Henry Whittemore Library holds opening ceremony for Holocaust programming

By Ryan O’Connell Associate Editor The Henry Whittemore Library held a reception to announce the opening of new programming related to American knowledge of the Holocaust during WWII Sept. 12. The programming includes the traveling “Americans and the Holocaust” exhibition lent by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), a collection of artwork based on Holocaust survivor memories and a film interview with Dorka Berger née Altman, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp - both by FSU Art Professor Leslie Starobin - and a group of The Gatepost articles detailing campus life during WWII. Library Dean Millie Gonzalez introduced the programming at the reception, beginning with the “Americans and the Holocaust” exhibit. Framingham State University, Gonzalez said, is one of 50 libraries selected by the USHMM and the American Library Association as part of its 2024-2026 traveling exhibition. The exhibit will remain at FSU until Oct. 11. The exhibit, which she said “examines the motives, pressures, and fears that shaped Americans responses to Nazism, war, and genocide from 1933 to 1945,” first started in 2013 with research from USHMM historians. She added the research was guided by a 1979 mandate the USHMM released which outlined the need for American reflection on its role throughout the Holocaust. Gonzalez said “Americans and the Holocaust” explores four main questions: “What did Americans know? Did Americans help Jewish refugees? Why did Americans go to war? And how did Americans respond to the Holocaust?” She said she hopes the exhibition provokes new questions and reflection opportunities - both in terms of the history of the Holocaust and “our roles and responsibilities today.” President Nancy Niemi spoke next, saying she thinks it’s appropriate FSU shares the exhibit with the community of Framingham, as an institution whose mission is “to serve our community through education.” She added it’s FSU’s job to teach students how to lead and interpret the world so they can act against evil and create good. “We need our students and we need each other to have this capacity,” she said. “We needed it in the 1930s and ’40s, and we desperately need it now.” Rabbi Sam Blumberg said on Sept. 14, “Jewish communities around the world will read Deuteronomy 22. “If you see your fellow’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it. The text teaches us, you must bring it back to the person who has lost it, even if the person who owns it does not live near you,” he said. “We are not permitted to - in the words of 11th century French commentator Rashi - ‘to close our eyes tight as if we do not see,’” he added. In other words, Blumberg said, moral living means facing the truth, especially when it is inconvenient. He added moral living means being in service to “the other” even when it is uncomfortable. “As [the exhibit] makes its way into the hearts and minds of our greater community, it is my prayer that we might open our eyes to see the hard truths of the past,” he said. “And most of all, that it helps us to open our eyes, so we can work to build a more just, a more moral, future,” he added. Art Professor Leslie Starobin said, “Twenty years ago, as recollections of the Holocaust began to fade, I sought out refugees and survivors, including relatives of my own family and friends. “I interviewed them about their journeys of hope and plight, and as a visual storyteller, I composed still-life montages from the things they carried and passed down to their children and grandchildren,” Starobin added. She discussed Dorka Berger née Altman, her mother-in-law’s younger sister, who spent four and a half years in Auschwitz and is still alive today at 91. Berger is the subject of one of Starobin’s still-life montages, as well as an interview detailing life in Auschwitz. “Yesterday I spoke to Dorka,” she said. “Her message to us, which I excerpted from a recording I made of her in 2019, is perhaps more poignant today than it was five years ago. “And all those who want to deny the Shoah - that’s a Hebrew word to reference the Holocaust - everyone will know how to answer, from the original source, from a person who went through it. These things have happened,” Starobin said. She added, “It’s forbidden that the world will forget, so it will never happen again.”