Join us on Sunday, February 1st for 10:00am worship and then the 11:30am Adult Forum.
All Are Welcome! Childcare will be provided and a light lunch will be served.
HALF-JEW – FULL LIFE: A Holocaust Story That Speaks to Today
Moral Courage in Dark Times: Identity, Violence, and the Will to Survive
In this talk, Dr. Georgette Bennett shares the extraordinary story at the heart of her new book, Half-Jew — Full Life, about her third cousin-in-law Gary “Pips” Phillips. Born in inter-war Berlin to an Aryan mother and a Jewish father, Pips could have been spared the worst of the Nazi war on Jews. But the very week that the Nuremberg laws were enacted, he chose to become a bar mitzvah.
That choice set him on a perilous path. His wartime experiences were marked by daring escapes, improbable rescues, and surprising survival in Nazi-controlled Berlin. Captured four times, he escaped three times, choosing to remain in Nazi custody the fourth time because there was nowhere to run in bombed-out Berlin. At the end of the war, he met his future wife, Olga Horvath, who had survived Auschwitz. Married, they emigrated to the United States to start a new life.
Arriving in New York City with nothing, Pips rose from waiter to co-owner of the world’s largest photo agency. Unlike Pips, Olga was unable to escape the shadow of her Holocaust experiences, and in a horrifying twist, jumped from the roof of their high-rise after more than 50 years of marriage, leaving Pips grief-stricken, but also able to reinvent himself one more time.
Beyond Pips himself, this story meshes with Dr. Bennett’s own story. A child of the Holocaust, born into a bombed-out apartment building in Budapest, most of her family in both Poland and Hungary was murdered. Although her parents miraculously survived, they went through all the horrors of the Nazi machine. That background inspired the work to which she has devoted the last 33 years of her life: interreligious relations, human rights, and conflict resolution. Prior to that, she had a groundbreaking career as a sociologist/criminologist who always had an interest in the links between religion and violence. All her books have explored the various forms of violence that we do to each other and how to combat them. In the case of this book, she looks at violence and resilience through the lens of a single person’s cinematic life story.
