Historian discusses the future of Holocaust memory
Please join us at 11 a.m. on Sunday, April 8, for a brunch followed by a commemorative Yom Hashoah talk titled “The Days of Our Years Are Three Score and Ten: The Future of Holocaust Memory” presented by Abraham Peck, research professor of history at the University of Southern Maine. If you plan to attend the brunch, please R.S.V.P. by emailing the synagogue at temple6359@aol.com or calling 207-786-4201. Admission to the brunch and lecture is $10 and can be paid at the door.
The son of two Holocaust survivors who survived the Lodz Poland ghetto and the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Stutthof, Buchenwald, and Theresienstadt, Peck was born in a displaced persons’ camp in Landsberg, Germany, the city where Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.
For more than two decades, Peck has been actively involved in numerous programs devoted to meaningful dialogue and creative social action programs between members of the American and international Jewish communities and members of the Christian, African American, Muslim, German, and Polish communities. His career has included directorial positions with the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and the American Jewish Historical Society in New York, the two leading institutions on American Jewish life and history. He was the director of Holocaust Museum Houston.
In 1981, he organized a scholarly program entitled “Jews and Christians after the Holocaust,” hosted by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. The program featured a first-ever dialogue between seminarians from Protestant, Catholic and Jewish institutions was highlighted in a CBS special narrated by Douglas Edwards. The program inspired a volume of essays, edited by Peck with a foreword by Elie Wiesel. In 1991, he created the Post-Holocaust Generations Dialogue Group with Gottfried Wagner, the grandson of the German composer Richard Wagner. The organization seeks to convert the inherited legacies of sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors and sons and daughters of German perpetrators into a forum for intra-generational dialogue and social action. The dialogue between Peck and Wagner was highlighted in Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators. (Syracuse University Press, 2001).
The recipient of two Fulbright Awards, Peck received his Doctor of Letters degree from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. His research interests include the history of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, German and European history, the history of interreligious dialogue and conflict between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the history of anti-Semitism. He has taught at universities and colleges worldwide, including Bates College. Peck was a visiting professor and founding director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies program at the University of Maine at Augusta. He led the Academic Council for Jewish, Christian and Islamic Studies at the University of Southern Maine, and served as a scholar-in-residence of the Judaic collection of the Sampson Center for Diversity.
As the founding president of Interfaith Maine, Peck received the 2002 Collaborative Promise Award presented by Institute for Civic Leadership as well as the Jefferson Award for Cultural Diversity in 2003.