Women’s Resilience and Survival in the Holocaust

A virtual event presentation by Professor Bjorn Krondorfer

Event Co-Sponsored by Congregation Or Tzion

About The Event:

This talk will trace the lives of two women Holocaust survivors who both grew up in traditional Jewish families in Bedzin, Poland, and later became residents of Arizona: Jane Lipski (Tucson) and Doris Martin (Flagstaff). They managed to survive the Nazi onslaught as adolescent girls. While Jane was able to escape the ghetto and join the resistance movement in Slovakia, Doris was sent to Auschwitz and selected for labor at a women’s camp near the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. While Doris was liberated in 1945 by the advancing Soviet forces and ended up in a Displaced Person Camp in Germany, Jane was arrested by the Soviets as a suspected spy and remained in captivity in Soviet labor camps until 1947. I will introduce the complex history of the Holocaust through the lives of Doris and Jane, with particular attention to women’s resourcefulness in their struggle so to survive.

About The Speaker:

Björn Krondorfer is Regents’ Professor and the Director of the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University. As an Endowed Professor of Religious Studies, he also teaches in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies. He received his Ph.D. at Temple University, Philadelphia. His field of expertise is religion, gender, and culture, and (post-) Holocaust and reconciliation studies. His scholarship helped to define the field of Critical Men’s Studies in Religions.

As director of the Martin-Springer Institute, he has organized several international academic symposia. He has mentored the creation of several exhibits: Through the Eyes of Youth: Life and Death in the Bedzin Ghetto; Resilience: Women in Flagstaff’s Past and Present; and the permanent installation of a Berlin Wall exhibit at NAU. He has curated the art exhibitions Wounded Landscapes (2014) and Echoes of Loss: Artistic Responses to Trauma (2018). In 2019, he has been awarded a one-month residential fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute on the theme of “truth and reconciliation.”