By Dirk Langeveld

FAIRFIELD — An annual Holocaust memorial event will be taking place at Fairfield University next week. 

The Holocaust remembrance ceremony will be held at 3 p.m. on Thursday, April 16th at the Kelley Center Presentation Room. The event is open to the public.

The featured speaker at the ceremony will be Shay Pilnik, PhD, the director of the Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University in New York City. Pilnik is the grandson of Holocaust survivors who later immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union. He previously served as the executive director at the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center in Milwaukee, Wisc. from 2014 till 2020, and is the author of The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War.

The Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies focuses on Jewish perspectives and experiences of the Holocaust, including their responses and resistance. The center says that this viewpoint is critical in order to “avoid universalization, distortion, and trivialization” of Holocaust studies.

The ceremony is hosted by Fairfield University’s Bennett Center for Judaic Studies and co-sponsored by Campus Ministry and the Jewish Federation of Fairfield County. The event is open to the public, but advance registration is required at fairfield.edu/bennett.

Fairfield University also notes how it will be receiving a Holocaust memorial sculpture later this year to join the Fairfield University Art Museum’s outdoor sculpture collection. “She Wouldn’t Take Her Boots Off” by artist Victoria Milstein, the sculpture depicts a photograph of five Holocaust victims in Latvia, including a woman historians believe refused to take off her boots. The image, a copy of which was preserved by a Jewish worker, came to symbolize quiet defiance and dignity in the face of death.

Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony

Thursday, April 16
3:00 pm
Kelley Center Presentation Room, Fairfield University
1073 North Benson Road
Fairfield

Expanded coverage of Fairfield County cultural events is made possible with support from the Fairfield University Quick Center for the Arts.

Dirk Langeveld

^{_{Dirk Langeveld has worked as a news reporter, content marketing specialist, and freelance writer. He is the author of “The Artful Dodger: The 20-Year Pursuit of World War I Draft Dodger Grover Cleveland Bergdoll” and has contributed to several books on Connecticut history.}}