Issue 7: Winter 2017 Authors

Rakel Berenbaum

Article: SNOEZELEN ROOMS: PRESERVING MEMORIES OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS WITH DEMENTIA

Rakel Berenbaum has a B.A. in Education and Computers, and an M.A. in Gerontology. She has over 30 years of experience in the field of aging, working primarily with people with dementia. She was director of one of Melabev’s Day Care centers, has worked extensively with volunteers, and has developed learning materials to teach about aging, including three books she edited on dementia care.

Rakel’s in-laws are survivors, and she encourages them to share their stories and lessons from the time of the Holocaust with the younger generation.

Chavie Brumer, LCSW-R

Article: Never Forget-Never Enough | The Indestructible Jewish Soul

Ms. Brumer holds a Masters in Social Work from Yeshiva University and has over 17 years of clinical experience working with individuals and families, including trauma survivors.  She works at the Claims Conference overseeing several programs, including this Kavod journal.

Eva Fogelman

Articles: Telling Your Children about the Holocaust ; PSYCHOLOGICAL DYNAMICS IN AGING SURVIVORS OF THE HOLOCAUST

Eva Fogelman, PhD is a psychologist in private practice in New York City.  She is co-director of Child Development Research.  Dr. Fogelman was the co-founder and co-director of Psychotherapy With Generations of the Holocaust and Related Traumas and founding director of Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers (ne Foundation for the Righteous). She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominee Conscience and Courage:  Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust and author and co-producer of the award-winning documentary, Breaking the Silence:  The Generation After the Holocaust.

Lois Griff

Article: HOW A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR INCORPORATES SPIRITUALITY INTO HER LIFE: A CASE STUDY

Lois Griff was born in Waltham, Massachusetts. She received her undergraduate degree at McGill University and her MSW from Columbia University. She has been a social worker since 1984 and has worked for most of her career with the elderly.  She was raised in what would be called today a ‘conservadox’ household.  She took a mini class on Spirituality, sponsored by UJA and Selfhelp Community Services, Inc.  She was inspired by that class and tries to use spirituality and social work techniques as often as possible when working with her clients.

Dr. George Halasz

Article: Reflections from Son of Saul to Son of Alice
Beshert-It Was Meant to Be
Trauma in a Residential Setting
Manifestations of Generational Trauma

Dr. Halasz is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, consultant and adjunct senior lecturer at the School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University. He also has a private psychiatry practice.

From 1992-2005, Dr. Halasz was a member of the editorial boards of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, as well as the Australasian Psychiatry journal, where he continues to maintain his membership. He has co-edited three books and a number of chapters and journal articles on a range of developmental and psychiatric conditions. He contributed to “The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust,” (eds. N. R. Goodman & M. B. Meyers, Routledge, 2012), based on his mother’s VHF Holocaust testimony. Dr. Halasz has appeared on television and radio, including ABC TV documentaries “Compass and Catalyst,” “All in the Mind” and “Encounter”. Finally, he is a regular panellist on the Triple ‘R’s ‘Radiotherapy’ since the 1990s.

Robert Krell

Articles: Conference Presentation: Survivor Resilience | A Measure of Faith: Child Holocaust Survivors and their Spiritual Dilemma | Preparing for the Care of the Aging: Child Survivors of the Holocaust

Robert Krell M.D., F.R.C.P.(C)
Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychiatry,
The University of British Columbia
Distinguished Life Fellow, American Psychiatric Association

Dr. Krell was born in The Hague, Holland on August 5th, 1940. He was hidden from 1942 to 1945 with the Munnik family and returned to his parents, who also survived in hiding. Their families of origin were all murdered in Auschwitz and Sobibor. In 1951, the Krells moved to Vancouver, B.C. Robert Krell graduated from The University of British Columbia with an M.D. in 1965, interned in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia General Hospital, and continued in psychiatric training at Temple University Hospital, Philadelphia, Stanford University Hospital in Palo Alto and then returned to The University of British Columbia.

In 1970, he became F.R.C.P. (C) and in 1971 a Diplomat of the American Boards of Psychiatry and Neurology. He was appointed Assistant Professor in Psychiatry in January, 1971 and served as Professor of Psychiatry until 1995, when he became Professor Emeritus. In his professional career, he was Director of Residency Training for ten years and for twenty-five years Director of Child and Family Psychiatry at the UBC Health Sciences Centre and B.C.’s Children’s Hospital.

As a volunteer in the community, Robert Krell served on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Jewish Congress – Pacific Region from 1972, Vice-Chair for nine years, Chair (1986-1989) and National Vice-President (1989-1992).
During that time he founded in 1975, with Dr. Graham Forst of Capilano College as co-Chair and Professor William Nicholls, head of Religious Studies-UBC, the Standing Committee on Holocaust Education, which teaches more than 1,000 British Columbia high school students annually. Outreach programs serve additional thousands of students in the Interior and on Vancouver Island. The program serves as an educational tool to combat prejudice, racism and anti-Semitism.

In his private psychiatric practice, Dr. Krell treated Holocaust survivors and their families and Dutch survivors of Japanese concentration camps.

Dr. Krell pioneered audiovisual documentation of Holocaust survivors in the Vancouver area in 1978 and expanded this program in 1983 and 1984 to tape 120 eyewitness accounts. In 1980 he urged the Canadian Jewish Congress to establish a national program which resulted in a nationwide audiovisual project taping 70 survivors.

Being himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, he assisted with the formation of child survivor groups, first in Los Angeles between 1982 and 1984 and then in Vancouver. He served on the International Advisory Council of the Hidden Child Conference that organized a gathering in New York in 1991 for approximately 1,500 child survivors who came from many countries to meet for the first time and have met annually ever since.

In 1985, Dr. Krell founded the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society for Education and Remembrance, which built
a memorial for Holocaust survivors, and was unveiled in 1987 at the Schara Tzedeck Cemetery.

Dr. Krell established the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre that opened on November 7th, 1994 in order to provide educational programs for high school children, warning of the consequences of unchecked racism and intolerance. For these activities, he received in 1998 the State of Israel Bonds Elie Wiesel Remembrance Award and in 2011, the Boston University Hillel Lifetime Achievement Award for “bringing solace and understanding to generations of Holocaust Survivors.”

On January 27th, 2012, he was the Keynote speaker at the United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In November 2012, the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University recognized his “distinguished contributions to Holocaust education” and on December 5th he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal, “as an outstanding human rights educator” On August 24, 2014 he received an award from The World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants at its Gathering in Berlin. March 4th, 2016 he was recognized with a Governor General Caring Canadian Award for founding the Vancouver Holocaust Centre and for his lifelong work promoting human rights and social justice. He has authored six books, co-edited three and written twenty book chapters and over fifty journal articles. For information on his newest book: Memoiries:Sounds from Silence, contact memoiries2016@gmail.com. Presently his interests remain the psychiatric treatment of aging survivors of massive trauma and participating in programs against racism and prejudice. Dr. Krell is married and has three children and nine grandchildren.

Rabbi Ronald Weiss

Article: JEWISH HOSPICE – AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Rabbi Ronald Weiss received his undergraduate degree from Brandeis University; a Masters degree in Jewish Education and Rabbinic Ordination from Yeshiva University.  He was a pulpit rabbi for twelve years, serving congregational communities in Binghamton, New York and Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

Rabbi Weiss moved to Toronto in July, 1994, where he serves as the Director of Chaplaincy Services at Jewish Family and Child Services. As mandated by UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, he is responsible for overseeing the spiritual and religious care received by Jewish patients in 41 hospitals, Jewish residents in 55 long-term care facilities as well as Jewish inmates in 26 Ontario correctional institutions on the Federal, Provincial and Municipal levels.

Rabbi Weiss represents the Jewish community on the Ontario Multi-faith Council for Spiritual and Religious Care, on which he served for many years as a member of its Executive Board.  He is the only rabbi in Toronto to carry a badge – serving as a Chaplain-at-large for the Toronto Police Service; as well he is an advisor to the York Region Police Service and works with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Rabbi Weiss is the chaplain of the Jewish Hospice Program and provides spiritual care and counselling to the terminally ill in the Jewish community.