Perlow events to observe Yom HaShoah

A lecture on evil, an interfaith memorial service and candle-lighting ceremony accompanied by a performance of music by composers who lost their lives during the Holocaust, and a panel discussion of a documentary film about Terez n (Theresienstadt), a Nazi Czech concentration camp, are highlights of the Yom HaShoah memorial events at Skidmore College this year.

Presented by the Office of the Dean of Special Programs as the Jacob Perlow Lecture Series, the memorial events will take place Sunday through Tuesday, April
19-21. All are free and open to the public.

The opening event of the series features Paul Ornstein M.D., co-director of the International Center for the Study of Psychoanalytic Self-Psychology, lecturing about a psychoanalytic perspective of evil.

Ornstein is professor emeritus of psychiatry and psychoanalysis at the University of Cincinnati, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard University. He is a Holocaust survivor from Hungary who endured a forced labor camp before being sent to Ukraine. His talk begins at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 19, in Davis Auditorium.

The Hawthorne String Quartet, Skidmore?s current Sterne Virtuoso resident artists, will present a memorial ceremony followed by a concert at 8 p.m. Monday, April 20, in the Payne Room of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.

The brief Yom HaShoah (memorial) observance will include the traditional lighting of six candles, representing the six million Jews who died as victims of the Holocaust.

The Hawthorne Quartet was formed in 1986, and is named for Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. The quartet has distinguished itself inter-nationally by championing the works of composers persecuted during the Nazi regime.

All four musicians in the quartet are members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Hawthorne Quartet?s violist, Mark Ludwig, is a Holocaust scholar, and founder and director of the Terez n Chamber Music Foundation, which preserves and performs music created by those who died in the Holocaust. He presented several programs in 2006 at Skidmore celebrating the power of art and music to transcend oppression.

The Hawthorne quartet?s members?violinists Ronan Lefkowitz and Si-Jing Huang, cellist Sato Knudsen, and Ludwig?have championed works such as those included on this memorial program.

The program will include a recent work commissioned by the Terez n Foundation: Czech composer Pavel Novak-Zemek?s String Quartet No. 6 Bells of Light. The new music was written in memory of Czech composer Pavel Haas, who died while imprisoned at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Two of Haas?s own string quartets also will be played, as well as quartets by Holocaust victims Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullman. Joel Brown, a Skidmore artist-in-residence, will join the Hawthorne Quartet for Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco?s Quintet for Guitar and Strings.

The series closes with a screening of the 2005 Knight-Ridder video, Terez n: Resistance and Revival, at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 21, in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. The documentary tells of the Nazi exploitation at Terez n of musicians, composers, artists, and theater professionals, whose talents were used as propaganda refuting allegations of a Holocaust, but whose works live on as both evidence and memorial to truth.

The film includes interviews with both survivors and those who left testimony to their experience, including an appearance by survivor Edgar Krasa, who will join Ludwig in a panel discussion on healing and the arts, specifically, artistic creativity and the healing process. The discussion will follow the screening.

Krasa was a cook at Terez n, where he also sang in the chorus. He was later among prisoners forced to march to Auschwitz.

Also participating as a panelist will be another Auschwitz survivor, Anna Ornstein. She is co-director, with her husband, of the International Center for the Study of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, professor emerita of child psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, and lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard University.

She is author of the book, My Mother?s Eyes: Holocaust Memories of a Young Girl. In addition to the panel discussion, she will, while at Skidmore, lead a discussion on memory and trauma, arranged by Professor Mary Ann Foley, with a small group of psychology, history and English students and faculty.

Both Ornstein and Krasa are board members for the Terez n Chamber Music Foundation.

A generous grant from the estate of Jacob Perlow?an immigrant to the United States in the 1920?s, a successful businessman deeply interested in religion and philosophy, and a who was committed to furthering Jewish education?supports the annual lectures and presentations to the Skidmore and Capital District community on issues broadly related to Jews and Judaism. Sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Special Programs, two Perlow presentations are offered each year, one in the late spring and another in July.