Former Holocaust Museum curator to speak at Bridgewater College

Judith Cohen, former chief acquisition curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., will speak at Bridgewater College on Monday, Jan. 27.

Cohen will speak in recognition of International Holocaust Remembrance Day at 7 p.m. in Cole Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

“My Dearest One: A Wife’s Final Goodbye” tells the history of a Czech Jewish family who was deported from their home in Prague to the Theresienstadt ghetto/labor camp and then to the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The talk is centered around a letter written by Vilma Grunwald to her husband, Dr. Kurt Grunwald, on July 11, 1944, while she was imprisoned at Auschwitz. The letter was written shortly before Vilma and her 16-year-old son, John, were taken on trucks to the gas chambers.

The lecture demonstrates how small family collections teach us previously unknown facts about the Holocaust and, when combined with similar collections, historians can piece together an entire family history.

Cohen is a graduate of Harvard University in history and literature and received her master’s from Brandeis in contemporary Jewish studies. She originally came to the Holocaust Museum in 1995 to work on the exhibition “Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto” before moving to the photo archives where she later served as director before becoming head of the curatorial acquisitions and reference branch and chief acquisitions curator. She has curated web exhibits and written and co-authored articles on the museum’s collection.

After she retired from the museum in 2020, she worked as a part-time researcher for the museum’s permanent exhibition revitalization project focusing primarily on Jewish rescuers.

The event is sponsored by the Kline Bowman Institute for Peace and Justice.