Speakers: Professor Katharina von Kellenbach, Pastor Heidi Neumark



 


Professor Katharina von Kellenbach and Pastor Heidi Neumark are Lutheran theologians, whose families carefully disguised their connections to Jews and Judaism. Both families tried to rebuild lives by disassociating and denying the trauma and guilt of the Holocaust. Neumark accidentally discovered that she was descended from a prominent Jewish German family and that her grandfather was murdered in a concentration camp. Von Kellenbach became inadvertently aware that her uncle belonged to the SS and was tried for the mass murder of the Jews in Pinsk, Belarus. These revelations compelled both speakers to go on a journey of discovery that led them through archives across several countries and into Jewish-Christian and Jewish-German dialogue. Uncovering their family secrets challenged them personally and theologically, as they confronted Lutheran anti-Judaism and German antisemitism.


Heidi Neumark, a graduate of Brown University and Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, is the pastor of the multicultural, bilingual Trinity Lutheran Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Her first book, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx, tells of her strong passion for social justice, which kept her in the South Bronx, where she served congregations for twenty years. Neumark has initiated support groups for Latino members and programs for low-income, immigrant children and homeless LGBT youth. In her book Hidden Inheritance: Family Secrets, Memory and Faith, Neumark tells of her discovery of her previously unknown German-Jewish ancestry and successive family loss and trauma through the Holocaust, as well as antisemitism in the Evangelical Lutheran Church.


Katharina von Kellenbach is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the Honors College of the State of Maryland. A student of Protestant evangelical theology in Berlin and Göttingen (1979-1982), she completed her PhD in the religion department at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1990. Her areas of expertise include Holocaust Studies, Jewish-Christian relations, feminist theology and interreligious dialogue. She is the author of biographical articles about the life and work of Rabbi Regina Jonas (1902-1944), who was ordained in 1935 and worked in Berlin until she was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and to Auschwitz in the fall of 1944. Her recent book, The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Lives of Nazi Perpetrators (Oxford University Press, 2013), uses the archival documents of prison chaplains to examine Christian discourses of forgiveness and Nazi perpetrators’ moral self-reflection in post-war West Germany.