A Survival Kit for 21st Century Jews   Monday, September 23, 2019 at 7PM (3200 California Street, SF, CA 94118) An Unorthodox Live Podcast Recording with Bari Weiss & Andrew Marantz “Since its debut in 2015, Tablet magazine’s Unorthodox has become one of the most popular and beloved Jewish podcasts in the world. Join hosts Stephanie Butnick, Liel Leibovitz Read More

The JFCS Holocaust Center is pleased to co-present seven films at this year’s film festival! Be sure to use the promo code JFCSHC39 for a special deal. This code takes $2 off any regularly priced screening.  We look forward to seeing you there! Afterward | directed by Ofra Bloch In this documentary, psychoanalyst and trauma expert Read More

Music of Remembrance Presents: The Parting Thursday, May 23, 2019 | 7:30 p.m. Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall San Francisco Conservatory of Music The Parting, a daring new opera by composer Tom Cipullo and librettist David Mason, explores the life and art of Miklós Radnóti, widely considered one of the most important poetic witnesses to Read More

Morgan Blum Schneider, Director of the JFCS Holocaust Center, will be participating in a panel discussion on antisemitism with Seth Brysk (Anti-Defamation League) and David Schraub (UC Berkeley).  The discussion will be moderated by Sue Fishkoff of J. The Jewish News of Northern California. Register here! Monday, May 13th, 2019: 6:00 – 8:00PM Goethe-Institut San Read More

Turning Our Gaze to What is Around Us By Michael Campos, PhD   As a JFCS Tauber Holocaust Educator Fellow with the Holocaust Center, I spent the summer immersed in Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. We traced the conditions that magnified antisemitism throughout Europe and learned Read More

Join our Associate Director, Dr. Alexis Herr, for a panel discussion with other scholars on the impact of collective and historic trauma on targeted communities.  This event is being put on in partnership with the multimedia exhibit, Then They Came For Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans During WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties, at Futures Read More

17th Annual Day of Learning Sunday, March 17, 2019 Galileo Academy of Science and Technology, San Francisco 12:30 – 5:00pm Register Today! > Download a flyer (PDF) here   Join us for the JFCS Holocaust Center’s Day of Learning, in San Francisco, on Sunday March 17, 2019! At the Day of Learning, students (grades 7-12) Read More

In this presentation, Professor Gross will examine the relationship between what Polish teens learn in school about the Holocaust and what they have absorbed from their cultural milieu. She will discuss how the research she conducted in Poland relates to contemporary thinking about history education and collective memory. While focusing primarily on the teaching of Read More

Teaching Holocaust history has the potential to inspire and empower students in the present. Led in partnership with the JFCS Holocaust Center and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, this session examines individual stories of rescue and resistance as a means of highlighting personal agency and moral choice. Using a curated selection of testimony, archival, and media Read More

Curated by Alexis Herr Is Genocide Predictable? Researchers Say Absolutely NPR, December 20, 2018 The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Dartmouth University created a model to predict genocide and are now putting it to use. Read Article> Son of local Rabbi Helps Genocide Orphans in Rwanda J– The Jewish News of Northern California, December 28, 2018 Read More

The Meaning of Hanukkah By Morgan Blum Schneider Hanukkah is the Hebrew word for dedication. During this year’s celebration I find myself reflecting on what dedication required and meant during the time of the Maccabees (160 BCE) and the Holocaust (1933 to 1945), and what it means to me as the director of the Holocaust Read More

Rywka’s Diary: The Writings of a Jewish Girl from the Lodz Ghetto—first published by the JFCS Holocaust Center in 2014—was recently featured in The Algemeiner. The handwritten diary—miraculously discovered intact amidst the rubble at Auschwitz—is a moving account of the life and dreams of 14-year-old Polish girl Rywka Lipszyc. After more than 70 years in obscurity, Read More

Join us for workshop with Dr. Magdalena Gross and filmmaker Yoav Potash! Sun., Nov. 11, 2018 2:00 – 6:30 PM Flora Lamson Hewlett Library Building 2400 Ridge Road Berkeley, CA RSVP > Hear from Dr. Magdalena Gross on teaching the history of the Holocaust through Structured Academic Controversy. This will be followed by an exclusive Read More

Join us for a fascinating discussion on Holocaust Memory in Poland: Attitudes, Studies, Politics, and More with Dr. Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs and JFCS Holocaust Center Associate Director Alexis Herr! Thu., Nov. 29, 2018 6:00 pm Graduate Theological Union Berkeley, CA Different historical narratives and collective memories linked to the post-WWII constructions of national identity still divide Western Read More

The JFCS Holocaust Center is excited to sponsor the upcoming premiere of Faces of Genocide! Sun., Nov. 11, 2018 5:00 pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason 2 Marina Blvd, Building C San Francisco Faces of Genocide is a unique short documentary about the shameful succession of genocidal atrocities throughout the 20th and beginning of the 21st Read More

Rywka’s Diary, Life in the Lodz Ghetto We are proud to sponsor the free upcoming Echoes & Reflections webinar, “Rywka’s Diary, Life in the Lodz Ghetto”. Wed. Oct. 24, 2018 3:00–4:00 PM PST Learn More > The newly discovered Rywka’s Diary is a powerful historical account of life in the Lodz ghetto recorded in moving Read More

Holocaust Center Associate Director Alexis Herr, PhD will be speaking at the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University next week — Be sure to check it out if you are in the area! Wed., Oct. 3, 2018 7:00 PM Northern Arizona University 705 S Beaver St., Flagstaff, AZ Learn More >

  Fall 2018 Lecture Series at San Francisco State University We are excited to co-sponsor the Department of Jewish Studies at SFSU’s Fall 2018 lecture series The Holocaust Across the Disciplines! All lectures are free and open to the public. Learn more >

By Yedida Kanfer, PhD In 1899, Polish writer Wladyslaw Reymont wrote a book entitled The Promised Land. Its subject was the city of Lodz, the “Polish Manchester,” which boomed as a textile center of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century. Reymont intended the title of his book to be sardonic, a critique of Read More

Upcoming Events We are excited to partner with the Jewish Community Library on two events this Fall! Both events are free and open to the public. Europe’s Underground Railroad with Megan Koreman Wed., Oct. 3, 2018 7:00 – 8:30 pm Jewish Community Library 1835 Ellis St., San Francisco Learn More > Hear from Megan Koreman, Read More

Europe’s Most Persecuted Minority By Nikki Bambauer Over the past several years, I have become increasingly troubled by the widespread use of the word “gypsy” in pop culture. Among young Americans, the term is synonymous with “free spirited” and “adventurous.” A quick search of “#gypsy” on Instagram will present you with images of long haired Read More

Interacting with the Past in the Present By Yedida Kanfer, PhD My name is Yedida and I have the privilege of managing the Tauber Holocaust Library and Archives at the Holocaust Center. What is an archive? Theoretically, an archive is anything that you store, or a place where you store it. Our archive traces the Read More

Local San Francisco artist Aimee Golant has just unveiled one of her newest pieces, the Shoah Aliyah placeholder. We are grateful that Aimee has chosen to donate 10% of the proceeds from this piece to the JFCS Holocaust Center. The shape of this Torah placeholder is reminiscent of the yellow Star of David badge which many Jews were Read More

Rywka’s Diary: The Writings of a Jewish Girl from the Lodz Ghetto—first published by the JFCS Holocaust Center—has been awarded this year’s Historical Award by Polityka, Poland’s top newsmagazine. The handwritten diary—miraculously discovered intact amidst the rubble at Auschwitz—is a moving account of the life and dreams of 14-year-old Polish girl Rywka Lipszyc. After more than Read More

Curated by Nikki Bambauer Friends separated by the Holocaust reunite in California Associated Press, April 13, 2018 Separated for 76 years, two Holocaust survivors had an emotional reunion last month in Los Angeles. Read Article > Everyone Supports Preventing Atrocity Crimes, But What Works? The Global Observatory, May 7, 2018 Since the Nuremberg Trials after the Read More

The JFCS Holocaust Center is excited to participate in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Fifth International Holocaust Studies Conference! May 30–31, 2018 Guatemala City, Guatemala Register by emailing [email protected]   This conference brings together international scholars to address the role of the police in the Holocaust, particularly in the organized murder of Jews and Roma. JFCS Holocaust Read More

Holocaust & Genocide Educators Receive Prestigious Grants Each year, the Preisler Shorenstein Institute celebrates the role of teachers in the field of Holocaust education with the Morris Weiss Award. Morris Weiss, a Holocaust survivor, was a founder of the JFCS Holocaust Center and was dedicated to fighting discrimination and antiseminism. His family established this scholarship Read More

Holocaust survivors are dwindling, but their children are just getting started The JFCS Holocaust Center’s newest education initiative, the Next Generation Speakers Bureau (NGSB), was recently featured in the J. Weekly! The Next Generation Speakers Bureau is a training program for second- and third-generation speakers to share their families’ stories of survival during the Holocaust. Read More

Did you or a direct ancestor lose German citizenship between 1933 and 1945 because of Nazi persecution? If so, you might be eligible to reclaim your German citizenship. We are excited to co-sponsor an upcoming workshop on the Peninsula about reclaiming German citizenship: Fri., May 11, 2018 10:30 am Peninsula Jewish Community Center 800 Foster Read More

We are pleased to co-sponsor an upcoming event at Congregation Sherith Israel. SHOAH: How Was It Humanly Possible?, an exhibit by the American Society for Yad Vashem, will be on display from April 16-19, 2018. This exhibit is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required. See below for details. Don’t miss two Read More

The Voices of Women in the Holocaust By Morgan Blum Schneider “Respond to hate with love… it is the only thing that works” –Helen Farkas, z”l [1] Why does it continue to be important to teach young women about great women in history? As Gershon Bacon reminds us, there is a “persistent tendency to assume the Read More

Alexis Herr, Associate Director at the JFCS Holocaust Center, will be speaking at Tennessee Technological University on January 31. Dr. Herr and the other members of the panel will speak on the history of the American South and the history of the Holocaust to initiate a larger discussion about the legacy of complicity. Other panelists include: Dr. Betsie Read More

The Diary of Rywka Lipszyc was discovered in the rubble of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau and was published 70 years later by the JFCS Holocaust Center. In the diary, Jewish teen Rywka Lipszyc chronicles her time in the Lodz Ghetto. The Polish-language version of Rywka’s diary debuted last month, printed in partnership with Austeria Publishing House in collaboration with the POLIN Read More

Plucked from the ashes of Auschwitz and published in 2014 by the JFCS Holocaust Center, Rywka’s Diary: The Writings of a Jewish Girl from the Lodz Ghetto has been an international sensation, sold alongside The Diary of Anne Frank. The tattered school diary written in Polish by 14-year-old Rywka Lipszyc has captivated readers around the world and has Read More

“A Reason to Remember” reception and presentation The JFCS Holocaust Center is pleased to partner with Mercy High School’s Farkas Center for this special event! November 9, 2017 4:00 to 6:00 pm Mercy High School 3250 19th Avenue, San Francisco 94132     All middle and high school students from San Francisco are invited to Read More