An intensive one-week residential institute that brings educators together from around the United States and Europe. We will explore the role of memory and witness in developing competencies for democratic citizenship. Attendees who complete the Institute join a corps of educators who serve as leaders in Holocaust and genocide education in their schools, communities, and professional organizations and assist the Center in applying its mission.
Goals
- Enhancing practical pedagogical and methodological competencies necessary to effectively and responsibly teach and engage students in continual Holocaust and genocide studies.
- Identifying the processes by which genocide unfolds while identifying factors that move ordinary people to make a variety of behavioral choices.
- Empowering education to prevent genocide and crimes of mass atrocity by finding points of leverage, intervention and empowerment.
- Enabling civic engagement through the Cohen Center Fellowship to promote the mission of the Cohen Center through activities in schools and communities.
Save the Date!
Next Summer Institute: July 10-15, 2022 at Keene State College
Register for the Summer Institute
CCHGS Fellows
Cohen Center Fellows are leaders who promote the mission of the Cohen Center by:
- Serving as regional contacts
- Presenting a workshop at a professional conference
- Writing an article for a newspaper or professional journal
- Conducting a book discussion in your community or a present a lecture
- Developing a lesson plans for distribution
- Coordinating community events
CCHGS Fellows’ Benefits
- Special invitations to events and programs
- Membership in the Cohen Center Professional Community of Practice
James H. White/Sibylle Sarah Niemoeller-von Sell Fellowship
The award honors the late James H. White (KSC 1984) and Sibylle Sarah Niemoeller von Sell and was created with a lead gift from Michael (KSC 1959) and Phyllis White (KSC 1960).
The purpose shall be to provide a full or partial scholarship for at least one citizen to attend the Cohen Center’s annual Civic Leadership Project (CLP) or participate in educational outreach events such as the biennial summer institute.
James H. White was the beloved brother of the Thomas White, the Coordinator of Educational Outreach. He was a man of integrity, committed to affirming the dignity of all human persons. He had an uncompromising sense of justice and as a teacher and wanted people to honestly confront prejudice and injustice.
Sibylle Sarah Niemoeller von Sell is a writer, lecturer and widow of anti-Hitler pastor Martin Niemoeller, was born to an old, highly esteemed Prussian aristocratic family. The family was staunchly and uncompromisingly anti-Nazi even before Hitler came to power. Sibylle von Sell was expelled from high school for refusing to join the Hitler Youth. Later, she suffered interrogation and physical abuse by the Gestapo for her family’s connection to the unsuccessful 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. The pastor of the von Sell family’s Lutheran church was Martin Niemoeller, founder of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in 1933, whose public attacks of the Nazi regime gave him such international attention that Hitler was reluctant to have him executed. He was, however, arrested, spending the war years in the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Dachau. After the war, she emigrated to the U.S., where she and Niemoeller were reacquainted and eventually married. After the death of her famous husband, she converted to Judaism and took the name Sarah — a meaningful gesture, she said, because it is the name that was used by the Nazis as a derogatory reference to Jewish women during the Holocaust.
Jim and Sibylle embody the values of civic leadership and moral responsibility. They shared the belief that present and future generations should take responsibility for building a world free of antisemitism, intolerance, and hate.
Recipients of this fellowship are required to write a letter of gratitude to Michael and Phyllis White and Sibylle Niemoeller von Sell discussing the personal impact of the CLP.
