GEORGIAN COURT UNIVERSITY TO HOST HOLOCAUST EXHIBIT

Manchester Times
ws/2009/0415/community_news/024.html
April 15 2009
New Jersey

OCEAN COUNTY – Georgian Court University will present a multimedia
Holocaust Memorial Exhibit through April 24 in the university’s
M. Christina Geis Art Gallery. The exhibit, timed to correspond with
Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 21, will include children’s books,
historic and modern photographs, maps, posters and text panels.

"This impor tant exhibit will take the viewer along a journey of one
of humanity’s darkest times," says Kathleen Settles, gallery director,
and one of the exhibit organizers. "The purpose of the exhibit is to
promote awareness, teach tolerance, inspire compassion and hopefully
enlist the viewer to an allegiance of goodwill toward all of humanity."

According to Lisa A. Festa, Ph.D., an assistant professor of
art history who also helped to organize the display, the exhibit
will feature a history of anti- Semitism throughout the ages, a
timeline of the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, and focus on the
implementation of laws against Jews as well as the Nazis’ censorship
of art and culture.

The exhibition will continue with a spotlight on the ghettos of Warsaw,
Poland and Terezín, Czechoslovakia, as well as the concentration
camps of Dachau, Germany and Auschwitz/ Birkenau, Poland. It will
also feature the liberation of the camps near the end of the war. The
exhibition will further pay tribute to several rescuers and the
"righteous among nations," and will end with a display about genocides
in other lands after World War II.

"It is hoped that viewers will leave the exhibition with a sense of
compassion and enlightenment, as well as a motivation and personal
drive to help change current events in order to ensure that genocide
never happens again," says Dr. Festa.

The exhibit coincides with Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance
Day, a day set aside to commemorate the lives and heroism of the
six million Jewish people who died in the Holocaust between 1933 and
1945. The exhibit closes on the anniversary of the onset of the Great
Catastrophe, the Armenian genocide of 1.5 million people that began
in 1915.

In addition to Ms. Settles and Dr. Festa, the exhibit was organized
and compiled with the assistance of Jose Gonzalez, lecturer in art.

The M. Christina Geis Art Gallery spotlights works of established
and upand coming artists in diverse media. The gallery is located on
the second floor of the Arts and Science Center on Georgian Cour t’s
Lakewood campus. Galler y hours are Monday through Thursday from 9
a.m. to 8 p.m. and Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The exhibit is free
and open to the public. For more information, call Kathleen Settles
at 732-987-2388.