Mount Vernon Unitarian Church Commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Week

Three free activities this weekend ­— a tour, a film, and a lecture — sponsored by the Mount Vernon Unitarian Church (MVUC) in Alexandria will commemorate Holocaust remembrance week, April 7 to 14. The theme for the 2013 observance is “Never Again: Heeding the Warning.”

A special Saturday morning tour of the Holocaust Museum and a Monday evening lecture at the church will be given by Dr. Daniel L. Cohen, an MVUC member, a docent for executive tours at the Museum, a medical doctor, and senior partner with Martin, Blanck & Associates a health care consulting firm in Alexandria.

Dr. Cohen has given presentations on Nazi eugenics programs at universities on both sides of the Atlantic and to the Academy of Medicine of Washington, DC.  He will speak on the Nazi eugenics/racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene) programs that laid the foundation for theories of Aryan “racial” superiority. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany implemented measures designed to maintain the purity of the "Aryan" race, involving massive involuntary sterilization, "euthanasia" of those whose lives were deemed to have no value, and human medical experimentation programs.

Dr. Cohen said the lecture will focus on the human rights violations perpetuated by the Nazis under the cover of “purifying” the Aryan nation of Germany (and Austria after the Anschluss in March 1938) and the crimes perpetrated by the medical profession against hundreds of thousands of Germans including children.

“The important aspect of this history is that the Nazi racial hygiene programs were substantially promulgated by German physicians, scientists and anthropologists, thus adding ‘academic credibility’ that swayed millions of people.  We are all vulnerable to persuasion, but some persuasion is actually seduction and inculcation. The Nazi programs were not simply an example of garden variety moral relativism, but rather a new profound morale absolutism, out of control, where ‘lives without value’ were eliminated!” he said.

On Sunday,  Rev. Kate Walker will screen the film “The Two That Dared: The Sharps War,” the story of a Unitarian minister and his wife who, just days prior to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, left their young children in Wellesley, Massachusetts to help save thousands being persecuted in Eastern Europe."

The Saturday museum tour is limited to 15 people. For a reservation or information, or if you want to carpool, contact Georgia Pourchot, 703-721-0595 or gpourchot@yahoo.com. The group will assemble at 9:45 am on the 15^th Street side of the museum (group entrance/Raoul Wallenberg Plaza) which is the rear entrance, for a three-hour tour beginning at 10 am.

The film will be shown at 7 p.m. on Sunday in the MVUC Chapel, 1909 Windmill Lane, Alexandria.  Dr. Cohen’s talk is 7-9 pm on April 8 in the Chapel.