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In commemoration of  Genocide Awareness Month, the Institute of Holocaust & Genocide Studies at Raritan Valley Community College will present an online series in April, “What Must We Learn?” The four-session series, led by Dr. Ellen Kennedy, Executive Director of World Without Genocide, will be held Thursdays, April 3, 10, 17, and 24, from 10-11 a.m.

The programs are free of charge and open to the public. Registration is required. To register, visit https://shorturl.at/sJNXk. The sessions in “What Must We Learn?” include:

Thursday, April 3, 10-11 a.m.: “Women at Risk: Genocide, Ecocide, and Femicide”

Although all targeted victims suffer grave harms during genocides, women are specifically subjected to gender-based assaults. They are also disproportionately vulnerable to ecocide, or environmental destruction, during which they constitute 80% of all people displaced by climate disasters. In addition, a woman or girl somewhere in the world is killed every 10 minutes by an intimate partner in the crime of femicide. This program focuses on these risks and efforts to promote women’s safety, security, and equality.

Thursday, April 10, 10-11 a.m.: “Boarding Schools and Cultural Genocides: the US, Canada, Australia, and China”

During colonization on several continents, young people from indigenous groups have been forcibly taken from their families and placed into “boarding schools” to assimilate them into the ruling culture. The goal is to weaken their ties to family and culture and to give control of the land and resources to the colonial powers. This program looks at the cultural genocides of indigenous peoples in the US, Canada, Australia, and in today’s Tibetan and Uyghur communities in China.

Thursday, April 17, 10-11 a.m.: “Genocides, Mass Atrocities, and Environmental Destruction: The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Syria”

This program considers the consequences of genocide on the land, animals, and environment. The "environmental Holocaust" includes deforestation, resource pillaging, and pollution of air, water, and soil throughout Europe in the 1940s. Russia’s catastrophic 2023 bombing of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine constituted ecocide, with floodwaters wiping out villages and farms and spreading toxins in one of Europe’s biggest ecological disasters in decades. The 2011-2025 war in Syria destroyed the natural world through deforestation, pollution, and land degradation. The program concludes with a discussion about global and local laws to hold perpetrators accountable for ecocide.

Thursday, April 24, 10-11 a.m. (Holocaust Remembrance Day): “Armed and Spiritual  Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto”

In 1942, nearly 250,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland to be exterminated in the Treblinka death camp. Many of the Jews who remained in the ghetto organized for armed resistance, only to eventually be annihilated in the largest and most courageous show of defiance during the Holocaust. The story will be told through a “readers’ theater” play highlighting upstanders who carried out both armed and spiritual resistance.

For information about the “What Must We Learn?” series, contact Michelle Edgar, Program Specialist, at michelle.edgar@raritanval.edu.

The Institute of Holocaust & Genocide Studies at Raritan Valley Community College is a collaboration with the Jewish Federation of West Central New Jersey. To learn more about the Holocaust Institute, visit https://www.raritanval.edu/community-resources/holocaust-institute.

RVCC is located at 118 Lamington Road in Branchburg, NJ. For further information, visit www.raritanval.edu.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 10, 2025

PR #69