An Interfaith Service of Remembrance for Kristallnacht
1938 - 2021

November 9 • 7 pm
Wallace All Faiths Chapel • Fish Interfaith Center 

Who Will Tell Our History?

Reflections by Glenn Kurtz, Ph.D.
Presidential Fellow at Chapman University
Author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film

 For the 14^th year, Chapman University gathers as an interfaith community to commemorate Kristallnacht. We remember the violence that swept across Germany and Austria 83 years ago on November 9-10, 1938, the arrests and deportations that followed, and the precedent that this event set for subsequent Nazi actions. We also remember the courageous few from many walks of life and beliefs who dared to defy Nazi authority and to become rescuers and resisters.

At this year’s commemoration, author Glenn Kurtz will speak on the challenges of passing down historical memory to the next generation with particular reference to Nasielsk, Poland, birthplace of Kurtz’s grandfather and the setting for his book Three Minutes in Poland. Today young people in Nasielsk tend to see the Holocaust era exclusively in terms of its effects on Poland with a methodological division between Polish history and Jewish history. To address this issue, a group of the town’s Jewish descendants, including Dr. Kurtz, and local educators are working collaboratively to create an educational program that seeks to bridge how the two communities define themselves in relation to their wartime history. By inviting students to explore the four-hundred-years of multi-ethnic coexistence that defined the town prior to the Holocaust, the program engages the problem of historical memory and the fraught issues at the heart of contemporary Polish-Jewish relations by asking who is included in “our” history.

Glenn Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, which was named a “Best Book of 2014” by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. He has delivered keynote addresses at such venues as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Jewish Historical Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and the POLIN Museum of the History of the Polish Jews (Warsaw, Poland). He holds a doctorate in German studies and comparative literature from Stanford University and is currently at work on a nonfiction book about the Empire State Building.

This event is presented in partnership with the Fish Interfaith Center

Funded in part by The Sally and Jerry Schwartz Endowment for Holocaust Education

Copies of Three Minutes in Poland will be available for purchase.

If COVID safety protocols allow, a book signing and reception will follow the event.

For those unable to join us on campus, the lecture will be livestreamed at https://chapman.zoom.us/j/98613663005