
The Rosenstrasse Protest of 1943 was held against the incarceration and potential deportation of roughly 2,000 people who were arrested by the Gestapo on February 27, 1943. With their loved ones held at Rosenstraße 2-4 in Berlin, family members, many of whom were women, kept their protest going for a week until Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels ordered the prisoners’ release on March 6, 1943. This program marks the 80th anniversary of the protest and the context of the mass arrest which targeted “exempted” Jews, a term used for those who were married to a non-Jew or had one non-Jewish parent.
Nathan Stoltzfus, the Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University; Ruth Wiseman, daughter of Dr. Rita Jenny Kuhn, who was detained at Rosenstraße; and Mordecai Paldiel, former head of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem; and Jessica Hammer and Moyra Turkington, creators of the educational role-playing game Rosenstrasse, will discuss the history and why it is important to study today.