(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)January 27, 2014

(MAHWAH, NJ)  – Noted historian Susan Zuccotti discussed her new book, “Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands During the Holocaust,” published by the Indiana University Press, at a program on October 23, 2013, cosponsored by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Italian Club of Ramapo College. The Morton and Clara Richmond Endowment supported the talk.

According to Zuccotti, several key questions prompted her research: Who was this extraordinary priest and how did he become adept at hiding Jews, providing them with false papers, and helping them to elude their persecutors? What was his motivation? What made him join an organization, dissolved by Pope Pius XI in 1928, that questioned the traditional anti-Semitic teachings of the Catholic Church?

As Zuccotti revealed, she found the answers to some of these questions in a collection of letters that the not-yet ordained Marie-Benoît wrote to his mentor and teacher, an older Capuchin priest, during his service at the front during the First World War. To tell this remarkable tale more fully, in addition to her research in French and Italian archives, Zuccotti personally interviewed Père Marie-Benoît, his family, Jewish rescuers with whom he collaborated, and the survivors who owed their lives to his network.

Susan Sessions Zuccotti holds a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Columbia University. She has won a National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Studies, and the Premio Acqui Storia – Primo Lavoro for “Italians and the Holocaust” (1987). She also received a National Jewish Book Award for Jewish-Christian Relations, and the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Prize of the German Studies Association in 2002 for “Under His Very Windows” (2000). She lives in Brooklyn and is married to John Zuccotti. This was her fourth visit to Ramapo College.

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