An international colloquium timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Vienna’s “Kristallnacht” - Vienna’s “Night of Broken Glass” - and focusing on memory, responsibility, trauma, and judgment as experienced through the recollection and interpretation of war will take place at the Yeshiva University Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th Street, on Sunday, November 23, beginning at 10 a.m. The colloquium is co-sponsored by New York University’s Center on Violence and Recovery. For further information on this free event, contact Yael Shy at yael.shy@nyu.edu, call 212-998-2266 or visit www.nyu.edu/cvr/events.html
This colloquium will address Vienna’s culpability, the Jewish Community’s own moral obligations of the time, the 2000 discovery of the Jewish Community Archive, and the transmission of trauma across generations. The conference will conclude with a discussion of the lingering effects of “Kristallnacht,” and a look to the future for new ways to heal these long-standing wounds and interrupt patterns of their transmission.
Highlights of “Vienna’s ‘Kristallnacht’: 70 Years On” will include:
- - A screening of the film Truth Be Told (A Work in Progress), chronicling one family’s journey back to Vienna, from where they fled the Nazis in 1939. The film focuses on the discovery of the Jewish Community Archive and on records found there that challenge and even contradict the stories passed down the generations. The film is directed by Brian Dilg and written and produced by Linda Mills, director of NYU’s Center on Violence and Recovery, and Peter Goodrich, a law professor at Yeshiva University. A panel discussion with the filmmakers and two European directors, Ruth Beckerman and Christian Delage, follows.
- - A lecture, “Ranks of Powerlessness: Vienna 1938-1945, the Path to the Judenrat” by Doron Rabinovici, Austrian-Israeli writer and historian.
- - A discussion, “Vienna: Continuity and Change,” by leading historians, archivists, and educators on the renewal of interest in and the admission of responsibility for the Holocaust in contemporary Austria, with Lothar Hölbling, Holocaust Victims’ Information and Support Center of the Jewish Community, Vienna; University of Klagenfurt historian Herbert Posch; and Christine Stromberger, Ministry of Education, Arts, and Culture, among other participants.
- - A multidisciplinary panel on “Trauma Across Time,” addressing the specific issue of the impact of trauma upon subsequent generations.
- - “Global Contexts: Continuity and Change,” a discussion with NYU President John Sexton; Dennis Davis, High Court Judge, South Africa; and Hannah Lessing, Secretary General, Austrian National Fund, on the lingering impact of Kristallnacht globally, and the potential for healing.
This colloquium is co-sponsored with the Yeshiva University School of Law Jacob Burns Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, the Yeshiva University Program in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies, and the Yeshiva University Program in Law and Humanities.
Glatt kosher refreshments and lunch will be served. A wine and cheese reception follows the event.
Media wishing to cover this event should contact Barbara Jester at 212.998.6844, barbara.jester@nyu.edu; or Yael Shy at 212.998.2266, yael.shy@nyu.edu.