2024 Remembrance Readings 

May 3rd, 2024 at 4PM & 7PM- two performances

Round Lake High School's Ghostlight Readers Theatre

No Fading Star by Celeste Raspanti

Round Lake High School Theatre

800 High School Drive, Round Lake IL 

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.

May 4th @ 7:30pm

J Company Youth Theatre

Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center

David & Dorothea Garfield Theatre

I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY by Celeste Raspanti

4126 Executive Drive

La Jolla, California 92037

7:00 PM on Monday, May 6 2024

Beit Midrash of the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan

Women, Theater, and the Holocaust, an evening of dramatic readings by professional actors, will be presented by Remember the Women Institute  

This annual Yom HaShoah event features four readings that dramatize various aspects of women’s experiences during the Holocaust. They portray how women suffered and survived the horrors of the Nazi regime. Excerpts from Annulla, written and performed by Broadway veteran Emily Mann, are based on the true story of a Jewish woman who passed as a non-Jew in Nazi Germany. English Lessons is the premiere of a short play by Cynthia L. Cooper, inspired by a memoir by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s sister Gemma LaGuardia Gluck, held as a political prisoner in Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp. Excerpts from And the Rat Laughed, a novel by Nava Semel, deal with the sexual abuse of a hidden child in Poland. The reading from Letters to Sala by Arlene Hutton, adapted from the book Sala's Gift by Ann Kirschner, is from the true account of a young girl's survival in Nazi labor camps.

Following these dramatic presentations, there will be a talkback with the playwrights, as well as a reception.

--