Three Perspectives Presented at Nisei Veterans Memorial Center

Three speakers with unique views on present-day and World War II Jewish life will give a talk at the Maui Adult Day Care Center on the Nisei Veterans Memorial Center campus on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2019 at 1:30 p.m.

Hans-Ulrich Suedbeck, German Consul General of San Francisco, will speak about Jewish life in Germany today. Before becoming Consul General, Mr. Suedbeck was Head of the Western Balkans Division at the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, Germany. Prior posts took him to Afghanistan, Serbia, Ukraine, Brussels, and The Hague in the Netherlands.

Denis Salle lives in Honolulu and represents the Federal Republic of Germany in Hawaii as Honorary Consul. He will speak about the Bunce Court school in Kent, England, and his family connection to a teacher at the school whose founder, Anna Essinger, is credited with saving Jewish-German children.

Judith Elam, daughter of Holocaust survivors and active member of Maui’s Jewish community, will share what happened to her family during the Holocaust with an emphasis on the Kindertransport, a rescue effort in which the United Kingdom took in about 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig during nine months prior to the outbreak of WWII; and the Kitchener Camp, a former military camp in Sandwich, Kent, UK, used to house male Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.

Nisei veterans and Holocaust survivors share history regarding WWII; in April 1945, nisei soldiers of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, a unit of the segregated Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, rescued 5,000 Jews from a death march and liberated Jewish prisoners from at least two subcamps of Dachau concentration camp.

After the talk, the Nisei Veterans Memorial Center will be open for those interested in viewing the current exhibit, “Zionismus: The German Roots of Zionism”. The exhibit is curated by the Leo Baeck Institute and is made possible by the German Information Center USA.

The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Please call (808) 244-6862 to reserve a seat.

NVMC’s mission is to ignite the potential in people by inspiring them to find the hero in themselves through the legacy of the Nisei Veterans.

Hans-Ulrich Suedbeck, German Consul General of San Francisco, will speak
about Jewish life in Germany today.

Judith Elam, daughter of Holocaust survivors and active member of Maui’s
Jewish community, will share what happened to her family during the
Holocaust.

Denis Salle lives in Honolulu and represents the Federal Republic of
Germany in Hawaii as Honorary Consul.