In conjunction with the exhibition, Memorial Library is sponsoring the following events, most of which are open to the public. Some events require advanced registration.
Date/Time: March 19, 2025, 7pm
Location: Southwest Corner of Memorial Library
Speakers: President Edward Inch and Cami Kottke
Audience: Open to the public
Description: An opening reception to officially commemorate the exhibition’s opening. The event will begin with brief opening remarks from President Edward Inch at 7:30pm. The remainder of the time will allow visitors to interact with the exhibition and one another.
Date/Time: March 24, 2025, 2:00pm-4:00pm
Location: Blue Earth County Library Auditorium
Run time: 90 min
Audience: Open to public
Description: A troubling picture of the U.S. during a time beset by anti-Semitism and a government that, due to complex social and political factors, delayed action and suppressed information and blocked efforts that could have saved hundreds of thousands of people from the Holocaust. Focuses on the case of Kurt Klein, who attempted to battle the bureaucratic stonewall as he tried to get his Jewish family out of Germany.
Date/Time: March 28, 2025, 9-10:30am
Location: Southwest Corner of Memorial Library
Description: As World War II begins, Americans are united in their disapproval of Nazi brutality but divided on whether to act. Some individuals and organizations work tirelessly to help the refugees escape. Meanwhile, Charles Lindbergh and isolationists battle with Roosevelt to try to keep America out of the War. Germany invades the Soviet Union and secretly begins the mass murder of European Jews.
Join us for a 45-minute screening of , Episode 1: “The Golden Door” (Beginnings – 1938) from “The U.S. and the Holocaust” documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein. After the screening, Dr. Rebecca Erbelding, educator and curator/archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will answer questions from the audience.
Viewer Discretion: This film contains mature content and graphic violence.
Speaker: Dr. Rebecca Erbelding
Date/Time: March 29, 2025, 3pm
Location: Ostrander Auditorium (Centennial Student Union)
Audience: Open to the public
Description: For more than a decade, a harsh Congressional immigration policy kept most Jewish refugees out of America, even as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. In 1944, the United States finally acted. That year, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, and put a young Treasury lawyer named John Pehle in charge.
Over the next twenty months, Pehle pulled together a team of D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. Together, they tricked the Nazis, forged identity papers, maneuvered food and medicine into concentration camps, recruited spies, leaked news stories, laundered money, negotiated ransoms, and funneled millions of dollars into Europe. They bought weapons for the French Resistance and sliced red tape to allow Jewish refugees to escape to Palestine. In this remarkable work of historical reclamation, Holocaust historian Rebecca Erbelding pieces together years of research and newly uncovered archival materials to tell the dramatic story of America’s little-known efforts to save the Jews of Europe.
Date/Time: April 7, 2025, 2pm – 3:30pm
Location: Blue Earth County Library Auditorium
Audience: Open to the public
Run time: 65min
Description: As a teenager in Nazi Germany, Jutta is shocked to discover she is Jewish. She joins the German resistance and meets Helmuth Cords, an injured German soldier. The two become sweethearts and ultimately, co-conspirators in the now famous Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler. With the failure of the plot comes a series of harrowing events as the couple and their associates are ruthlessly pursued by the Nazis. It would sound like a pitch for a Hollywood Blockbuster were it not all true. Narrated in vivid detail and supported by never-before-seen 8mm footage shot by one of the central characters, Surviving Hitler: A Love Story is a gripping film that combines simple romantic narrative, tense wartime story, and eye-opening links to monumental historical events.
Date/Time: April 8, 2025, All Day
Audience: https://minndakjcrc.org/education_programs/ushmm-registration/
Description: Since 1996, the JCRC’s annual trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. has educated participants about the atrocities of the Holocaust.
College and High School students, teachers, police and law enforcement personnel, National Guard members, as well as unaffiliated community members, join us each year to visit the museum, spending an immersive day learning about the Holocaust and the dangers of unchecked hatred.
Participants must be 12 years and older. Under 18 must be accompanied by an adult. Cost includes airline ticket, transportation in Washington, DC, and admission to the museum. (Registration is required).
Please contact susie@minndakjcrc.org for more info.
Speaker: Mark Wiese, Mankato West High School Social Studies Teacher
Date/Time: April 11, 2025, 3 to 5pm
Location: Southwest Corner of Memorial Library
Audience: Mankato Area Lifelong Learners
Description: Mankato West High School Social Studies Teacher, Mark Wiese, will give a presentation that addresses the themes of Americans and the Holocaust as well as how it is taught in our local schools and his experience at the Echos & Reflections Advanced Learning Seminar at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel in 2019.
Before the presentation, the Lifelong Learners group will have the opportunity to go through a guided tour of the Americans and the Holocaust Exhibition.
Speaker: Dr. Emil Towner, Interim Director of St. Cloud State University's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education (CHGE)
Date/Time: April 15th at 1pm
Location: Southwest Corner of Memorial Library
Audience: Open to the public
Description: Join us for an insightful discussion on the role of apologies in addressing genocide and mass atrocities, with a particular focus on the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. This event will explore the gacaca trials, a community-based justice system that sought to facilitate reconciliation and peacebuilding. We will examine the documentation process, including a specific form used to record apologies, and consider both the benefits and challenges of such apologies in the pursuit of justice and healing.
Date/Time: April 21,2025, 2pm – 3:30pm
Location: Blue Earth County Library Auditorium
Audience: Open to the public
Run time: 60 min
Description: Of the 1.6 million Jewish children who lived in Europe before WWII, only 100,000 survived the Holocaust. Most were hidden children, shuttered away in attics, cellars, convents or farms. This is Maud Dahme's story of courage, hope and bravery. Chronicles the wartime experiences of Dahme, one of an estimated 5,000 Jewish children hidden from the Nazis by righteous gentiles in the Netherlands.
