Drew Talk: American Protestants Respond to the Holocaust

The American Protestant response to the devastation of the Holocaust is the subject of an upcoming talk at Drew University.

The speaker is Dr. Amy Weiss, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education at the College of Saint Elizabeth in Morristown. She’ll speak Sept. 18 in Room 106 of the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts, beginning at 4:15 p.m. The talk is sponsored by Drew’s Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study.

Weiss will examine the theological crisis that liberal Protestants in the U.S. experienced in the wake of the Holocaust.

Even though they were geographically removed from the physical devastation of World War II and not responsible for the tragic deaths of 6 million Jews, American Protestants felt that they needed to atone for the crimes committed by Germans and their allies. This realization gave rise to the founding of the American Christian Palestine Committee in 1945.

The Committee went on to partner with the Jewish National Fund to establish the Children’s Memorial Forest, which is dedicated to the more than 1 million Jewish children who perished during the Holocaust.

Fundraising for the memorial help educate American church-based Sunday school children about the Holocaust and illustrated American Protestant intervention in the politicized land reclamation project to secure land for Jewish statehood.