Due to the expected inclement on Monday, January 26, all in-person programs and services at Temple Israel will be cancelled. This includes the Beth HaGan Early Childhood Center. The synagogue business office will be closed, but staff will be working remotely and available to take your call. For the Players rehearsal, please be on the lookout for a separate email. The Shoah Book Club will take place on TIGN Zoom. Morning and evening minyan will be on TIGN Zoom only.
Join the Shoah Remembrance Committee’s Holocaust Book Club for their next book discussion – The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp by Lynne Olson
Monday, March 9th
8:15 p.m.
Blue Room and on TIGN Zoom
A tale of great enterprise and great fortitude, and of wonderful female solidarity and nobility of spirit, in the bleakest of circumstances.
For decades after World War II, histories of the French Resistance were written almost exclusively by men and largely ignored the contributions of women. Many current overviews of the subject continue to underplay the extent and importance of women’s participation in the Resistance, treating the subject, in the words of one historian, as ‘an anonymous background element in an essentially male story’.
The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück corrects that omission, surveying the bond between four women — Germaine Tillion, Anise Girard, Genevieve de Gaulle, and Jacqueline d’Alincourt — who fought valiantly against Nazi oppression. While the women belonged to different Resistance movements and networks, they were united by a common they were arrested by the Gestapo, underwent merciless interrogations and beatings, were jailed — and, most significantly, survived, if just barely, the hell of Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp designed specifically for women. In an institution designed to dehumanise and kill, the sisterhood maintained their sense of self and joined together to face down death.
Remarkably, in the aftermath of World War II, the women once again joined forces to find a way to transcend the horrors of the war and turn it into something good for themselves and the world. The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück is an illuminating, inspiring account.
Please RSVP to Carol Smolinsky at smohome6@aol.com and let us know if you’ll be joining us in person or via zoom and if you need help getting a book.
Upcoming book discussion on Mondays at 8:15 p.m.
April 20 – Jazz Survivor the Story of Louis Bannet and Dawn by Elie Wiesel
