Inheriting memories: Becoming custodians of our collective past

Join us at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum to commemorate Yom HaShoah in partnership with the Museum of Inherited Memories.

We are one of the last generations to hear testimony directly from Holocaust survivors. We have been listening for as long as our survivors have been ready to share, but how do we feel about inheriting the position of witnesses?

This Yom HaShoah, we look into our role as custodians of these survivors’ memories and how we might share them with our families and beyond. Whether you work in the field of Holocaust remembrance or are an active audience member, whether you are Jewish or not, the descendant of survivors or not, we all have a role to play should we choose.

Special guests include Bram Presser (author), Emily Lubitz (musician), Ezra Faigenbaum (student, poet), Lior (musician), and Sarah Grynberg (speaker, teacher, podcast host).

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Sarah Saaroni OAM	Bram Presser	Emily Lubitz and Ezra Faigenbaum
Holocaust survivor Sarah (Sabcia) Saaroni OAM was born in 1926 and grew up in Lublin, Poland. Following the German invasion in 1939, she fled to Germany, and spent the next few years living as a Polish-Christian labourer. She escaped capture several times. Sarah now regularly speaks about her experiences to students.	Bram Presser is a semi-reformed punk rocker, recovering academic and lapsed lawyer. His novel, The Book of Dirt, won the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction (USA). He also writes the popular novella-focussed Substack, A Book For Ants, and is a co-founder of Melbourne Jewish Book Week.	Emily Lubitz is best known as the lead singer and songwriter for critically acclaimed indie-folk band Tinpan Orange. Her voice has been described as “brushed velvet” (The Age) and “gossamer” (triple j). She will appear alongside her nephew, student and poet Ezra Faigenbaum.
Lior	Sarah Grynberg	Tracey Collie
Lior is multi-award-winning artist, and one of Australia’s most treasured singer-songwriters. He burst on to the Australian music scene in 2005 with his debut album Autumn Flow and has since released a further six albums including Compassion (2014), a symphonic song cycle of original orchestrations set to ancient texts in both Hebrew and Arabic.	Sarah is a well-being expert, speaker, and host of internationally successful lifestyle podcast A Life of Greatness, where she’s interviewed guests from John Howard to Olivia Newton-John to Daniel Ricciardo. Through years of research, she has formulated a blueprint to achieving greatness which has become the touchstone of her work.	Tracey is the Education Programs Manager at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. She first visited the museum as a 15-year-old student, where she met and talked with Holocaust survivor Stephanie Heller. The values imparted during this encounter are reflected in Tracey’s work as an educator at MHM today.