By Christine Yeres
October 19, 2007
Marlene Warshawski Yahalom, Director of Education
Housed in Reid Hall, the grey granite castle designed by Stanford White that is the stately focal point of the Manhattanville College campus, the Holocaust Education Center expanded both its mission and its name last year to reflect its deep concern for human rights. Now called the “Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center,” its mission is to help educators in high schools throughout Westchester County to instruct their students about the Holocaust and genocide, in particular those occurring now in Somalia and Darfur.
Marlene Warshawski Yahalom, new director of education at the center, explains: “A lot of Holocaust centers are leaning in this direction. It’s a natural extension of the whole mission.” New Castle resident Lee Laster, a board member, adds: “You can’t save people who were victims of the Holocaust, but you can educate the next generation and save people whose lives are in danger now.”
Darfur was the focus of the center’s educational workshops and activities last spring, in which Horace Greeley was one of 250 participating high schools. Yahalom reports: “As part of our Human Rights Institute last March, NBC correspondent Ann Curry visited and spoke to teachers and students about her own experience as a woman reporter determined to cover the story of the genocide in Darfur.” Curry returns, in fact, as the keynote speaker for the center’s October 23rd benefit, “Power to Inspire” at the Mamaroneck Beach and Yacht Club.
Founded by Holocaust survivor Leon Wolf to keep the memory and lessons of the Holocaust alive in the consciousness of future generations, the 13 year old center is preparing for a major project: the cataloguing of its 2,000 volume collection of books on genocide and the Holocaust. “It’s an amazing collection and an enormous undertaking,” says Yahalom. “We’ll need help cataloguing and protecting these books. Once organized, the collection will be a rich resource for students and teachers.”
Director of the center since last March, Yahalom’s Polish and German grandparents and parents were all survivors of the Holocaust. “My mother’s parents were in Auschwitz, my father’s parents were hidden by gentiles in Belgium, and my father was a “hidden child” in a monastery in Belgium. He became a courier for the Resistance at 15 after leaving the monastery. My grandmother had sent him to the monks with a blanket and a French/German dictionary. The blanket was shared by all the children in the monastery – it kind of rotated and was lost. But at the end of the war, the dictionary came back with him to his parents. After this experience, my father emigrated to Israel and fought in Israel’s War of Independence. My mother was only nine [at the time of the Holocaust] and managed miraculously to survive the war mainly by working as a slave laborer in German army factories. My parents met in New York City, where I was raised.”
Yahalom lives in the City still, a single mother with two daughters in college. “Before coming to the center, I was Director of Education for the American Society for Yad Vashem, the American office of the Israeli Yad Vashem Heros’ and Martyrs’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.” She loves her “reverse commute” to Purchase and, she says, “the opportunity to work with dedicated staff and surrounding communities.” Laster adds, “We hope people will come to our October 23rd benefit and share both our satisfaction in what we have accomplished and our hopes for the next year.”
For more information on the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center as well as a schedule of events and lectures, visit http://www.holocausteducationctr.org. For NewCastleNOW.org’s May, 2007 article on Greeley students’ participation in the center’s Human Rights Film Marathon last May, type “marathon” into our “Search” box at the top of any page.
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