Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh

"Camera as Passport" Exhibit
2025-08-20 - 2026-01-30 | American Jewish Museum, JCC Squirrel Hill, 5738 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15217, United States
Register here.

Carnegie Library Family & Local History Book Club - Perseverance: One Holocaust Survivor’s Journey from Poland to America
2025-08-28 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 4400 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, United States
“Join us for a lively discussion on Perseverance: One Holocaust Survivor’s Journey from Poland to America by Melvin Goldman & Lee Goldman Kikel.

This title is available for checkout in our Catalog.

Co-author Lee Goldman Kikel will be joining us for this discussion

This discussion will take place in the Family& Local History Department (3rd floor).”
RSVP here: https://www.carnegielibrary.org/event/family-local-history-book-club-2/

Inseparable: A Presentation by Holocaust Survivor Marion Lewin
2025-09-10 18:30 - 19:30 | Rodef Shalom Congregation, 4905 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, United States
Marion Ein Lewin, born in Holland, survived the concentration camp Bergen Belsen together with her parents and her twin brother. One of a handful of families who survived the Holocaust intact, they arrived in New York City in 1947. Marion and Steven, then age 9, had never been to school and were placed in kindergarten. Every few weeks the twins proceeded to the next grade until they finally caught up with their proper class. Today Marion and her brother, according to all available data, are the only surviving twins of the Holocaust.
Marion Lewin’s professional career focused on health policy and health care economics. For 15 years she was Senior Staff Officer at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science and headed its Office of Health Policy Programs and Fellowships. She headed several distinguished studies at IOM and has written extensively on a wide range of health care topics. Marion received her undergraduate and graduate education at Barnard College and Columbia University.
In recent years she has pursued her deep interest in theater, co-chairing the Council of Theater J, serving on its Board, and serving on the Board of Round House Theatre. In the last two years, Marion and her brother have helped Faris Cassell in the research and writing of INSEPARABLE, the book about the Hess family’s impossible odds of surviving the Holocaust.
Register here.

If you would like to support the work of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, we would greatly appreciate your generosity! Even a gift of $18 helps us with our mission to preserve the stories of the Holocaust and to educate future generations. You can make your gift when you reserve your ticket or by clicking this link.

Presentation by Holocaust Survivor Howard Chandler
2025-10-09 18:30 | Community Day School, 6424 Forward Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15217, United States
Join Classrooms Without Borders, the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, and Community Day School on October 9th for a presentation by Holocaust survivor Howard Chandler.
Howard Chandler was born in December 1928 in Wierzbnik, Poland (now Starachowice). Nearly eleven when the Nazis invaded, he was forced into the ghetto and later witnessed its liquidation, when his mother, sister, and youngest brother were deported to Treblinka and murdered. Howard, his father, and brother endured years of forced labor, deportation to Auschwitz, and the death march to Buchenwald before liberation at Theresienstadt in 1945; only Howard and his brother survived, while his father was killed at Stutthof. After the war, Howard lived in England before immigrating to Canada, where he married Elsa and raised four children. In the 1970s he testified at war crime trials, and since 2011 he has returned annually with Classrooms Without Borders to share his story of survival and resilience, inspiring educators and students to confront hatred and preserve memory.
Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1757544696499?aff=oddtdtcreator

"Camera as Passport" Special Reception and Curator Presentation
2025-10-23 17:30 - 19:30 | American Jewish Museum, JCC Squirrel Hill, 5738 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15217, United States

Voices from the Shadows—LGBTQ+ Experiences During the Nazi Era
2025-10-29 18:00 - 19:30 | Rodef Shalom Congregation, 4905 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, United States
Eric Marcus introduces Making Gay History’s podcast series on the experiences of LGBTQ+ people during the rise of the Nazi regime, World War II, and the Holocaust. Drawing on extensive research conducted for this first-of-its-kind audio documentary, Eric shares archival clips during a 45-minute presentation (+ 15-minute Q&A) that brings this painful, often hidden history to life through the voices of the people who lived it.
About Eric:
Journalist and author Eric Marcus is the founder and host of the award-winning Making Gay History podcast, which brings LGBTQ+ history to life through the voices of the people who lived it. Eric is also executive director of the Making Gay History educational non-profit organization, which works in partnership with the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the United States, to provide LGBTQ+-inclusive American history lessons to middle and high school educators. In addition, Eric is co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Eric is the author and co-author of a dozen books, including the #1 NY Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis, and he was a founding board member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum. (For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Marcus.)
Dr. Anika Walke, Askwith Family Associate Professor of Holocaust Studies at CMU, will join the Q&A after the program.
Register here.
Thank you to our event sponsors:
Randi Cost
Michael and Debbie Gordon
Pam and David Haber
Howard Loevner
Steve Zupcic and Mojoe Klements

If you would like to support the work of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, we would greatly appreciate your generosity! Even a gift of $18 helps us with our mission to preserve the stories of the Holocaust and to educate future generations. You can make your gift when you reserve your ticket or by clicking this link.

Harbor from the Holocaust and the Shanghai Ghetto
2025-11-10 18:30 | Rodef Shalom Congregation, 4905 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, United States
Join the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, a program of The Tree of Life, for our annual Kristallnacht commemoration featuring a 20 minute film screening of Harbor from the Holocaust, which tells the story of nearly 20,000 Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II to the Chinese port city of Shanghai. This documentary explores the extraordinary relationship of these Jews and their adopted city of Shanghai, even through the bitter years of Japanese occupation 1937-1945 and the Chinese civil war that followed.
The film will be followed by a discussion with Iris Samson, co-producer of Harbor from the Holocaust, and Cindy Berg Vayonis, a descendant of Holocaust survivors whose parents and grandparents found refuge in the Shanghai Ghetto.
The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh’s annual Kristallnacht program is generously supported by Edgar Snyder.
Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1758226174819?aff=oddtdtcreator
–
More About the Film:
It was a relationship that produced some exceptional artists, statesmen and authors, as well as “ordinary” people who survived to carry on their Jewish religion and traditions that would have otherwise been consigned to oblivion.
This documentary takes a captivating look at why Shanghai was uniquely positioned, through geo-political, cultural and historical influences, to allow this remarkable influx to happen, due to those past relations with Jews predominantly from the Middle East, the Iberian Peninsula and Russia, and because of its centuries of control by and openness to foreigners as a vigorous center of trade and commerce.
This story cannot be viewed in black and white, good vs. evil, suffering vs. thriving, wealthy vs. poor. The story, much like the city itself, is nuanced and complex, incorporating many kinds of foreigners, many classes of Chinese, many kinds of Jews, and many layers. Shanghai was not a place of tolerance and openness, so much as it was a place of fractionalized, disparate forces which were sometimes competitive and sometimes complimentary, but always existed within tenuous and often difficult transactional alliances. Even the people whose stories will be shared have very different tales of how they lived in Shanghai, what their families experienced, and how they were able to function on a day-to-day basis.
Rivaling all elements and in tragic contrast to those who could not escape, this is a Holocaust story of life.
–
If you would like to support the work of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, we would greatly appreciate your generosity! Even a gift of $18 helps us with our mission to preserve the stories of the Holocaust and to educate future generations. You can make your gift when you reserve your ticket or by clicking this link.

Voices for Change
2025-11-13 18:00 | August Wilson African American Cultural Center, 980 Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15222, United States

Teaching Jewish Life and Antisemitism in the Classroom
2025-11-20 08:30 - 15:30 | Chatham University Shadyside Campus, 1 Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, PA, 15232, United States
This training will provide resources for educators to teach two key topics: Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust and in Western PA, and the history and dynamics of antisemitism.
In the morning we will learn from visiting Dr. Lauren Granite Centropa Archive, which interviewed over 1,000 European Jews between 2000-2019 about their memories of the 20th century. You’ll experience a lesson about the diversity of European Jews and leave with materials to teach it in your classroom.
In the afternoon we will provide practical resources that will help you teach the complex topic of antisemitism to students. In partnership with the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives, we’ll also offer resources to teach students about historic and present-day Jewish life in Western PA.
Featured educators include:
Dr. Lauren Granite, U.S. Education Director of the Centropa Archive
Noah Schoen, Manager of Community Outreach at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh
Eric Lidji, Director of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives
Register here.

Teaching the Holocaust Through Literature
2025-12-11 08:30 - 14:30 | Allegheny Intermediate Unit, 475 E Waterfront Dr, Homestead, 15120, United States
In this program, educators will learn instructional strategies for teaching the Holocaust through literary selections from veteran educator Lynne Ravas. Shared approaches will help build historical understanding, create empathy, and provoke compassion with students. Educators are encouraged to bring your own books (BYOB) to pair these specific text(s) with their exploration of Echoes & Reflections resources.
Register here.
