Student Presenters: Kasey A., Eli M., Ben N., Sophia N., Ryan Y.
Faculty Advisor: Michael Jaffe
In Part II of this series, panelists will discuss with the Buckley community the role of historical trauma and communal/ancestral memory in Jewish memory. Among other topics, we will discuss the role and importance of remembering the approximately 6 million European Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices in the Shoah (Holocaust), amid the traumatic experience of mass murder, pogroms, and antisemitism of Ashkenazi Jewry. Approximately two-thirds of European Jews, about the same number of Jews living in the United States today, were murdered between 1939 and 1945, extinguishing much of a more than centuries-old Jewish life in Europe.
We will also discuss the perhaps lesser-known, but no-less significant, history and impact of the massacres, discrimination, and antisemitism experienced by the Sephardic/Mizrahi Jewish communities of Spain, the Middle East, and North Africa, including the forced expulsion and emigration of approximately between 850,000-1,000,000 Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews from predominantly Arab Muslim countries, from Morocco to Iran, mainly between 1948 and 1980. These Jews left behind an estimated combined wealth, according to one estimate, as high as $300 Billion in today's dollars.