Lecture Recognizes Holocaust Memorial Day

04/16/2014 

SUNY Cortland will recognize Holocaust Memorial Day with a lecture Tuesday, April 22, about recent reconciliations between Germans and Jews.

David Kay, an economist from Cornell University, offers “Remembrance and Reconciliation: A Return to Germany from America” at 7:30 p.m. in Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge. The lecture, organized by the College’s Jewish Studies Committee and its Hillel student organization, is free and open to the public.

Kay will share personal stories about recent gestures of closure. Many Germans have reached out to the families of Jews who were persecuted by the Nazi regime or forced to flee their hometowns in the 1930s. Often, invitations are extended to the Jewish people to visit their family’s one-time home — a gesture mixing reunion, reconciliation and remembrance.

Since 2001, Kay has accompanied his father, Eric, on three reunion trips to Heidelberg, where Eric was born. David Kay will share photos from his trips and from his family’s archives, using them to discuss the highlights of the visits and the varied reactions of participants. In addition to sharing his family history, Kay will discuss the efforts of modern Germany to interpret its Nazi past.

Holocaust Remembrance Day serves both as a day of reflection and as a recognition of heroism, said Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Political Science Henry Steck. The day is devoted to remembering the victims of the Holocaust, and it also honors the heroism of the Jewish ghetto fighters from Nazi-occupied Warsaw who rose up April 19, 1944, in a revolt against the Nazi army to stop the deportation of Jews to extermination camps.

Kay’s lecture is sponsored by the Auxiliary Services Corporation, the James M. Clark Center for International Education, SUNY Cortland’s Project on Eastern and Central Europe, the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies and the College’s History, Political Science and Psychology departments.

For more information, contact Steck at 607-753-4807.