Ithaca College

On October 23, 2017, at 7:30 pm, in Clark Lounge, Dr. Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University will speak on “Returning, Remembering, Forgiving: the Holocaust in Ukraine.” 

Dr. Hoffman’s talk is sponsored by the Jewish Studies program at Ithaca College, and is free and open to the public.

Dr. Hoffmann will speak on how his family survived the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. He grew up in a happy home in the town of Złoczów, Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), until the war descended. His family was saved by the personal goodness of a Ukrainian family, but only 200 out of the 4,000 Jews of Złoczów survived. Dr. Hoffmann’s talk addresses the complexity of Ukrainian-Jewish relations, the role of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church during the war, and the struggle to establish memorials in Zolochiv and surroundings. His story is a personal one, embedded in the geography and history of the people cohabiting that contested piece of the earth. Ultimately it is a story of the choices for good or evil that people must make in the worst of times. 

Biography

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Złoczów, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). He has been at Cornell University since 1965 and is now the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).

For more information about Dr. Hoffmann’s lecture, please contact Rebecca Lesses, Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Program at rlesses@ithaca.edu or 607-274-3556. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should also contact her as soon as possible to make arrangements for attendance.