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548 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 7 (1996)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0548 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE

After the concentration camps were liberated in 1945 at the end of World
War II, there was silence. The reservations and the arguments for keeping
still were many. Many Jewish communal leaders feared that emphasizing the
tragedy that had befallen their people during the Holocaust might help to
create a new wave of antisemitism. The survivors wanted to put the horror
behind them as quickly as possible and get on with building new lives, with
families, in new lands. The churches remained silent, too, for they were not
yet ready to confront the significance of the ideological targeting for murder
of 6 million Jewish men, women, and children in the heart of Christendom.
Even the word Holocaust did not become current until the 1960s. Several
events pushed the word into the public consciousness. The trial of Adolf
Eichmann' had a powerful effect on public awareness in both Israel and
America. The 1960s began with Elie Wiesel's powerful and classic book Night
and Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews and reached their climax
in the first major philosophical discussion of the event, Richard Rubenstein's
After Auschwitz.
In 1959 the first graduate seminar was taught (by Franklin H. Littell at
Emory University). During the 1960s, other courses and seminars were begun
in the high schools and colleges.2 Some cities built monuments; Philadelphia
was the first in the nation to do so, in 1964, with a statue by Nathan Rapoport.
During the 1970s, a few Holocaust education programs were launched. The
first was Yaffa Eliach's center in Brooklyn, followed six weeks later by
Franklin Littell's institute at Temple University.'
The Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches4 was
launched in 1970 by Franklin Littell and Hubert Locke at Wayne State
1. Adolf Eichmann was the man whose scheme of the Final Solution for the Jews was
responsible for the murder of approximately 3 million persons, although when he testified in the
Jerusalem Court of Justice, he claimed that he was only a cog in the wheel, a soldier obeying
orders. This line of defense had been rejected in the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg, and it was
rejected in Jerusalem. See Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
2. The first graduate seminar dealing with the Holocaust and the church struggle was
cross-listed in the History Department and the Candler School of Theology, Emory University,
1959-60; it was taught by Franklin Littell, a professor and a minister of the United Methodist
Church. In 1961, the first undergraduate course on the Holocaust was taught by Marie Syrkin
at Brandeis University.
3. The Brooklyn Center was founded at the Jacob Braverman High School, an Orthodox
Jewish school, by Dr. Yaffa Eliach, a professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New
York and a Holocaust survivor. It has since merged with the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The
National Institute on the Holocaust-now the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, Genocide,
and Human Rights-was established as an interfaith agency while Dr. Littell was a professor of
religion at Temple University.
4. Founded as the Annual Scholars' Conference on the German Church Struggle and the
Holocaust, the name of the event was changed some years ago to emphasize the primacy of the
Holocaust as a defining event.

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