Jewish Women's Resistance in the Holocaust
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
EST: 1:00 PM
UK: 6:00 PM
CET: 7:00 PM
Israel: 8:00 PM
The conversation will introduce Jewish women’s resistance during the Holocaust. Jewish women contributed to resistance activities across Nazi-occupied Europe in necessary and critical ways. They smuggled guns and ammunition, mobilized resistance in ghettos and undergrounds, fought in armed combat, documented partisan activities, tended the wounded, rescued and sheltered fellow Jews, and helped for their families to survive. Their diverse experiences have been preserved in oral histories, memoirs, poetry, photographs and film, as well as in contemporaneous and postwar testimonies.
Shana Penn is Executive Director of Taube Philanthropies, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies, in Berkeley. Her award-winning book, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland was published in the United States in 2005 and in Poland in 2014. Shana was decorated with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2013 and received the Medal of Gratitude from the European Solidarity Centre, in Gdańsk in 2020.
Sylwia Chutnik is a writer, publicist, social activist, feminist and promoter of reading. She is a graduate of Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at the Warsaw University from which she holds a PhD. Sylwia is a member of the Union of Polish Writers and the Union of Writers Association, and a curator of festivals and literary initiatives (Apostrophe – International Literary Festival, OFF Literary Café). She is a columnist for the Polish press: Polityka, Pani, Wysokie Obcasy, and Gazeta Stołeczna. Her texts have appeared in collective books and in many catalogs for exhibitions of contemporary art and theater programs (including the Grand Theater – National Opera and the Nobel Museum in Stockholm). Dr. Chutnik is also the lead singer in a punk band Zimny Maj.
Zuzanna Hertzberg is an interdisciplinary artist, artivist, and researcher. Her art includes painting, performance, textiles, and assemblage. She earned her PhD. at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and is also a graduate of the W. Strzeminski Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. A creator of installations and collages made using archival materials, Zuzanna is interested in the interweaving of individual and collective memory, in the search for identity within the mechanism of appropriation and restitution of minority heritage, especially women’s heritage. She has held exhibitions at the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Her most recent exhibition Mechitza: Individual and Collective Resistance of Women During the Shoah, was presented at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
Sheri Rosenblum is the Director of Development and Outreach for the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. She holds a BA and an MA in Judaic Studies from UCLA and Brandeis University. Sheri studied for two years under the renowned Dr. Amos Funkenstein (z” l), winner of the coveted Israel Prize for History. She wrote her undergraduate thesis, Moral Dilemmas of the Judenrat, under the direction of Dr. Arnold Band, the A. Savitt Fellow at the United States Holocaust Museum. In her role at the JPEF, she trains educators worldwide on how to use the Foundation’s innovative RESIST materials in the classroom. An expert on the Jewish partisans, she lectures extensively on the subject, has appeared in NPR interviews, and provided resources for the BBC and Amazon podcasts.
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