Please join us for a service of remembrance and to honor local Holocaust survivors and their families followed by the program: “Postcards from Europe’s Edge” presented by Professor Amos Bitzan, the Frances and Laurence Weinstein Assistant Professor of Modern European Jewish History in the Department of History and the Center for Jewish Studies at UW-Madison. His course offerings include a course on the History of the Holocaust, about which he will be presenting.

In 2015 a Center for Jewish Studies board member discovered a collection of postcards, sent between 1940-41 to his parents who had emigrated from Nazi Germany to Racine, WI, from his grandmother, Sara Spira, then living in Nazi-occupied Poland. The postcards bore witness to the cruel world she now lived in solely because she was Jewish. The course was both about one victim, Sara Spira, and the broader study of the Holocaust as a whole. Professor Bitzan will present Sara Spira’s story and the process undertaken by his students to reveal the circumstances that she and her fellow Jews witnessed. The stories that he will share with us are from his classroom, and beyond.

This program is funded by the Mitchell and Sharon Rapkin Endowment for Holocaust Education and Commemoration, an endowment fund of the Jewish Federation of Madison.