Holocaust Remembrance At Ocean County College Begins With Interfaith Service

TOMS RIVER, NJ — Ocean County College and Congregation B'nai Israel will host an interfaith program Sunday evening as the start of a weeklong Holocaust Remembrance program, congregation and college officials said.

The interfaith program begins at 7 p.m. in the Gateway Building at the campus on Hooper Avenue and is the start to the remembrance week program sponsored by the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, & Human Rights Education at Ocean County College. More than 6 million Jews were murdered in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany in the early 1940s.

This year’s program is dedicated to the memory of the victims of Terezín Camp; it is a celebration of their creative spirit and enduring art and music. Events are free and open to the public.

Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, or Terezín, was a garrison near Prague, Czechoslovakia, according to a news release from the college. It was set up by the Nazis to serve as a model “ghetto camp” where visual and performing Jewish artists were imprisoned. This “cultural center” was a place to bring visiting dignitaries and entertain them with operas, concerts, and artwork of the inmates, the news release said.

In reality, the living conditions of the camp behind the subterfuge were atrocious. Overcrowding, starvation, beatings, torture, and death were the ways of the camp. Jewish artists were forced to produce propaganda art and copy masterpieces confiscated from museums. Jewish musicians were released from labor details to practice and compose music acceptable to the Third Reich and to play for the Jewish prisoners as they descended from the deportation trains and walked to the gas chambers. What remained from the ashes of Terezín is a collection of paintings by artists and children, along with magnificent musical scores, the news release said.

Here is the full week of events, beginning with Sunday's Interfaith Service:

Sunday, April 23

7 p.m.: Opening Commemoration Ceremony, Room 104, Lecture Hall, Gateway Building. Holocaust Remembrance Interfaith Service sponsored by Congregation B’nai Israel of Toms River.

Monday, April 24

9:30 a.m.-noon: Holocaust Remembrance, Room 104, Lecture Hall, Gateway Building. Reading of names of victims of the Holocaust by members of the greater Toms River and College communities.

12:30 p.m.: When Words Fail, Music Speaks: A Holocaust Narrative, Room 104, Lecture Hall, Gateway Building. Renowned NJ actor/playwright Harlan Tuckman, who has performed in both professional productions off-Broadway and in regional theatre, plays a bitter conductor who rehearses a performance of Verdi’s Requiem with incarcerated prisoners for Nazi officials.

2 p.m.-6 p.m.: Holocaust Remembrance Continued, Room 104, Lecture Hall, Gateway Building. Reading of names of victims of the Holocaust continues. Volunteers are welcome to read.

Tuesday, April 25

9:30 a.m.: Holocaust Remembrance Memorial Prayer Service, outside on the Campus Quad by the Flag Display

Wednesday, April 26

9 a.m.: Making Light in Terezín, Room 115, Technology Building. Film and discussion about how prisoners in the Terezín ghetto found a mechanism for survival through theatre, song, dance, and laughter. The director follows a modern day Minnesota theatre group as it travels to Terezín to perform a cabaret piece originally created and enacted there during World War II.

2 p.m.: Refuge in Music, Room 115, Technology Building. Film and discussion of a documentary awarded the International Classical Music Awards 2014 Prize for Best Documentary. It is the story of Alice Herz-Sommer and Coco Schumann, two extraordinary musicians from very different musical worlds, both of whom survived Terezín Camp.

Thursday, April 27

12:30 p.m.: Out of the Ashes, Room 115, Technology Building. PowerPoint lecture about Terezín Camp and the art and poetry of the artists and children imprisoned there. Bedrich Fritta, a Czech painter deported to Terezín, recorded the inhumane conditions of the camp and smuggled drawings and poetry out of the camp.

Friday, April 28

9:30 a.m.: Entarte Kunst, Room 115, Technology Building. PowerPoint lecture about how the Nazi Party’s National Socialist Society of German Culture used its power to label paintings by Jewish artists as “Degenerate Art” and launched an exhibition in Munich in 1937 of paintings, sculptures, prints, and books that represented, for the Nazis, the connection between race and depravity.

Photo from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., by Ted Eytan, via Flickr under Creative Commons license