jewishindependent.ca\/krieger-takes-on-new-roles<\/a>.)<\/p>\nMarazzi had been the VHEC\u2019s director of communications and special projects for about 10 months before being appointed interim executive director. Her permanent appointment was announced on June 17, at the annual general meeting of the society.<\/p>\n
The organization\u2019s president, Al\u00a0Szajman, credited Marazzi\u2019s background as a good fit.<\/p>\n
Formally announcing Marazzi\u2019s appointment, Szajman noted her role as \u201cIrwin Cotler\u2019s right-hand person\u201d and her existing relationships with partner groups like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and with various foundations, government leaders and influencers locally, nationally and internationally.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn short, we\u2019ve come to recognize Hannah as a leader, someone with passion, vision and maturity. Her Italian-Mennonite background reminds everyone that you don\u2019t have to be Jewish to stand against antisemitism and advance the lessons that everyone should have learned about the Shoah,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Marazzi has an undergraduate degree in history, political science and government from Trinity Western University and a master\u2019s degree in public policy from Cambridge, where she served as an assistant editor of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nEarly in her career, she was working on Parliament Hill when Cotler reached out to her boss, then-MP for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country John\u00a0<\/span>Weston, to become involved in the case of a woman sentenced to death in Iran. Through the Cotler connection, Marazzi went on to help organize the Nuremberg Legal Symposium. The gathering, which was co-created by March of the Living and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, in 2016, educated legal professionals and the next generation about the lessons of Nuremberg and how to apply them today, especially as the legal sector addresses hate, denial and incitement. Marazzi became administrative coordinator for the event.<\/p>\nShe went on to work for the Cardus Institute, a Christian think tank, and then for United Nations Volunteers, in Amman, Jordan, before Cotler coaxed her to join him when he was appointed to inaugurate the office of Canada\u2019s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.<\/p>\n
Marazzi returned to the West Coast \u2013 she grew up in the Fraser Valley \u2013 to be closer to her family when her father faced a health crisis.<\/p>\n
Addressing the VHEC annual meeting, Marazzi paid tribute to the founders of the organization, who opened the doors to the centre 30 years ago, including Dr. Robert Krell, the founding president, who was present at the meeting.<\/p>\n
She reflected on her first visit to Auschwitz, at age 22, 10 days after graduating from university.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did not know then that I would return to places like Auschwitz, Treblinka and many other sites of memory and begin learning in my own country at places like the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre,\u201d she said. \u201cI feel strongly in my bones that we must not allow the lessons of the Holocaust to fade from memory. As my mentor Irwin Cotler says, \u2018No one can say that we did not know. We knew. But we did not act.\u2019 This is why I believe so resolutely in the power of Holocaust education to awaken us to the reality of what happens when a society, through silence and inaction, allows evil to flourish unchecked.\u201d<\/p>\n
The VHEC has become Western Canada\u2019s leading Holocaust museum dedicated to the promotion of social justice, human rights and genocide awareness. It is at a turning point in its history, as all such facilities prepare for an era when there are no longer eyewitnesses to the events who can share their narratives.<\/p>\n
Holocaust museums have increasingly used technology to capture and immortalize those stories \u2013 and Marazzi credited Krell as a pioneer in that field, having begun one of the world\u2019s earliest archives of video-recorded survivor testimonies, beginning when the technology was fresh.<\/p>\n
Broader developments in the community will have a profound impact on the VHEC. The centre is slated to double in size and attain a new visibility thanks to JWest, the redevelopment of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, where the VHEC is located.<\/p>\n
Marazzi emphasized the importance of partnerships in the VHEC\u2019s success, including local connections, such as with the Roma and Rwandan communities. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the VHEC partnered with the University of British Columbia to bring to Vancouver\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nDr. Nataliia Ivchyk \u2013 an expert on Holocaust studies in Ukraine and East-Central Europe, focusing on gender, memory politics and the experiences of Jewish children during the Holocaust \u2013 who was identified as a scholar-at-risk. At the VHEC, Ivchyk took on the Russian-Language Holocaust Testimony Project, conducting interviews with Russian-speaking survivors in the Lower Mainland.<\/p>\n
Internationally, World Jewish Congress has reached out to borrow the centre\u2019s current exhibit, Age of Influence, which focuses on how the Nazi regime used propaganda specifically targeted at raising and indoctrinating young Germans. Demand for this exhibit, an original VHEC creation, has led to the creation of traveling versions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMarazzi acknowledged that, when she tells people where she works, they sometimes suggest it must be a depressing daily grind.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s actually the most hopeful place you can be at this time,\u201d she said. \u201cYou have the survivors who have experienced unimaginable horrors and yet not only are they here with us contributing to society in extraordinary ways, they are willing to dig deep into what was the worst experience of their life and share it to educate students.\u201d<\/p>\n
The VHEC has never been busier, she added. Hundreds of kids, teachers and adults, including elected officials and diplomats, law enforcement, groups of coworkers, unions and others, attend the exhibits every week. At national and international conferences, Marazzi has discovered this is not the case in all such institutions. Security fears and possibly other factors have seen attendance drop in many Holocaust education institutions, she said, even amid a flourishing of antisemitism and intolerance, the phenomena they are intended\u00a0<\/span>to address.<\/p>\nMarazzi credits the trajectory of success with the work that the VHEC has done for the past 30 years in creating relationships based on trust and mutual respect with other communities, school districts and educators across the province.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cWe are completely inundated and it\u2019s exhausting but it\u2019s delightful,\u201d\u00a0<\/span>she said.<\/p>\nThe confluence of events \u2013 Marazzi\u2019s appointment, the impending expansion of the VHEC and the global increase of antisemitism \u2013 place the organization at a moment of challenge and opportunity, said Szajman.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe moment is \u2013 I was going to say big, but it\u2019s huge,\u201d he said. \u201cIn my lifetime, I\u2019ve never seen the kind of antisemitism that I\u2019m witnessing now. It sounds horrible, but I\u2019m glad my father, a Holocaust survivor who passed away a few years ago, doesn\u2019t have to see it. I think there\u2019s been a very overt and visible right-wing antisemitism for decades. What we\u2019ve witnessed over the last few years in particular is this explosion of left-wing antisemitism, sometimes overt, sometimes veiled \u2013 and thinly veiled at that.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe organization\u2019s work has never been more important, he said.<\/p>\n
While the eventually expanded VHEC will accommodate more visitors, Szajman noted that the centre has always reached beyond its walls, going to audiences where they are \u2013 both in-person and through virtual technologies even before these became everyday tools during COVID.<\/p>\n
Szajman used to call the VHEC \u201cthe little engine that could.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not true, though, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the little engine that does<\/i>. It\u2019s remarkable. This tiny little group of people who bust their butts every day putting in incredible hours, are so committed, including not just Jewish staff. It\u2019s non-Jewish staff, too, that are so committed to this that, as a board member and as president, I couldn\u2019t be any more motivated if you paid me,\u201d he said, adding with a trademark laugh: \u201cAnd they don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s note: This article is different than the print version that ran July 25, 2025, to reflect more fully the list of executive directors who helmed the VHEC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hannah Marazzi is the new executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. (photo by Alina Ilyasova) The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, which is marking three decades of educating about and commemorating the Shoah, has a new executive director: Hannah Marazzi. She is the first person of non-Jewish background to hold the role. Barry Dunner […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47260,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7412,801,3076,24195,6377,597,2364],"class_list":["post-47258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-al-szajman","tag-antisemitism","tag-education","tag-hannah-marazzi","tag-museums","tag-vancouver-holocaust-education-centre","tag-vhec"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}