Expert Talks

From Displacement to Distance: Why Holocaust Survivors Built New Lives in Australia

Dr. Suzanne Rutland, leading historian of Australian Jewry, traces the political, social, and emotional forces that led thousands of Holocaust survivors to resettle in Australia. Her talk explores how survivors rebuilt their lives at the edge of the Jewish world and how their presence transformed Australian Jewish identity and national memory.

The Revival of Halacha After Liberation: Agunot, Marriage, Loss, and Halachic Responsibility

In the chaotic years after liberation, agunah cases were not theoretical, they were urgent and constant. Drawing on the postwar rabbinic work of his father, Rabbi Chaim Pinchas Lubinsky, who served as Av Bais Din of Hanover and its environs, and on his own research and writing about that period, Mr. Menachem Lubinsky explores how communities confronted marriage, loss, evidence, and halachic responsibility when answers never came.

Opening the Aftermath: 1946 and the Moral Work That Followed

Dr. Ruth Lichtenstein, Holocaust educator and founding director of Project Witness, opens the conference by reframing liberation as the beginning rather than the conclusion of the Holocaust story. Drawing on decades of educational leadership and survivor testimony, she situates 1946 as the start of an enduring moral, pedagogical, and historical responsibility that continues to shape Holocaust education today.

Between Ruins and Renewal: Jewish Life in Poland 1945–1955

Dr. Kamil Kijek, historian of postwar Polish Jewry, explores Jewish life in Poland during the turbulent decade after the Holocaust. This session examines rebuilding amid destruction, political pressure, violence, and emigration, offering a nuanced portrait of a community navigating survival between hope and hostility.

After Rescue: Kindertransport Children and the Long Road Beyond the War

Rabbi Aubrey Hersh, Holocaust scholar and educator, follows the postwar lives of Kindertransport children whose rescue did not mark an end to loss or trauma. This talk explores identity, belonging, survivor guilt, and the emotional legacy of being saved while families and communities were destroyed.

Freedom and Responsibility: A Torah Perspective on Liberation Eighty Years Later

Rabbi Warren Goldstein, Chief Rabbi of South Africa, brings a Daas Torah perspective to the question of liberation. He explores freedom not merely as release from oppression, but as a lifelong moral and spiritual obligation, asking what Jewish tradition teaches about responsibility, memory, and ethical action eighty years after the Holocaust.

From What Was Written to What We Teach: Youth Diaries and the Work Beyond 1946

In this closing address, Israel B. Bitton, Deputy Director of Project Witness, reflects on the discovery of Holocaust youth diaries and their power as educational tools for a world born long after the war. Drawing together the conference's central themes of survival, rebuilding, memory, and responsibility, he explores how the words written by young people during the Holocaust continue to shape how we teach history, ethics, and empathy beyond 1946.

Eighty Years Later: What Liberation Gave and What It Withheld

Dr. Michael Berenbaum, world-renowned Holocaust historian and scholar of memory and ethics, examines liberation as both a moment of deliverance and a moral paradox. Eighty years on, he explores what freedom restored, what it could not repair, and how these unresolved tensions continue to inform Holocaust remembrance, justice, and education.

Returning From The East: Jewish Repatriation to the Soviet Union After the Holocaust

Dr. Eliyana Adler, historian of Soviet and East European Jewry, examines the little-known stories of Jewish survivors who returned to the USSR after the war. This session explores repatriation as a complex choice shaped by hope, coercion, ideology, and fear, revealing how postwar Soviet realities reshaped survival itself.

Upstanders & Bystanders

Protecting Our Religious Freedom

Utilizing Tools Of Democracy To Protect Our Religious Freedom.

The Day The Rabbis Marched

This talk explores the history and impact of the march by 400 Orthodox rabbis to the White House during the Holocaust. Speaker: Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in Washington, DC and author of more than 20 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.

Shailos U’tshuvos of the Holocaust

This talk provides educators with the tools to use the materials in diverse classroom settings. The material is designed for all levels of Mesivta Yeshivah boys and is a breakthrough in Holocaust education.

Voices From The Ghetto: Part One of a Two-Part Series

Learn about life in the Warsaw Ghetto and the tragic events of the summer of 1942. Of the many leaders who inspired the Jews of the Ghetto, and generations to come, was Rabbi Klonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of Piaseczno. Take a glimpse into greatness through the Rebbe’s writings, many of which were found after the war, buried deep in the rubble of the Ghetto. SPEAKER: Rabbi Eli Lefkowitz is a Rebbi in Monsey and the Director of the Mesivta Division of Project Witness.

Antisemitism Through History Timeline

Mrs. Schechter's Part Of The Spring 2025 Course

Liberation And Rebirth

Rabbi Yossi_Weiser - The Final Solution

Dr. Michael Berenbaum Witness To The Witnesses