Victoria Barnett, staff director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will be the featured speaker for the annual Kristallnacht commemoration on November 9, 2011, at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, 2199 E. Main Street. Her presentation, “How the Holocaust Changed Interfaith History,” will take place at 7 p.m. in the Gloria Dei Worship Center. The event is free and open to the public.
The Holocaust was a cataclysmic event in human history on many levels, yet its profound effect on “interfaith history” is little known. Barnett will describe how interfaith organizations in the United States and Europe reacted to the persecution of the Jews, including “Kristallnacht” (Night of Broken Glass), a series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9–10, 1938.
Barnett is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (1992) and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (1999), and editor/translator of Wolfgang Gerlach’s And the Witnesses were Silent: the Confessing Church and the Jews (2000). She also is co-editor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works project, the English translation series of Bonhoeffer’s complete works. She will be in central Ohio for three days as a scholar in residence, offering programs and conversation at Ohio Wesleyan University, the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, and the Columbus Jewish Federation.
The program at Trinity is an education project of The Columbus Jewish Federation, Trinity Lutheran Seminary, The Holocaust Education Council of Central Ohio, and the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio.