Update on Recent Developments

Wyman Institute Update: June 3, 2003

 

    1. We are pleased to inform you that Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel has joined the Advisory Committee of the Wyman Institute.

    2. Academic Council member Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was recently interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about his continuing efforts to track down Nazi war criminals, including his new “Operation Last Chance,” which offers monetary rewards for information leading to the capture of Nazi war criminals. The rewards program has already produced information about two war criminals who murdered Jews in Lithuania in 1941 and are now living in Australia.See: http://www.abc.net.au/

    3. A Mother’s Day essay by Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff, “Why Elliot Roosevelt Shouldn’t Have Listened to His Mother,” appeared in the National Jewish Post & Opinion on May 14. (It described how Eleanor Roosevelt dissuaded her son Elliot from volunteering to smuggle Holocaust survivors to Palestine.)

    4. Academic Council member Prof. Gershon Greenberg published several articles in recent months: “Shlomoh Zalman Unsdorfer, Disciple of the Hatam Sofer: with God Through the Holocaust,” in Yad Vashem Studies 31 (2003 Hebrew and English versions); “The Holocaust Apocalype of Ya’akov Mosheh Harlap” in Jewish Studies 41 (2002); “Religious Survival Among Orthodox Jewish Displaced Persons” in Thinking in the Shadow of Hell, ed. Jacques Doukhan (Andrews University Press, 2003); and “Jerusalem, Vilna, Chicago: Gedaliah Bublick’s Wartime Dilemma” in America and Zion : Essays and Papers in Memory of Moshe Davis, ed. Eli Lederhendler and Jonathan Sarna (Wayne State University Press, 2002).

    5. Academic Council member Prof. Baila Shargel authored “American Jewish Women in Palestine: Bessie Gotsfeld, Henrietta Szold, and the Zionist Enterprise,” in the latest issue (June 2002) of American Jewish History. The essay, which deals in part with efforts to bring Holocaust refugees to Palestine, is derived from Prof. Shargel’s forthcoming biography of Bessie Gotsfeld.

    6. Academic Council member Prof. Steve Jacobs recently lectured at the University of the South (in Sewanee, TN), on “Believing in God After Murder” in April; and in May at the Annual Yom Ha-Shoah Commemoration in the Jewish community of Evansville, IN, on “Where was God?,” as well as at the community’s Sol and Arlene Bronstein Interfaith Institute on “Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations After the Holocaust.”