An international conference addressing the question of why more was not done by the Allied Powers to save Jews during the Holocaust will be held at the in Jerusalem next week, bringing together scholars from five countries.
Topics to be discussed will include 'Could the Allies have bombed Auschwitz?', 'Chinese reponses to the Holocaust" and "Immigration and Refugee Policy of the US on the eve of World War II'. While most of the current historical research on the Holocaust focuses on the Nazis and their Jewish victims, the issues of the knowledge, roles and responses of the governments and armies of the Allied Powers, has largely remained a minor research topic.
The idea for such a conference grew out of the friendship forged between Alexander Groth, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and emeritus professor of political science at the University of California – Davis, Tony J. Tanke, a California attorney and senior fellow and lecturer at the Santa Clara University Law School, and Laurence Weinbaum, chief editor of the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, the organ of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, which operates under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress. Their discussions on issues like 'What did the Allies know about the Holocaust as it unfolded?' and 'Were they somehow complicit in, or at least secondarily responsible for, the great catastrophe?' led them to put together a meeting of academic minds from all over the globe to examine these troubling questions in an intense and comprehensive manner.
One of the highlights of the conference will be the screening of the film, 'The Jan Karski Report' by renowned French filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, who will be attending the Conference. Lanzmann, who recently turned 90 and is best known for his epic Holocaust film 'Shoah', will give a interview as a precursor to the screening of his famous interview with Jan Karski.
Karski served as a liaison officer of the Polish underground during World War II and infiltrated both the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp. He was known as the first person to bring eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the outside world and his courage and persistence to try and convince the West to act to save the Jews has been widely praised. Among many honors bestowed upon him for his bravery, he has also been recognized as Righteous Gentile by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.
The conference will be held at Jerusalem's Menachem Begin Heritage Center from 16 to 19 March 2015 and is open to the public. It will be sponsored by the InFaith Community Foundation, the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, the World Jewish Congress and the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, and admission will be free of charge. Additionally, the entire conference will be broadcast live online at www.alliedpowersholocaust.org, for those unable to attend the event in Jerusalem.
On the same website, it is possible to register to attend the sessions, see the full conference schedule and to read more about the participating scholars.
