In late March, Vanier College held the 34th annual Symposium on the Holocaust and Genocide. Under the title of "Generations" and using personal and family stories and scholarly analysis, the symposium examined the many ways in which the Holocaust and other pogroms, persecutions, and genocides of Jews and other minorities have affected subsequent generations.
Vanier's Symposium on the Holocaust and Genocide, which consisted of sixteen presentations, is the only week-long college-level symposium of its kind in Quebec. Presentations covered history, survivor accounts, Antisemitism, genocide, and culture.
Concordia professor emeritus, Ira Robinson reflected on Antisemitism in Canada over the last decade while Megan Hollinger from University of Ottawa explained approaches to combating Antisemitism, and Amy Fedeski, French Educator at Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto, examined how antisemitism has evolved across time.
Austrian interns, Philip Makotschnig and Philipp Jandl, described their ten-month remembrance service (Gedenkdienst) where they educate others about the Holocaust, and Heidi Berger discussed her journey as a child of survivors, how she shares her mother's story.
Vanier graduate, Lina Sangwa, gave a moving description of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Drawing on her family's experiences, her talk laid bare how genocide becomes possible in a society and what prevention requires today. Exploring this theme further, Natasha Pein, raised in the former Soviet Union where state-sponsored propaganda vilified Jews and Israel, exposed how historical libels and conspiracy theories evolve into modern ideologies that fuel discrimination and violence.
Sam Langleben shared his family's Holocaust survival story and the Ukrainian family who risked their lives to save them, while Anna Shternshis gave a brief history of 1940s antisemitic propaganda in the Soviet Union where some 2.5 million Jews were killed.
Other presentations described the expulsion of the Jews of Iraq beginning in the 1950s. Odette Masliyah, born in Baghdad, shared her family's flight to Iran in 1970, and Montrealer Philip Khazzam spoke of his years pursuing Iraq for the legal rights to his family's home, stolen from them when support for the Nazis forced them to leave.
Other Symposium activities highlighted how Jewish culture continues to evolve today in Ukraine, Russia, and Jewish communities around the world. Antoine Simonato, from the Montreal Holocaust Museum, gave a workshop approaching Jewish identity through the voices of Montreal Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Ethnomusicologist, Miranda Crowdus, described the survival of Jewish music and musical practices, and filmmaker David Richier, discussed weaving together testimony from Holocaust survivors in his documentary on the Montreal Yom Hashoah Commemoration.
