “It’s the aftermath, intergenerational trauma, relationships, and genealogy. It’s a very specific family history, but it’s also a microcosm of one person’s history against a larger world history.”

She adds, “My great-grandfather was not a famous artist, but he was a known artist in Warsaw in the ’20s and ’30s. He wanted to be an artist of merit. So to be able to carry that work forward makes me proud. And I’m grateful to those who have been excited to learn about it.”

A self-portrait by Moshe Rynecki.

We spoke with Rynecki a few hours before she presented to the BFF audience.

How did Chasing Portraits, book and film, come about?

My grandpa George wrote a collection of vignettes of his memories of life in Poland up to and through the war. And in it he says, “I’m writing this, if for no other reason, than for my granddaughter Elizabeth to know the truth and not to be afraid of it.”

He died in February of ’92. And I was living in Washington, D.C., when the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened there, in 1993. And then I went to grad school for rhetoric at UC Davis, and wrote my thesis about how children of Holocaust survivors fit within Holocaust discourse.

And so all of these pieces came together. I felt this obligation to my family to record this history that they had not really wanted to talk about, but I didn’t know how to do that. And when I realized that the paintings were survivors that could not speak, and that I could speak for them and tell their history, that was really the linchpin of deciding that Chasing Portraits needed to move forward.

The only people who can bear witness are the survivors themselves. So those of us who didn’t exactly experience that history but nonetheless were impacted by it, how do we articulate that? And as the survivors are dying, there’s this struggle and rush to make sure that next generations learn this history, and how do we do that?

A scene in a synagogue, painted by Moshe Rynecki.

When you studied rhetoric here, the curriculum encompassed film, and now the department is even named “Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies.” How did a rhetoric background support writing and directing your film?

I could not have made my film without the amazing team of people that I worked with. I don’t have the skills and expertise. But I knew what all the pieces were and what all the stories were. Because of my ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ rhetoric background, I understood and saw things in ways that were different than I might have otherwise.

How do the book and the film relate to each other?

Probably the first half of the book tells more of the history, drawn from my grandpa George’s memoir. And then my quest picks up, and the book tells the story of my experiences.

I never wanted to make a Holocaust film, so the film is a contemporary story. And something very interesting happened in the editing room. I came with 100-plus hours of footage, and I said, “Here are all these pieces and I don’t really know how they go together, but here’s the general sense of what’s going on.”

My consulting editor, Josh Peterson, was the editor on a project about the Nazis’ systematic looting of art across Europe. So he really understood the art story and he said, “Yes, this is an art story for sure. But what really frames the story is your relationship with your father.”

Elizabeth and her father, Alex, in the recording studio. (SĹ‚awomir GrĂĽnberg)

If my father was sitting here, he would be delightful and charming. But if you asked him to recall wartime events, in history and emotions, he would deflect. He just does not like to talk about it. Plus he doesn’t really remember a lot — he was 9 when the war ended.

Between the art by Moshe that Perla found and the pieces that have turned up since, you have seen about 200 of his images. What are a couple that are especially meaningful to you?

I’m always fascinated by his self-portraits. My great-grandfather grew up in a religious family, but he lived a much more secular life. What’s really interesting is that he created these really religious scenes, and they’re very accurate. And yet, when he paints himself, he paints himself as a classically Western male.

Elizabeth Rynecki ’91 poses with a painting by her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki — a self-portrait that situates the artist beside, but not part of, a wedding ceremony. (Shoey Sindel Photography)

So there’s one big painting that’s mostly a wedding scene, but my great-grandfather’s off to the side, and he’s looking right at us. So it’s interesting: Here’s this religious and important cultural family moment — and I don’t know who is in the wedding — and he has one foot in each world, and that painting really symbolizes that.

Another one, Luna Park, shows people at an amusement park in Warsaw. And what draws me to that painting is that, when we think about Jews and Poland, and Eastern Europe in general, we mostly think about all of those who were murdered. And we should know that.

But before you focus just on the death and the destruction and the loss, you need to know what was there before — a vibrant community. Warsaw was called the “Paris of the East,” and in the movie, my dad says something like, “It was the apex of that world.” What I love about that painting is that it shows this thriving community.

You can love a super famous painting that’s in a museum, but it’s different to have a really emotional tie with a painting. And at one point I say in the movie, “My great grandfather’s paintings are more than things to me. They’re actually a physical link to him.” He painted them, he touched and held those canvases. And that, to me, is an incredibly powerful experience and emotion.

Luna Park by Moshe Rynecki.

Educator, author, champion of equal opportunity for women, and a human-rights advocate whose passion was forged by her experiences in the Holocaust and by surviving the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Hessisch-Lichtenau concentration camps, Judith Magyar Isaacson ’65, LL.D. ’94, died on Nov. 10 at age 90.

In 2006, Judith Magyar Isaacson ’65 signs her memoir “Seed of Sarah” after a class about the Holocaust taught by former ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ professor Steve Hochstadt. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

She earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ in 1965 and a master’s in mathematics at Bowdoin two years later. She taught math at Lewiston High School and then at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, where she became the dean of women in 1969 and dean of students in 1975. She retired in August 1978.

As dean, she was instrumental in ending the college’s unequal and antiquated codes of social conduct for men and women and in increasing extracurricular and athletic opportunities for female students.

In 1976, after discussing her Holocaust experiences with a group of students, Isaacson was moved to record those memories. Published in 1990, her memoir Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor is an enduring inspiration of courage and resilience for young women and men.

‘Inextinguishable force of human worth’

Isaacson received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree at Commencement 1994, and the degree citation read, in part:

To remember vividly, so that none can forget — to say the unspeakable, so that all can hear — takes a voice of courage, power, and eloquence. Your strengths, Judith Isaacson, touch the lives of not only your family and your colleagues but those countless others who read in your personal and professional life the inextinguishable force of human worth.

For preserving, for giving testimony, for helping us to understand, and for the encouragement of conviction, we stand in admiration and resolve.

Judith Isaacson receives the honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1994. (ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Communications)

‘I fought pretty hard for women’

In 2004, Kirsten Terry Murphy ’07 wrote a story for The ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Student about Isaacson’s induction into the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame.

Murphy wrote about Isaacson’s work as dean to dismantle the college’s notoriously unequal social rules that literally ran many pages for  women and a few pages for men:

Isaacson could see that many of the codes of conduct at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ were outdated, and quickly became an advocate for women’s rights at the school. She had children of her own in college at that point, and from their experiences she found that, comparatively, the policies at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ were very different. “Young, 18-year-old women had far more freedoms at home than at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝,” explained Isaacson….

Isaacson resolved other important complaints from students. One concerned the issue of parietals. Previously, men and women did not have permission to enter dorms of the opposite sex, but she changed campus-housing rules to allow visitations. Another problem surrounded sports. “I fought pretty hard for women to have athletic privileges,” she said.

Judith Isaacson talks with members of the Women’s Council in 1970, the start of changes that would make ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ social life more equal for women. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

‘How many times have I started anew?’

Isaacson retired from ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ in 1978. Shortly afterward, she wrote an essay about that final Commencement as dean of students and about her uncertain, but growing, idea of writing her memoirs, which would become Seed of Sarah.

The essay recalls the academic procession, led by President Hedley Reynolds, who

….carries his presidential paraphernalia with great dignity, his head held high, his steps springy. I am proud to be following just behind him, but still incredulous of my position. What right have I, the ultimate outsider, to be playing this venerable role?

My mind, that relentless time machine, projects a different image. Instead of stepping along the carpeted aisle in my academic gown, cap and hood, I see myself marching in a mile-long procession, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, stark naked….

This is my next-to-last official function at the College. After tomorrow’s Commencement, I’ll be embarking on a new venture, just like the seniors.

How many times have I started anew? I muse, as my eyes follow the members of the Class of 1977 making their solemn way to the front pews. How many different identities have I had?

Judit Magyar — a family name meaning Hungarian.
Jewish teenager under the Nazi regime.
Number 561.20578 in concentration camps.
Frau Hauptman, American captain’s wife in Germany.
Mrs. Irving Isaacson, lawyer’s wife in Lewiston, Maine.
Mom, to my children.
Judy, to my classmates.
Mrs. Isaacson, to my math students.
Dean Isaacson for the past eight years.
Will Grammi be next? Here is hoping.

Irving Isaacson ’36 and Judith Isaacson met after her liberation by American troops in 1945. Married on Dec. 24, 1945, they were photographed in 2000 by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

‘A warm and humorous optimist’

Historian Steve Hochstadt, a Holocaust scholar who taught at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ from 1979 to 2006, had a long friendship with Isaacson that included a classroom relationship.

Each year that he taught his course on the Holocaust, she would visit.

“It’s very important for Holocaust students to meet a survivor,” said Hochstadt in 2006.  “And ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students get to see what kind of survivor Judith is: a warm and humorous optimist.”

Hochstadt tells the that Isaacson “was an extraordinarily joyous person who could tell you about very sad things that happened to her, her relatives and her friends, but who was able to retain joy in life.”

Hochstadt that Isaacson and Seed of Sarah expanded the narrative of the Holocaust to include women.

Speaking to 125 students in the Filene lecture hall, Hochstadt tells the Sun Journal, “she was so relaxed, so happy to be there, so confident.”

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

‘All who live, rejoice, rejoice’

Katalin Vecsey, a senior lecturer in the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ theater department, was born in Hungary, as was Isaacson.

Isaacson, she said, became her “Hungarian mother in the United States.”

Seed of Sarah begins with this quote by a Hungarian poet, Endre Ady: “All who live, rejoice, rejoice.”

“I think that totally sums up her life,” Vecsey tells the Press Herald. “She really was so grateful to be alive and she shared that joy with everybody.”

Kati Vecsey and Judith Isaacson, photographed in 2009 by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

The 2013 Phillips Fellows, Asha Mohamud ’15 and Rachel Baumann ’14. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

“The next world is already on its way. College education in the U.S. faces the urgent task of getting ready for it,” ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ President Charles F. Phillips told the incoming class during Convocation 1959.

Intersections between culture and medicine drew Asha Mohamud to Tanzania.

Phillips was referring specifically to Asia, which was just beginning its ascent to today’s global influence. But ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝’ fourth president was getting at a broader notion as well: the educational importance of understanding cultures different from one’s own.

Since 1999, Phillips Student Fellowships have put that concept into action. Phillips Fellows create outstanding international or cross-cultural projects involving research, community-engaged learning or career exploration.

The program supports immersion in another culture, opportunities for intense meaningful work and unique prospects for intellectual and personal growth.

Meet Phillips Fellows Rachel Baumann ’14 and Asha Mohamud ’15.

The story of her grandparents’ escape from the Holocaust drew Rachel Baumann to Europe.

The student fellowships, along with faculty fellowships and professorships, are supported by the Phillips Endowment Program, a suite of awards, honors and opportunities funded by a $9 million bequest to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ by Phillips and his wife, Evelyn Minard Phillips.

“The fellowships take students out of their comfort zone in ways that are personally transformative, and prepare them to be citizens of the world,” says Kerry O’Brien, assistant dean of the faculty. “They really embody the mission of the college on several levels: educating the whole person, honoring diversity, cultivating intellectual discovery and civic action, and preparing future leaders.”

In 2013, seeking to understand experiences outside the U.S. that had changed the lives of people close to them, two ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students sought and were awarded Phillips Fellowships.

Frieda Esther Lopatka, grandmother of Rachel Baumann.

ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ senior Rachel Baumann discusses her grandparents’ travails during the Holocaust, and offers insights into both wartime history and the importance of humanity and faith, in a talk at 4:15 p.m. Friday, Nov. 15, Room G65, Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road.

Titled Why My Grandmother Converted to Judaism in Nazi Germany During 1936, the talk is sponsored by the Multifaith Chaplaincy. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, please email hbalcomb@bates.edu.

Baumann, of Fairfield, Conn., traveled to Europe last summer on the strength of a Phillips Fellowship from ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ to retrace her Jewish grandparents’ steps through Berlin, Warsaw and the surrounding suburbs where they sought refuge as Jews during Nazi rule.

Her grandmother had converted to Judaism — perhaps for the sake of being in love, perhaps because she was simply moved by the faith — at the same time that Nazis began their persecution of the Jews.

Baumann also studied today’s Jewish community in Berlin and spent time at the Jewish Museum Berlin to get an understanding of the contemporary identity and climate for Jews in Germany.

Through studying how Berlin actively remembers the atrocities of World War Two, from large memorials to individual stones in the street, Baumann was able to piece together both her family’s missing narrative and a greater story of how a country broken by war and hatred can self-consciously rebuild a narrative of peace and remembrance.

Baumann is the same age that her grandparents were when the Nazis rose to power in Germany. Though they were able to survive their trials in Europe and emigrate to America, until this summer their young adulthood was a mystery to Baumann and her family.

ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College’s other 2013 Phillips Fellow, Asha Mohamud ’15 of Lewiston, spent her summer in Tanzania working for an HIV/AIDS clinic and learning about community-driven public health initiatives.

The Phillips Student Fellowship is a summer research grant given to two ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students every year, allowing them to explore another culture, conduct immersive research, and grow personally and intellectually through their unique experiences.

Ann Weiss, who discovered at Auschwitz a cache of photographs from the lives of Jewish victims before they arrived at the death camp, speaks at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14, at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Confiscated from Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1943, the images reflect the memories that men and women sent to Auschwitz could not leave behind. A unique testament to the vitality of the victims’ lives, these photos are the only known surviving collection from a whole transport to a concentration camp.

At ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, Weiss will discuss her discovery of the photographs and the journey culminating in their publication in her 2001 book “The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

The event is open to the public and will be followed by a book signing. For more information, please contact 207-755-5980.

In contrast to the Holocaust images embedded in our minds, these extraordinary photos provide an intimate and compelling record of who the Nazis’ victims were, whom they loved and what mattered most to them.

Weiss discovered the collection of more than 2,000 photos by accident during a group tour of Auschwitz in 1986. She has traveled the globe researching the stories behind the photos. Her journey has taken more than 20 years, including many visits to Poland to secure permissions and copy the photos, and far-ranging travels to reunite photos with remaining family members. Whenever a story was matched to a face, an identity was restored.

“Survivors have always told me how their loved one died, but I would ask a new question, ‘How did they live?’ ” says Weiss. “And even when no survivor remains to tell the story, it is the photos themselves, and the eyes, that reveal their own powerful testimony.”

The photographs are the basis for touring exhibitions and a 1988 documentary film, “Eyes from the Ashes.” The images have been displayed around the world including an exhibit at the Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Weiss is a principal interviewer, researcher and analyst for The University of Pennsylvania’s “Transcending Trauma: Psychological Mechanisms of Survival” project, which has interviewed Holocaust survivors in the most detailed interview protocol to date.

She serves on the editorial board of the “Studies in the Shoah” series of history books, and has served as a trained interviewer for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Project, founded by director Steven Spielberg.

She is the founder and director of the Eyes from the Ashes Foundation, an educational organization. .

Katalin Vecsey, a member of the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College theater faculty, reads from the writings of Holocaust survivor Judith Magyar Isaacson ’65 in a free public event.

Selections from Isaacson’s book Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor, as well as a forthcoming sequel, soon to be published by Hentrich & Hentrich, of Berlin, will be presented by Vecsey.

• Callahan Hall at the Lewiston Public Library
• Thursday, Feb. 12, at 7 p.m.

The seminar will be highlighted by various evening speeches given by survivors of the Holocaust. Lou Shulman recounts his experience of Life in the Warsaw Ghetto, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 8. Rochelle and Jerry Slivka, both survivors of the Holocaust, will speak at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 9. The speeches will be held in Room G52, located on the ground floor of Pettengill Hall.

The weeklong seminar includes lectures by special guest scholars and speakers, films and reviews of books and videos followed by discussion. In addition, the seminar will focus on methods of educating elementary school students about the Holocaust as well as examine the changing nature of Holocaust studies entering the 21st century.

Sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, the Spiritual Journeys lecture series features speakers from a variety of traditions who tell the stories of their spiritual awakening and development. Speakers are invited to explore how they experience a sense of the holy in their everyday lives, how their perspectives and disciplines have shaped that sacred experience, and how they understand religion as a resource or an obstacle to the life of the soul. Speakers may also address what the political and social consequences of their spirituality.