Seton Hill University’s annual JoAnne Boyle World Affairs Forum and it’s National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education featured guest speaker Dr. Alex Grobman who spoke on "Those Who Dared: Rescuers and Rescued During the Holocaust" on November 7.

His lecture was about the role of the rescuers of the Jews during the Holocaust. Grobman explained that Yad Vashem has honored close to 20,000 Righteous Gentiles since the memorial was established in 1953 and gave the criteria that is used to decide who is awarded.

“Jewish tradition requires … recognizing good deeds,” said Grobman. “That’s why there is an obligation to tell how the rescuers, or helpers, saved Jews. By saving Jews they rescued the spirit and idea of man."

Grobman explained that some cases are straight-forward and others are more complex, but that common sense always plays a major role in their decisions.

“Risk is the basic criteria for granting the award, not altruism,” said Grobman.

Real case studies were examined and the audience was asked to judge how they would have voted. To be granted the title “Righteous Among the Nations” the rescuers must fulfill the following criteria:

1. On his or her own initiative they had to have been actively and directly involved in saving a Jew from being killed or being sent to a concentration camp, where the Jew was trapped in a country under the control of the Germans or their collaborators during the most dangerous periods of the Holocaust and totally dependent on the goodwill of non-Jews.

2. They risked everything including their own life, freedom and safety.

3. They did not receive any form of money or reward as a precondition to providing help.

“Obviously we have a responsibility to not only remember what people did then, but we’re trying to learn what type of person was responsible and what circumstances under which they were prepared to take those risks, so that perhaps we can teach people today to respond the same way,” said Grobman.

The rescuers included atheists, devout Christians, government bureaucrats, German soldiers, antisemites, and even German collaborators. The focus was on how people, both good and bad, reacted in times of stress and of the moral choices all people may have to face in their lives.

"Understand the danger that exists in the world when we allow evil to triumph and that one person can make a difference, if only we are willing to take the risk," said Grobman.



Grobman is a historian with an MA and Ph.D. in contemporary Jewish history with a major in the Shoah from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is president of the Brenn Institute, a think tank dealing with historical and contemporary issues affecting the Jewish community.

He founded the United State’s first Holocaust Center in St. Louis, Missouri and served as its first director. He also served as director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, California, where he was the founding editor-in-chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Annual, the first serial publication in the U.S. focusing on the scholarly study of the Holocaust. With Rabbi Daniel Landes, Grobman edited Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust, a companion to the Center’s Academy Award winning film Genocide.

Grobman is the author of Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944-1948, and editor of In Defense of the Survivors: The Letters and Documents of Oscar A. Mintzer AJDC Legal Advisor, Germany, 1945-46. His latest book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened, and Why Do They Say It? published by University of California Press in Berkeley was used to refute David Irving at the Lipstadt/Irving trial. He has also edited three academic guides: Anne Frank in Historical Perspective, Those Who Dared: Rescuers and Rescued, and Schindler’s List.

He is also a member of the academic board of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and a book reviewer for Lifestyles magazine and a contributing editor and book reviewer for Together magazine.