St. Thomas Newsroom | May 8, 2006 University News

Abraham Foxman, since 1987 the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, will discuss “Jews, Christians and the State of Israel” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 18, at Temple Israel, 2324 Emerson Ave. S.

The talk, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Jewish-Christian Learning at the University of St. Thomas and St. John’s University.

The talk is the annual Rabbi Max A. Shapiro Lecture, named in honor of Shapiro’s leadership in Jewish-Christian relations. Now retired, he was rabbi at Temple Israel and was a founder and director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning.

The establishment of Israel has affected the relationship between Jews and Christians worldwide. As director of the Anti-Defamation League, Foxman has been at the center of Jewish-Christian dialogue and debates about peace and justice for Israel and the Palestinians.

In his lecture, Foxman will discuss how different religious views on Israel affect Jewish-Christian relations and the search for peace in the Middle East.

Born in Poland in 1940, Foxman is a Holocaust survivor who speaks out against hatred and violence and confers with elected and community leaders worldwide. He was appointed to the President’s U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council by presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He has participated in several official presidential delegations to events in Europe and Israel, and had six audiences with Pope John Paul II.

Foxman is the author of Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism; he appears frequently on national news programs and is quoted often in newspapers and magazines.

Tickets or reservations are not required for the lecture. Parking is available in the Temple Israel lot and on surrounding streets. For more information about the lecture, call the Jay Phillips Center for Jewish-Christian Learning, (651) 962-5780.

St. Thomas Newsroom | October 26, 2005 University News

A prominent scholar of religion in popular culture will explore “How Christmas Got to be This Way – For Christians and Jews” in a program that will be held at Luther Seminary in St. Paul and at St. John’s University in Collegeville.

Dr. Bruce Forbes, who holds the Arthur L. Bunch Chair in Religious Studies at Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa, will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 8, in the chapel of Olson Campus Center at Luther Seminary. He will present the talk a second time at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, in the Centenary Room, Quadrangle 264, at St. John’s.

St. Thomas Newsroom | October 24, 2005 University News

A series of three award-winning films that focus on Christian-Jewish relations will be shown on three Monday evenings in November at Mount Zion Temple, 1300 Summit Ave.

Each film begins at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by a discussion of the issues raised by that evening’s film. The dates and films are: Nov. 7, “I am Joseph Your Brother”; Nov. 14, “John Paul II: The Millennial Pope (Part II: The Pope and the Jews)”; and Nov. 21, “Sister Rose’s Passion.”

The films, free and open to the public, are co-sponsored by Mount Zion Temple, the Jay Phillips Center for Jewish-Christian Learning at the University of St. Thomas and St. John’s University, and six Catholic churches in the Twin Cities.

The churches are the Cathedral of St. Paul, St. Cecilia and St. Pascal Baylon, of St. Paul; Corpus Christi and St. Rose of Lima, Roseville; and Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Maplewood.

The films are being shown in connection with the 40th anniversary this fall of Nostra Aetate: The Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. After centuries of virtual isolationism on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, this document from the Second Vatican Council paved the way for an era of interfaith dialogue.

For more information about Center for Jewish-Christian Learning programs call (651) 962-5788 or visit the center’s Web site.

St. Thomas Newsroom | September 29, 2005 University News

St. Paul author Felicia Karo Weingarten, who survived four Nazi concentration camps during World War II, will read from her new book, Ave Maria in Auschwitz: The True Story of a Jewish Girl From Poland (DeForest Press, July 2005), at noon Thursday, Oct. 6, in 3M Auditorium of Owens Science Hall at the University of St. Thomas.

The reading, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the St. Thomas History Department and the UST History Club.

Weingarten also will read and discuss the book at 11:15 a.m. Monday, Oct. 31, in Alumnae Hall of Haehn Campus Center at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph. Her presentation there is co-sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Jewish-Christian Learning and the Theology Department at St. Benedict and St. John’s University.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the camps, where millions of imprisoned Jews were killed or died from starvation or disease as a part of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

Weingarten was a teenager in 1939 when the Nazis walled Jews into a ghetto in her hometown of Lodz, Poland. She later was sent to four concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, from which she was rescued in 1945. When the camp was liberated, she was nearly dead and weighed only 65 pounds.

After the war she married Auschwitz survivor Leon Weingarten; the couple moved to St. Paul in 1950 and had two children. She has spoken on Jewish culture and on the historical, psychological and political factors of the Holocaust for more than 30 years. The author of three books and numerous articles, she has been a consultant for the University of Minnesota and has an honorary doctorate from Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Ave Maria in Auschwitz is a collection of Weingarten’s short stories from her World War II experiences in Lodz and the concentration camps. Her stories also challenge readers to be people of integrity, hope and commitment. The book is titled after of one of its stories, in which a female S.S. commandant demands that a prisoner, a young woman in her 20s, sing for her. The young woman chooses “Ave Maria.”

“I talk about this so people will understand and remember,” Weingarten said. “We are all capable of good and evil, and I hope most of us choose to be good, not to be cruel to people because they are different.”

For more information about Weingarten’s reading at St. Thomas, call the History Department, (651) 962-5730.