The Jewish Federation of Reading/Berks and Albright College will present the 19th annual Richard J. Yashek Memorial Lecture on Thursday, March 27, 7:00 p.m., in Albright’s Freedman Gallery. Parking is available in the lot at the corner of 13th and Bern Streets. The lecture is free and open to the public, including interested teens, college students, and adults.
This year’s Yashek Memorial Lecture, titled 80 Years Later: Fulfilling Holocaust Education’s Great Promise, features Boaz Dvir, the founding director of Penn State’s Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative and the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative. Dvir will examine how and why traditional Holocaust education has failed, what we can do to uproot antisemitism and other forms of hate, and how we can strengthen democracy. He discusses a new, innovative way to deliver on Holocaust education’s great promise.
Dvir has a history of innovative storytelling and deep examination. A Donald P. Bellisario Career Advancement Professor in Penn State’s Journalism Department, Dvir is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. He tells the stories of ordinary people who, under extraordinary circumstances, transform into trailblazers who change the world around them. Dvir’s films have been distributed by PBS, The New York Times, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and other outlets, and have received coverage by such media as the Huffington Post, The Guardian, and Forbes. He’s written for many publications, including New York’s Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and TIME magazine. Dvir’s critically acclaimed nonfiction book, “Saving Israel” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), follows the World War II aviators who risked their lives and freedom in 1947-49 to prevent what they viewed as a second Holocaust.
Dvir is also an experienced educator. He wrote a syllabus on multimedia journalism ethics for Harvard University’s Kennedy School and has taught journalism and documentary filmmaking at the University of Florida.
Richard J. Yashek, for whom the lecture is named, was born in Luebeck, Germany, in 1929. In 1941, the Yashek family was deported to Latvia, and in March 1942, they were separated. Yashek stayed with his father while his younger brother went with his mother. He never saw his mother and brother again. In October 1944, his father was separated from him and never seen again.
Yashek survived several concentration camps and eventually came to the United States with the help of members of his mother’s family. He worked for the family business, J.C. Ehrlich Co. Inc., in Pottsville, served in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1953, and completed his high school GED while in the service. After his tour of duty, Yashek resumed working for J.C. Ehrlich as a technician and retired as company vice president in 1999. Upon his death in 2005, Yashek’s family donated a 221-folder assembly of documents, correspondence, birth certificates, deportation lists, and video interviews to the Edwin & Alma N. ’51 Lakin Holocaust Resource Center at Albright College.
