May 4, 2024 2:00pm 

Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in partnership with the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center

The Chosen performed at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park

A post show panel discussion is planned for after the discussion.  The actors from the production will be joined onstage after the show by Henry Fenichel. He is a Holocaust survivor. He arrived in Brooklyn in the early 1950s and can provide a firsthand account of what the Jewish communities in Brooklyn were like around the same time as the setting of the play. 

Henry Fenichel was born in The Hague in 1938. Shortly after the Nazi rise to power, sensing the danger to come, Henry’s parents, Pessel and Moritz, sent a request for their relocation to Palestine where his father’s family resided. After Henry’s father was deported to Mauthausen in 1942 and murdered by the Nazis several months later in Auschwitz, Henry and his mother still had no response to their request to immigrate. They then went into hiding. When Henry was four years old, he and his mother’s hiding place was discovered in the spring of 1943, and they were imprisoned in the Westerbork transit camp, one of two transit camps in the Netherlands. Shortly after arriving, Pessel learned of a prisoner exchange that would allow a select number of Jews to escape to Palestine. Through a miraculous series of events, Henry’s mother was able to get them on the list for “transport 222”. In February 1944, they were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and by June, Henry, his mother, and 220 other Dutch individuals left Bergen-Belsen, on their way to freedom in British Mandate Palestine. Upon arriving in Palestine, Henry was placed in a children’s home. His mother visited often and when she remarried, Henry lived with his mother and stepfather, Abraham. With the help of Abraham’s family, they came to America in 1953. Henry taught Physics at the University of Cincinnati for nearly four decades.