Wednesday, November 4, 6:30pm
TBZ is honored to welcome Joel Fabian, U.S. Army veteran, Holocaust survivor, and dear friend of Rav Tiferet, back to share lessons for Jews today.
He begins his presentations to students by introducing himself in German. The guttural sound of the foreign tongue always gets his audience’s attention right away—but what keeps them captivated is the story he weaves about his family’s unlikely survival “hiding out in plain sight” within the larger picture of the Holocaust. He takes pains that his audience will understand that Jews were not the only targets for annihilation during the dark war years, speaking about LGBTQ, black, and intellectually disabled victims and others. Doing so, he said, helps today’s students grasp the universal lessons he wants them to take away from his presentations. “We Holocaust survivors were given a mandate by those who didn’t survive,” he said. “They told us that if you talk about us, people will know we were alive.” At 86 years of age, this is one of our last opportunities to witness and to learn.