Since the new semester began this fall, our Director of Education Simon Li has visited many local and international schools to give Holocaust workshops for students of different ages. In October 2016, he ran a Year 6 workshop at Nord Anglia International School discussing Shanghai as a haven for Holocaust victims. It is always the HKHTC’s aim to teach the Holocaust in an age-appropriate manner in a history classroom.
During this first semester of 2016-17, Director of Education Simon Li gave a 90-minute workshop to more than 180 students at C.C.C Rotary Secondary School on genocide, followed by the showing of a short film and an interactive discussion on how to study the Holocaust through the stories of the victims, bystanders and perpetrators as well as their ideology and motivation.
This September, HKHTC Director of Education Simon Li was sponsored by the Adelson Family Foundation to attend a Holocaust educators’ seminar at Yad Vashem, the world’s Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem. During this seminar, Simon had a fruitful discussion on the pedagogical approach to teaching the Holocaust with Yehuda Bauer, a respected authority on the subjects of the Holocaust.
On January 17, 2017, HKHTC and the Univeristy of Hong Kong hosted a very well-attended talk “Micha Gelber: A Dutch Survival Story of the Holocaust” with Holocaust survivor Micha Gelber, HKU professor Roland Vogt, and Simon Li, HKHTC Director of Education.
Please join us as Micha Gelber, survivor of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, recounts the amazing story of his childhood and fight for survival in the face of Nazi occupation.
Tuesday 17th January 2017 8pm
Jewish Community Centre, 70 Robinson Road
It was with great honour that we welcomed Mr Nobuki Sugihara, son of Consul Chiune Sugihara, a Righteous Among the Nations, for our September events. Mr. Sugihara spent a week in Hong Kong, from September 18th – September 25th. During his stay, he opened a new, original exhibition on Righteous Among the Nations from Asia, including his father Chiune Sugihara who helped an estimated 10,000 Jewish people escape from Nazi controlled Lithuania.
The opening event for the “Asian Righteous Among the Nations” exhibition took place at the University of Hong Kong, on September 19 followed by a film Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness and a Q&A with Mr. Sugihara. Mr Sugihara also spoke at Asia Society (in conversation with Mr Ronnie Chan, the Chairman of Asia Society Hong Kong) as well as the Hong Kong Jewish Community Centre. Besides, Mr Sugihara also spoke to several hundred school students, discussing his father’s work and the importance of standing up to evil.
Please click here for more photos from our September events with Mr Nobuki Sugihara.
On 12 September 2016, we were delighted to co-organize a public screening and discussion event with the Faculty of Law, Faculty of Arts, and eSRT in Law, Language, Literature of the University of Hong Kong (HKU):
Of Many – Screening and Discussion with Linda Mills, the Director
Dr. Linda Mills, Director
Co-Founder, Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership
Co-Chair, Of Many Advisory Board
Date: Monday, 12 September, 2016
Time: from 6:00pm
Venue: Room 723, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, University of Hong Kong
About the film: Set Against the dramatic backdrop of violence in the Middle East and the tension between Jewish and Muslim students on college campuses, Of Many focuses on the surprising and transformative relationship between an orthodox rabbi and imam, who serve as university chaplains in New York City. Through a series of voyages to communities struck by catastrophe, we witness young religious Jews and Muslims working together and overcoming long-standing divides. Timely and humorous, this short documentary offers an inspiring and hopeful narrative in the face of a seemingly irreconcilable conflict.
About the Director: Linda G. Mills is the inaugural Lisa Ellen Goldberg Professor and Vice Chancellor for Global Programs at New York University, and Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Of Many Institute. Mills, born in Los Angeles, California co-directed the documentary, Auf Wiedersehen: ‘Til We Meet Again, a film that explores the intergenerational transmission of trauma from the Holocaust to 9-11. The film was an official selection at eight film festivals, including the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival where Auf Wiedersehen won an audience award, Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival and the Vienna Jewish Film Festival. Dr. Mills is also an accomplished producer; her projects include The Reality Show: NYU, which received the 2010 Silver Award from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) and The Heart of Intimate Abuse, for which she received a Telly Award. Her scholarly work challenges the current paradigms of domestic abuse by rethinking how we respond to violence in intimate relationships.
On June 24-26, 2016, Directors of the HKHTC travelled to Phnom Penh, Cambodia to enhance their knowledge base of the events of the Cambodian Genocide. Accompanied by a staff member from the DC-Cam (Documentation Center of Cambodia), the directors’ stops included S-21 (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) where they met with 2 survivors and toured the prison grounds and also the Choeung Ek Killing Fields. The group also went to the DC-Cam premises where they met with a perpetrator that worked at the S-21 prison and the Genocide Education coordinator/team leader and a genocide education teacher from DC-Cam.
Please click here for more photos from our directors’ trip on the Cambodian Genocide.
On Monday 23rd May, a group of twenty local Church leaders visited the HKHTC Resource Centre.
Director of Education, Ben Freeman, presented on the history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust for nearly two hours. They discussed the reasons why anti-Semitism existed in Europe for thousands of years and explored the historical context to the Holocaust.
We were honoured that Dr. Ephraim Kaye, of the International School of Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, visited Hong Kong on Friday 20th of May.
Accompanied by HKHTC Director of Education, Dr. Kaye visited Discovery College and Discovery Bay International Schools to discuss Holocaust history and Holocaust denial.
