Diana Mara Henry’s I Am André is an amazing real-life story of espionage, of courage and resistance, and of friendship and love. It pulls back the veil on the hidden history of the struggle for the identity of the Resistance in France. The life of ‘André’ Joseph Scheinmann is more intriguing and compelling than any work of fiction. His true-life story of derring-do starts in Munich, as a Jewish youth whose family moves to France in 1933 to escape the Nazi tide. He joins the French army at the outbreak of WW2 and escapes from a prisoner-of war camp after the bitterly brief fight for France in the summer of 1940. André becomes a spy and saboteur for the British and Free French while working undercover as translator and liaison with the German high command at the Brittany headquarters of the French National Railroads. Summoned by the British, he clandestinely crosses the Channel for initiation and training as an MI6 agent in England. His network betrayed during his absence, he is arrested on his return to France. André then begins an even more perilous journey through interrogations in Gestapo prisons and the little-known Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace, before being transferred to Dachau and Allach, ahead of the advancing Allies. Many vintage photographs and letters from his agents come to illustrate this heart-pounding story of a debonair young man in a broken world who remade himself as a cunning fighter for freedom. 

By the close of World War II, six million Jews had been erased from the face of the earth. Those who eluded death had lost their homes, families, and entire way of life. Their response was quintessentially Jewish. From a people with a long history of self-narration, survivors gathered in groups and wrote yizkor books to recall the particulars of towns, the names of families, and the material culture of a vanished world. Jane Ziegelman's Once There Was a Town takes readers on a journey through this largely uncharted body of writing. 

Israel and the Holocaust - A Close Reading and Discussion

This is a two-part series. You will be registered for both parts. Please take note of the different days and locations.

• Part I: February 3, 2026 (Tuesday) from 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM ET (Zoom)
• Part II: April 29, 2026 (Wednesday) from 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM ET (In-Person)

Research Assistance at the Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center

The Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center is the physical presence of JewishGen—the genealogical research division of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

Our professional genealogists who are experts in family history research are here to guide and assist you, whether you’re just starting your search or digging deeper into your family tree. With unlimited access to JewishGen’s powerful online tools and many other essential resources, the Kalikow Center is your personalized launchpad for discovery.

Here, your family’s past comes to life. Genealogical research—especially Jewish family history—can be a fascinating but complex journey, filled with hidden details, unfamiliar languages, and elusive records. That’s where we come in.

Come with questions. Leave with stories. Your history is waiting—let the Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center help you discover it.

The center is open on:

Wednesdays at 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Thursdays at 12:00 – 4:00 pm & 4:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Sundays 10:00 am – 12:30 pm & 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

We encourage you to make a reservation. You may walk in on a first come first serve basis as well.

Museum admission is required to visit the center.

Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these “diaries of the night” in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one. 
 
Available again for the first time since its publication in the 1960s, this sensational book brings together this uniquely powerful dream record, offering a visceral understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination. After Beradt herself fled Germany for New York, she collected these dream accounts and began to trace the common symbols and themes that appeared in the collective unconscious of a traumatized nation. The fear of dictatorship was ever-present. Dreams of thought control, even the prohibition of dreaming itself, bore witness to the collapse of outer and inner worlds. 
 
Now in a haunting new translation by Damion Searls and with an incisive foreword by Dunya Mikhail, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler’s terror. 

Combining magical realism and evocative hand-drawn animation with revelatory interviews and verité footage, Among Neighbors examines the story of a small, rural town where Jews and Polish Catholics lived side by side for centuries before World War II. The film brings the Polish response to the Holocaust to life through the last living eyewitnesses, revealing both love and betrayal as it zeroes in on one of the last living Holocaust survivors from the town, and an aging eyewitness who saw Jews murdered there - not by Nazis, but by her own Polish neighbors. Produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Yoav Potash (Crime After Crime, Sundance Film Festival).

New York pianist Roger Peltzman's one-person show, Dedication, recounts his family's tragic history of fleeing the Nazis in war-torn Europe using drama, humor, powerful images, and musical performances of everything from blues to Chopin. 

Drawn into the story of people he never knew, Peltzman develops a "relationship" with his uncle, Norbert Stern, a brilliant pianist who was murdered in Auschwitz at age 21. Learning that Holocaust trauma can be inherited, Peltzman recounts his coming to terms with second generation survivor trauma and the role of music in helping to manage wounds that will never fully heal. 

Sons of Survivors, written by Aron Hirt-Manheimer and Marty Yura is a dual memoir that traces the colorful growing-up adventures of two sons of survivors through fast-paced alternating passages. Though the Holocaust formed the backdrop of their lives, it was only as older adults that they set out to try to piece together what happened to their families during the war -- and to bear witness.

For Aron, the most powerful revelations were contained in a nearly forgotten memoir written by his uncle fifty years earlier in Argentina. Marty’s breakthrough came after participating in a Zen Peacemakers immersion retreat on the killing fields of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Navigating through this haunted terrain together, the friends realized that the love they inherited from their parents transcends the trauma. Their joint memoir attests to a legacy of love against hate.

Hirt-Manheimer and Yura will be in conversation about their book with Dr. Michael Berenbaum.

Liliana is a documentary by Ruggero Gabbai that retraces the testimony of life senator Liliana Segre linked to her arrest, deportation and poignant final farewell to her father. The film is based on juxtapositions, cross-references and contrasts between the historical account and the contemporary portrait of one of the most important women on the Italian scene. The docu-film highlights lesser-known aspects of the senator, revealing a modern cultural and political figure who is passionate about conveying a message of freedom and equality to the younger generations. The voices of people close to her tell her story: her children, grandchildren, public figures such as Ferruccio De Bortoli, Mario Monti, Geppi Cucciari, Fabio Fazio, Enrico Mentana, and the carabinieri of her escort, allowing us to get closer to a more familiar and private Liliana. The result is a deep and detailed portrait, which gives access to the theme of the transmission of trauma and the importance of how history is told to future generations.

Run time: 84 minutes. 

American Lyric Theater partners with the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust to present a concert of Tevye's Daughters - a new opera by Alex Weiser and Stephanie Fleischmann. 

Inspired by the darker, grittier stories by Sholem Aleichem not included in Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye's Daughters centers on the tale of the beloved milkman's younger daughter Shprintse, who falls in love with a young man above her station. Like so many women of her generation, Shprintse has no choice but to navigate her crisis in silence. Galvanized by the literature of little-known female Yiddish writers, as well as tkhines - Yiddish prayers designated expressly for women - Tevye's Daughters rewrites that silence, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories have frequently been suppressed, omitted, and even erased. The opera moves between a shtetl in Ukraine in 1907 and a summer cabin in the Catskills in 1964 as Tseytl, Khave, and Beykle, now old women, haunted by a vestigial memory submerged for more than half a century, can no longer look away from the past. The arrival of Rose, a granddaughter grappling with her own sexual identity, incites the sisters not only to remember Shprintse's traumatic story, but to come to terms with their shared tumultuous present. 

Eighty years after his liberation from Buchenwald, we seek to understand the man behind Elie Wiesel's searing and widely read memoir Night. Told largely through his own words and eloquent voice, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire seeks to penetrate to the heart of the known and unknown Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) - his passions, his conflicts and his legacy as one of the most public survivors of the trauma of the Holocaust. With unique access to personal archives, original interviews and employing hand painted animation, the film illuminates Wiesel’s biography as a survivor, writer, teacher, and public figure. 

Run time: 87 minutes.  

There will be a talkback following the screening.

Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage and The LUNAR Collective for a night of MahJongg to celebrate the Lunar New Year and the Year of the Horse!

Enjoy kosher Chinese food, American and Chinese MahJongg, and a guided exhibit tour of Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark. 

Explore the layers of Jewish life that once shaped Seville on this live, interactive journey through one of Spain’s most storied cities. Wander the former Jewish Quarter, hear stories of scholars, merchants, and everyday families, and trace how Jewish culture, tradition, and resilience left lasting marks on Seville’s streets, architecture, and local customs. This thoughtful tour brings history to life while connecting past and present in real time. Co-presented with Wowzitude. 

The San Diego Jewish Men's Choir presents an uplifting afternoon of music celebrating Jewish life, tradition and heritage in the Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew and English languages. Under the direction of Ruth Hertz Weber, this award-winning, and 2-time Top 5 Billboard Charting, group of 25 Jewish guys that sing and dance bring their unique blend of class and schmaltz to the Museum for this one-of-a-kind program.  The group's esteemed musicians include Emilia Lopez-Yañez-oboe, Dr. Michael Munson-piano, Doron Peisic-accordion, and Zisl Slepovitch-clarinet. 

In 1942, the Nazis established a unique ghetto/concentration camp outside Prague in an old army garrison known as Terezín, which the Germans renamed Theresienstadt. Terezín was a prison to thousands of scholars, performers, musicians, actors, writers, and philosophers. Overwhelmingly Jewish, these prisoners turned to the arts and humanities as both balm and sword. They performed, created, taught, lectured, and composed not merely as entertainment, but as necessity and nourishment, as critical to staying alive as eating and drinking.

Defiant Requiem highlights the most dramatic example of intellectual and artistic courage: the remarkable story of Rafael Schächter, a brilliant young and passionate Czech opera-choral conductor who was sent to Terezín in 1941. He was determined to sustain courage and hope for his fellow prisoners by enriching their souls through great music. His most extraordinary act was to recruit 150 prisoners and teach them the Verdi Requiem in a dank cellar using a smuggled score over multiple rehearsals, after grueling days of forced labor. The Requiem was performed on sixteen occasions for fellow prisoners. The last, most infamous performance occurred on June 23, 1944. With only sixty prisoner-singers remaining following massive deportations, Schächter was ordered by the Nazi camp commander to perform the Requiem before high-ranking SS officers from Berlin and the International Red Cross to support the myth that the prisoners were well treated and flourishing.

Following the screening of the film, there will be a discussion with Murry Sidlin, Founder, President, and Artistic Director of the Defiant Requiem Foundation.

Dancer/Choreographer Anna Sokolow and Composer Alex North connected as young artists in the midst of the 1930’s Great Depression. Both came from Russian Jewish immigrant families and were committed to the social justice issues of the time, including workers rights and anti-fascism. Their art focused on lifting the spirit of the masses and improving the life of working people. While their careers took off within the atmosphere of the New York City modernist movement, they also traveled to Russia and to Mexico expanding both their artistic education and influence. In 1937, Sokolow premiered Slaughter of the Innocents, her 1937 lament for Basque women suffering under Nazi aerial bombing set to an original score by Alex North.

Samantha Geracht, Artistic Director of the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble will take the audience through the reconstruction process of this dance, which included a set of photographic proofs and the discovery of the lost North score, while outlining the history of anti-fascist modern dance. Slaughter of the Innocents will be performed by members of the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble to the original music showcasing the creative collaboration of Anna Sokolow (1910-2000) and Alex North (1910-1991). This piece remains fresh, compelling, and relevant for today's audiences. 

Rooms, choreographed by Anna Sokolow with a jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins, examines the psychic isolation and unfulfilled desires of characters isolated in their small, city apartments. The controversial and groundbreaking 1955 work breathes with the loneliness and alienation following the breakdown of wartime solidarity, when the threat of atomic annihilation, the 1952 polio epidemic, and the Red Scare hung like invisible contagions and created a mood of pervasive uncertainty and dread throughout the country. An enduring masterpiece, Rooms still conveys the anxiety and isolation of today.

This event forms part of Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival.

ASL Tour "Art of Freedom: The Life & Work of Arthur Szyk"

Thursday, March 12th at 6:00 PM

Join us for a Curator and ASL interpreter-led tour of the Museum’s newest exhibition of Szyk’s stunning works, Art of Freedom: The Life & Work of Arthur Szyk hosted at The Museum of Jewish Heritage– A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

Over his decades-long career as an artist, Arthur Szyk emerged as a powerful voice in the fight for freedom, justice, and democracy. As a Polish-born Jew and an immigrant to the United States, he advocated for European Jewry, calling the world to action during the Holocaust while his anti-Nazi illustrations rallied Americans to the war effort. 

This program is for deaf adults.

The program is free, but registration is still required.

Light refreshments to follow.