MEDIA CONTACT: Polly Burks
561-297-2595, pburks@fau.edu
BOCA RATON, FL (December 19, 2006) – The Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University will present two lectures in January. The first is entitled “And Life is Changed Forever: Child Holocaust Survivors” with Robert Krell, a child who survived the Holocaust in hiding. This lecture will take place on Sunday, January 14 at 4 p.m. Then on Sunday, January 21 at 4 p.m., William Gralnick of the American Jewish Committee will present “If Everyone is Watching the Foreign Terrorists, Who is Looking Under the Rug Here at Home?” Both lectures will take place in the Performing Arts Building, room 101, on FAU’s Boca Raton campus, 777 Glades Road, and both lectures are free and open to the public.
Krell was born in The Hague, Holland on August 5, 1940. He was hidden from 1942 to 1945 with the Munnik family and returned to his parents who also survived in hiding. In 1951, the Krells moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. Krell graduated from The University of British Columbia with an M.D. in 1965, continued in psychiatric training in the United States and then returned to Vancouver to work.
In his private practice, Krell treated Holocaust survivors and their families, and Dutch survivors of Japanese concentration camps. He established a Holocaust Education Centre in 1994 in order to continue teaching programs for high school children as a warning of the consequences of unchecked racism and intolerance. For these activities, Krell received the 1998 State of Israel Bonds Elie Wiesel Remembrance Award.
Krell has published several books, including his latest, which he co-edited, And Life Is Changed Forever: Holocaust Childhoods Remembered. Presently, his interests remain in psychiatric treatment of aging survivors of massive trauma and participating in programs against racism and prejudice.
Gralnick is director of the Southeast Region of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). He has become well known for his work with Catholic and Protestant Church leaders throughout the southeast, having coordinated interreligious dialogues with the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church, the North Carolina Baptist Association, and the Greek Orthodox Church. Gralnick also has founded three offshoots of the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry, and the international "Project Lifeline Letters." That project won a national award from AJC.
Active in combating anti-Semitism, Gralnick collaborated on two investigative series probing the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the southeast. He concentrates on teaching individuals and organizations on how to create community climates that are less tolerant of Klan activity and has advised several communities in this regard.
In 1986 Gralnick was asked by Edward A. McCarthy, Archbishop of Miami, to serve on the Catholic-Jewish Steering Committee for the September 11, 1987 Papal visit of Pope John Paul II. Tasks related to the visit involved security and local protocol issues.
Gralnick has been an adjunct training officer for the City of Miami Police Department and similarly has served at departments in Lantana, Lake Worth, Boynton Beach, Cooper City and Boca Raton, Florida. He has also worked with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department and the Cambridge and Harvard University Campus Police Departments in Massachusetts.
For more information on the lectures, call 561-297-2979.
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