Holocaust Remembrance Today - A Living Responsibility: A Panel Discussion in Conjunction with the Exhibition "Between Life and Death: Stories of Rescue During the Holocaust" at the United Nations
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Panel Discussion
Co-presented by YIVO, Center for Jewish History, European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, United Nations, and the Sousa Mendes Foundation In Person:Admission: Free Zoom Livestream:Admission: Free Note the Zoom livestream will begin at 7:00pm ET. |
Join us for a panel exploring how societies remember and reinterpret the Holocaust in the 21st century, and what meaning International Holocaust Remembrance Day holds today.
Inspired by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS) exhibition Between Life and Death: Stories of Rescue during the Holocaust, on view at the United Nations from January 13 to February 28, the discussion will focus on acts of rescue, individual moral choices, and the legacy of human solidarity during one of the darkest periods in history.
In a panel led by Jayashri Wyatt, Elżbieta Ficowska, Jay Winter, and Daniel Blatman will discuss how remembrance has evolved over the decades, how stories of rescuers and survivors can be communicated to younger generations, and how to respond to new challenges such as disinformation and the rapid development of AI, as well as the fading of living memory. The conversation will highlight why remembrance remains essential for shaping empathy, civic responsibility, and resilience in today’s world.
The panel discussion will take place at 7:00pm ET and will be preceded by a reception for the in-person audience at 6:00pm ET.
About the Panelists
Jayashri Wyatt is the Chief of Education Outreach, in the UN Department of Global Communications. She is a seasoned communications professional with a wealth of experience in the United Nations System producing high-level events, advocacy campaigns, and films for the Department of Global Communications, UNICEF, and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). She also has nearly a decade of experience as an educator championing women’s empowerment and gender equality.
Elżbieta Ficowska was born in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 to Henia and Jossel Koppel. She survived because she was smuggled to the "Aryan side" and was hid from Germans by Stanisława Bussold, a 56-year-old midwife and member of the underground who helped Jews. The only thing left from her Jewish parents is a little silver spoon bearing the girl's name and birth date. Her story is among those presented at the travelling exhibition Between Life and Death. For many years, she has been active in the Association of Children of the Holocaust, sharing her personal testimony of rescue and remembrance.
Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and a leading scholar of 20th-century European history. A specialist on the World War I, he has profoundly influenced the study of memory, mourning, and the cultural consequences of modern conflict. He is the author of numerous seminal works, including Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995), The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (1996), René Cassin and Human Rights (2013), The Cultural History of War in the Twentieth Century and After (2022), and most recently The Day the Great War Ended, 24 July 1923: The Civilianization of War (2022). He holds honorary degrees from the universities of Graz, Leuven, and Paris.
Daniel Blatman is an Israeli historian and one of the leading scholars of the Holocaust and the Jewish labor movement in Eastern Europe. He is the author of numerous works on the mechanisms of genocide and the final months of the World War II, including studies on the death marches. His publications include: For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labor Bund in Poland 1939–1945 (2003), Reportage from the Ghetto: The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw Ghetto (2005), and The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (2011).