Exhibit from Deborah Roth-Howe follows four Jewish families
Congregation Havurah Shalom of Sun City is partnering with the Georgetown Public Library to host a free event for Holocaust Remembrance Day in April that will feature the story of multiple families in a small German town during WWII as told by Deborah Roth-Howe, a descendent of one of the families.
The event is April 12, from 2-4 p.m. and is tailored for all ages. Sheryl Sapriel, from Congregation Havurah Shalom, said last year’s event was standing room only with over 300 people attending.
“The exhibit really illustrates the step by step process that allowed Hitler to develop the final solution,” Ms. Roth-Howe said. “It shows how one action was built on previous unopposed actions.”
Ms. Roth-Howe said her parents escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 from the town of Roth, south of Nuremberg. She told the Sun she had done some work with the children of Nazi’s, German bystanders, Jewish refugees and survivors which inspired her to look into her German ancestry and her father’s hometown.
“My father, who is from this village of Roth, Germany, that is highlighted in the exhibit, also had returned to the village over the years to research the history of Jews in this region, and wrote a manuscript detailing that,” she said.
Her dad worked with a history doctoral student to translate the documents, who then started the Arbeitskreis Landsynagoge Roth — an effort to rebuild the synagogue in the town.
At the reopening in 1998, there were documents, proclamations, receipts showing the story of the city’s Jewish population during the 1930s and 40s with highlights of four families. One of the families highlighted was Ms. Roth-Howe’s father.
“My father didn’t want to go. He thought it was tokenism, and I had to encourage him to go, because of my German-Jewish dialog work, I really felt that something good could come out of this,” Ms. Roth-Howe said.
At the event, Ms. RothHowe wondered if this was expanded to all 31 Jewish residents who lived in the town at the time, and put into historical context, could the exhibit would be a good educational tool for American students?
The exhibit, titled “A Reason to Remember; Roth, Germany 1933-1942” highlights the families throughout the World War II era in a chronological order and looks at how Gestapo orders impacted them.
“It’s really a microcosm of what happened to so many people in Nazi occupied Europe,” Ms. Roth-Howe said.
She added this exhibit always felt important to her because there’s always someone who’s the “other.” However, she said “given the state of the world today” she sees a lot of parallels between 1930s Germany and what is “happening in our country right now.”
“One of the things my father says [in an interview in a short film at the exhibit] is that these were good people, but they blessed it with silence and indifference,” she said. “That’s my large part of my motivation is to remind people you can’t be silent, and there are consequences to being silent and indifferent, and the consequences can be devastating. Now’s our time to speak up and be vigilant and outspoken.”