Gross Center Meets Challenges

Gross Center Meets Challenges

As with so much (W.W. Norton, 2019), else in connection that tells the story of her with the Covid-19 father having been one pandemic, the Gross of a group of PolishCenter for Holocaust Jewish children who fled and Genocide Studies Nazi-occupied Poland via had to reconfigure its Russia, Uzbekistan, and programming for spring Iran, ultimately reaching 2020 for virtual delivery. British-controlled The only exception Palestine. A recording was Professor Rachel of both Dekel’s talk Mikhal Dekel Yehuda’s lecture, “The and the Q&A that followed have been posted on the Intergenerational Effects Center’s website (https://www.ramapo.edu/holocaust/ of Trauma,” that she program-videos/). Growing up in Israel, Dekel knew delivered in person virtually nothing of her father’s past in the Holocaust. He on March 5, a week never spoke about his experiences during the war, he before Spring Break had no accent, and no number tattooed on his forearm. and Ramapo College’s Her quest to uncover her father’s past began in 2007, Dr. Rachel Yehuda conversion to remote when the Iranian author Salar Abdoh sent her an op. ed. learning. As the title of her talk indicates, Yehuda from a Persian newspaper “Iran, Jews and the Holocaust” explored the groundbreaking study of how the trauma of that mentioned “what are called the Tehran Children” parents can be passed on in some way to their offspring. that led Dekel to traverse the globe in these refugees’ Her fascinating lecture opened a window into the work footsteps. Her visits to archives and conversations with that she and other researchers are doing on risk and people in Uzbekistan, Poland, Russia, Israel and (through resilience factors, psychological and biological predictors a proxy) Iran helped her paint a picture of interlinked and of treatment response in PTSD, genetic and epigenetic divergent histories, of death and survival, of hospitality studies of PTSD and the intergenerational transmission and cruelty, and of the politics of twenty-first century of trauma and PTSD. The most important takeaway of memory and historical amnesia. her talk was that the transmission of trauma occurs in The second rescheduled talk, an exceedingly nuanced way in which predetermined again delivered via WebEx, was pathways cannot be always discerned. by Professor Elissa Bemporad Dr. Yehuda is Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience of Queens College (CUNY) and and the Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division concerned her book, Legacy at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine which includes the of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and PTSD clinical research program and the Neurochemistry Ritual Murder in the Lands of the and Neuroendocrinology laboratory at the James J. Soviets, published in December Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She has an active of last year by Oxford University federally-funded clinical and research program that Press. The book traces the welcomes local and international students and clinicians. legacies of the two most A recognized leader in the field of traumatic stress extreme manifestations of studies, she has authored more than 250 published tsarist antisemitism-pogroms papers, chapters, and books in the field of traumatic and blood libels-in the Soviet stress and the neurobiology of PTSD. Union, from 1917 to the early Fortunately, the remaining programs were able to 1960s. Closely intertwined in be delivered as WebEx meetings. The first was a talk Prof. Elissa Bemporad history and memory, pogroms delivered by Professor Mikhal Dekel of The City College and blood libels were and are of New York, who spoke about her recently published considered central to the Jewish experience in late Tsarist book, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey Russia, the only country on earth with large scale anti