Hannah Marazzi

Community milestones … July 2026

On June 26, Governor General of Canada Louise Arbour announced the latest appointments to the Order of Canada, which recognizes people across all sectors of society who have made extraordinary and sustained contributions to the country. Among the recipients were two members of the Vancouver Jewish community: Dr. Trevor Hurwitz and Lorne Segal.

photo - Dr. Trevor Hurwitz — Dr. Trevor Hurwitz *(photo from UBC)*

Hurwitz, a University of British Columbia faculty of medicine clinical professor, was appointed for his contributions to complex brain disorder treatments. Considered the founder of neuropsychiatry in British Columbia, he created the province’s first programs in the discipline, which remain at the forefront nationwide. He is also a patient advocate and advisor on medico-legal and ethical issues in psychiatry.

photo - Lorne Segal — Lorne Segal *(photo from Coast Mental Health)*

Segal, president of Kingswood Properties Ltd., was recognized for his decades of leadership in real estate development, as well as his enduring commitment to philanthropy, mental health advocacy, youth empowerment and community service.

As chair of the Coast Mental Health Courage to Come Back Awards for 21 years, Segal has been instrumental in shaping the event into British Columbia’s premier mental health campaign, increasing awareness of the need for more mental health support and raising millions for the cause. Through his involvement, the inspiring recipient stories have reached thousands of people, reminding us all that setbacks do not define us and that courage can transform lives.

For years, Segal has championed the belief that mental health deserves the same attention, understanding and care as physical health. His leadership has helped reduce stigma, open important conversations and create opportunities for people to seek support when they need it most.

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photo - Hannah Marazzi — Hannah Marazzi *(photo from VHEC)*

Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre executive director Hannah Marazzi has been appointed to the international steering board of the newly established Hilda Dajč International Digital Holocaust Memory Award.

Launched through a partnership between Terraforming, a Serbian organization dedicated to Holocaust education and remembrance, and the Landecker Digital Memory Lab at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, the award recognizes excellence, ethical integrity and innovation in the digital memorialization of the Holocaust.

The award honours Hilda Dajč, a Jewish architecture student and volunteer nurse who was murdered in 1942 at the Judenlager Semlin (Staro Sajmište) camp in Belgrade, Serbia. Her four letters from the camp are among the most moving and important testimonies of the Holocaust.

The Hilda Dajč International Digital Holocaust Memory Award was created in response to growing concerns about Holocaust distortion and misinformation in digital spaces, as well as the need to strengthen democratic values through education and remembrance. The award seeks to elevate the relevance of Holocaust memory for younger generations, drive innovation in digital remembrance, establish international standards for digital Holocaust education and foster shared responsibility in countering antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

Projects will be evaluated on criteria including technological sophistication and creativity, pedagogical impact and youth engagement, collaborative digital ecosystems and the amplification of marginalized and overlooked Holocaust histories.

Marazzi joins a board composed of experts from institutions including Arolsen Archives (Germany), the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum (Israel), the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Jewish Heritage Network and European Memory Data Space (Netherlands), iRights.Lab (Germany), the Memorial Centre Staro Sajmište (Serbia) and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.

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photo - Sarah Mali of JFC-UIA Canada in Israel, left, and Rachel Sachs of the Jewish Federation of BC’s Israel office — Sarah Mali of JFC-UIA Canada in Israel, left, and Rachel Sachs of the Jewish Federation of BC’s Israel office. *(photo from JFBC)*

This month, Jewish Federation of British Columbia received the 2026 Tel-Hai Dignitary Award, recognizing the longstanding partnership between our community and the Galilee.

Rachel Sachs, executive director of the Israel office, accepted the award on behalf of the BC community. Alongside Federation, the award was also presented to Prof. Mooli Lahad for his lifelong contributions to trauma and resilience, and Prof. Ran Ziv, whose leadership has helped bring technology companies and employment opportunities to northern Israel.

The award reflects the deep relationship our community has built with Tel-Hai and the Galilee over many years. Federation is grateful to Sachs and Adi Kaye of the Israel office for their leadership, the relationships they have built and their on-the-ground presence.

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photo - Katrina Hermann — Katrina Hermann *(photo from VHEC)*

In June, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s new research and program assistant, Katrina Hermann, presented on the centre’s symposium on the Holocaust – now in its 50th year – at the Association of Canadian Jewish Studies annual conference at York University, Toronto. Through analyzing the early years of the symposium, Hermann demonstrated the important pedagogical innovations of Vancouver’s survivor and educator communities, contributions rarely discussed in academia. She was awarded the Marcia Koven Award for best student paper for her presentation.

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Each year, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre presents the Meyer & Gita Kron & Ruth Kron Sigal Award for Excellence in Holocaust Education to teachers in British Columbia who have demonstrated excellence and sustained commitment to teaching students about the Holocaust. The award was established in memory of the Kron family, Lithuanian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who reestablished their lives in Vancouver. Through their lifelong involvement in education and community, the family touched the lives of thousands of students.

The VHEC received a record number of applications and nominations for this year’s award, reflecting both a renewed commitment to Holocaust education in the province and a recognition of the important role it plays in helping students understand the challenges facing democratic societies today. The applications were of exceptional quality, and the centre commends the dedication and skill of all those who applied.

This year’s award recipients are Ryan Holly and Hofit Sabi.

photo - Ryan Holly — Ryan Holly *(photo from VHEC)*

Holly, an educator at Kelowna Secondary School, enables students to understand the Holocaust not only as history, but as an event with contemporary resonances. He confronts a dearth of education about antisemitism in public school with lesson plans inviting students to analyze the continuity and change of historical antisemitism, as well as an in-depth case study of antisemitic propaganda during the Holocaust. His emphasis on evidence-based learning encourages student engagement with primary sources, particularly survivor testimony. Holly has been involved in professional development activities, attending annual conferences and seeking out self-directed opportunities globally. Students and colleagues alike commend his compassion, care and dedication as he handles this difficult subject with nuance and engagement.

photo - Hofit Sabi — Hofit Sabi *(photo from VHEC)*

Sabi, a Grade 6 educator at Vancouver Talmud Torah, is recognized for her ability to translate the complexities of Holocaust history into age-appropriate, inquiry-based learning for younger students. Her pedagogical approach is distinguished by its global scope, particularly her development of a pioneering mini-unit on the often-overlooked experiences of Jewish communities in North Africa to challenge single stories of Jewish identity and show how international political dynamics like colonialism and fascism intersected during the war. Sabi’s curriculum prioritizes evidence-based experiential learning, and she empowers students to become informed, compassionate civic stewards.

An honourable mention goes to Diana Weld of Quw’utsun Secondary School in North Cowichan for her leadership in modernizing Holocaust education within her department and her commitment to school-wide professional development. Weld developed a comprehensive Humanities 10 unit from the ground up. Her curriculum bridges historical context with modern media, using survivor memoir, film and literature to help students navigate complex ethical issues like indoctrination, blind loyalty, complicity and indifference.

Remembrance – a moral act

Malka Pischanitskaya, centre, told her story of survival at the Vancouver community’s Yom Hashoah ceremony. Her daughter, Inna Turner, and granddaughter, Sophie Turner, also spoke at the April 14 event. (Rhonda Dent Photography)

Even before the Holocaust upended her life, Malka Pischanitskaya’s family was hobbled by poverty. Her father left before she was born, and she was largely raised by her grandmother and great-aunt while her mother worked elsewhere. After the Nazi invasion reached Romaniv, Ukraine, in 1941, when Malka was 10 years old, she saw Jews murdered in the streets. On Aug. 25, 1941, Romaniv’s Jews were rounded up for mass execution.

On that day, there was a pounding on the family’s front door and orders to assemble at a central location. What followed was chaos, crowds converging from all directions, families separated. Men were taken away and executed.

“The screams of men were just horrible,” she recalled.

Malka and her mother survived only because, after hours of terror, some mothers with children were unexpectedly released. Most of their family and community were murdered.

What followed were years of hiding, near-starvation and repeated brushes with death. The title of Pischanitskaya’s memoir, A Mother to My Mother, published by the Azrieli Foundation, comes from the reversal forced on her by war: her mother was so traumatized that young Malka often became the more practical, protective figure, begging for food and helping keep them alive. (See jewishindependent.ca/a-harrowing-survival-story.)

Pischanitskaya shared her story April 14 at the annual Yom Hashoah community event, marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, in conversation with Ellie Lawson, education manager of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Each day, Malka left her mother hidden – in a haystack, a trench, wherever they could remain unseen – and went from door to door in nearby villages, begging for bread. Malka had gone to a Ukrainian public school and spoke Ukrainian fluently, while her mother was identifiably Jewish by her accent. Sometimes people helped, sometimes they could not, but two people in particular probably ensured Malka and her mother lived.

One of those people was Lydia. When Malka first approached her, Lydia demurred. “My home is so empty,” she said. “Like a crystal bowl.”

Malka proposed that, if Lydia would hide her and her mother, she would continue to gather food and share it. Lydia agreed and, for more than a year, Malka and her mother lived hidden in Lydia’s home.

Eventually, neighbours became suspicious. Malka and her mother moved, this time to the home of a young orphan who, like Lydia, chose to help despite the risks.

Both women would be recognized at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

“They needed us as much as we needed them,” Pischanitskaya said of the relationships forged in desperation.

By the end of the war, nearly 40 members of her family were gone – and she began to rebuild a life. “I was not sitting and crying,” she said. “I was mobilized.”

They returned to Romaniv to find almost nothing left. Malka finished school, earned a teaching diploma in Zhytomyr in 1954. She married, had two children, lived in Tashkent and Uzhhorod, and immigrated to Vancouver in 1975. For decades, she did not speak about her Holocaust experiences.

Pischanitskaya’s daughter, Inna Turner, who joined her at the Yom Hashoah event, grew up with the emotional weight of that silence.

“I didn’t know she was a Holocaust survivor,” Turner said. “But I felt it.”

Turner said the silence had a profound effect on her life.

“I think many Holocaust survivors suffer from PTSD,” she said. “And, in the olden days we didn’t know much about it. We know more now, or at least we think we do, and we know that it affects an individual. But it affects not just an individual, it affects people who are the closest to the individual, like children, grandchildren, spouses, siblings, the family. Being a child of a Holocaust survivor, well, what can I say? Not a walk in the park, that’s for sure.”

Only years later did Pischanitskaya begin to speak – through a community of survivors, art and writing.

Pischanitskaya’s granddaughter, Sophie Turner, introduced her not only as a survivor, but as a grandmother who is strong and resilient. She sees her grandmother’s story as a responsibility she and others of her generation are obligated to sustain. “This is not only history,” she said. “It is living memory that we carry with us.”

Survivors lit candles representing six million lives lost, including one and a half million children. Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim and US Consul General Shawn Crowley were among the dignitaries who attended. Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, senior rabbi at Temple Sholom, which hosted the event with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, with support from the Jewish Federation’s annual campaign and the Province of British Columbia, welcomed attendees.

“We live in a time when the language of the Holocaust is being used in ways that empty it of meaning,” said Moskovitz, “Words like genocide, once anchored in specific historical reality, are now invoked casually…. Comparisons are made that collapse moral distinctions rather than clarify them. And, perhaps most troubling, the Holocaust itself is sometimes inverted – Jews recast not as victims, but as perpetrators. This is not just inaccurate, it is dangerous. The Holocaust was not a metaphor. It was not a slogan. It was the systematic, industrialized attempt to annihilate the Jewish people. Six million Jews were murdered, families were erased, entire communities were destroyed. That reality demands precision, honesty and reverence. And when that truth is blurred, something else is lost as well. Empathy is lost. Understanding is lost. And the moral clarity that the Holocaust calls us to carry into the world begins to fade.”

“Remembrance is not a passive state of being,” said Hannah Marazzi, executive director of the VHEC. “It is an act of moral choice … an act of resistance.”

In addition to mourning those murdered, she said, Yom Hashoah is about honouring survivors. “Those who endured unimaginable suffering and yet found the strength to go on,” she said. “Many rebuilt their lives here in Canada. Their resilience, wisdom and testimony have shaped not only this community, but the city of Vancouver, and continue to shape the work that we undertake at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.”

A musical program included Abbygail Sandler, Cantor Michael Zoosman, Cantor Shani Cohen, Lisa Kesselman and Ellie Sherman. They were accompanied by Eric Wilson on cello, Erin Marks on oboe, Wendy Bross Stuart and Perry Ehrlich on piano. Cantor Yaacov Orzech chanted the memorial prayer El Moleh Rachamim.

Rebuilding a life after Shoah

Prof. Robin Judd, author of Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust, speaks with community members at the Kristallnacht commemoration in Vancouver Nov. 9. (photo by Sova Photography)

The history of war brides – generally British or European women who married Allied military men – is widely known and has been explored by historians and social scientists. Between 1944 and 1948, about 65,000 dependents came to Canada as spouses or intended spouses of military personnel.

Speaking at Vancouver’s annual Kristallnacht commemorative event Nov. 9 at Congregation Beth Israel, Prof. Robin Judd discussed an almost unknown subset of this phenomenon: Holocaust survivors who met Allied soldiers in displaced persons’ camps after the war and went on to marry them.

Judd is associate professor of history at Ohio State University and immediate past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, the largest international society for scholars of Jewish studies. Her award-winning book Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust explores the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust.

Many Jewish survivors, as well as community and religious leaders, viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way for the survivors to move forward after extraordinary trauma, said Judd, whose academic interest in the subject stems from family history.

“My grandmother was a war bride,” Judd said. “She was a survivor. She and my father survived the war in hiding. My biological grandfather died at liberation, and my grandmother married an American soldier after the war, who then adopted my father.”

Her grandmother spoke little about her experiences during or immediately after the war, though Judd knew the rough outline of her past. Only when Judd began research into the subject did she learn that her grandmother’s experience was not as unique as Judd had assumed.

The individual stories of these war brides, and their efforts to integrate, offer lessons around survival in the aftermath of trauma, as well as larger issues concerning marriage, immigration and citizenship, she said.

Judd focused on a few couples, including Isaac and Leesha (neé Leisje Bornstijn) Rose, and Sala (neé Solarcz) and Abe Bonder.

Sala survived in the Warsaw Ghetto for more than a year, before deportation to a ghetto outside Lublin, then to Majdanek and a series of other camps. She was liberated during a death march in April 1945.

At Rosh Hashanah services at a DP camp in Hanover, she met Abe, a mechanic in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Until then, Judd said, Sala had avoided the Canadian and British soldiers overseeing the DP camp because she said they made her feel like a monkey in the zoo.

“But Abe came to her and started to speak to her in a very quiet Yiddish,” Judd recounted. “It was his questioning, his real interest in understanding who she was and what she had experienced that made her want to seek a second encounter with him.”

Many of the war brides found themselves at the whims of their new extended families, subsumed into existing structures that were foreign and unfamiliar. Often, they arrived in the new country and did not have homes of their own but lived with their husbands’ families, sometimes with multiple generations in the same home.

Leesha arrived in Ottawa and moved in with fiancé Isaac and her soon-to-be mother-in-law, with whom she had limited language skills to communicate. The groom’s mother took it upon herself to plan the wedding.

“Leesha and other war brides are often talking about how, in these moments, whether it was the marriage or it was having their first child, or it was their first child’s bar or bat mitzvah, or their first child’s wedding, how they so desperately missed those murdered family members at that time,” Judd said.

Newcomers were sometimes judged unfairly, as if their healthy appearance diminished the perception of their suffering. A newspaper article described Leesha as “a good-natured chubby little girl.”

“There was this notion that these women looked almost too healthy,” said Judd, “That the trauma was almost not written sufficiently enough on her body.”

Associations and networks existed for the newcomers to connect with others from similar backgrounds, including Jewish war bride clubs and synagogue-affiliated groups.

The war bride experiences Judd studies are diverse and include sad but also happy memories, she said, from the difficulties of reconstruction and recovery to stories of resilience and rebuilding.

Prof. Chris Friedrichs, a scholar of German history who taught at the University of British Columbia from 1973 until his retirement in 2018, contextualized Judd’s presentation, as well as Kristallnacht and the larger history of the Holocaust.

Kristallnacht sent a message to the world, he said. But the world did not listen.

“This horrific Night of Broken Glass was front page news all over the world, but not for long,” he recounted. “Much else was going on in the world at that time and, within a few days, Kristallnacht was forgotten. In fact, the world learned nothing from Kristallnacht. But the Nazis learned a lot. They realized that whatever they might do to the Jews, there would be no consequences. And thus, once Hitler’s war started in 1939, within Germany itself and in every country the Germans conquered under cover of war, a relentless program to exterminate the Jews began to be carried out by beatings, by shootings, by starvation and by gas.”

Hannah Marazzi, executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), which presented the event in partnership with Beth Israel and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, called Kristallnacht “a defining moment in which the shadow of hatred quite literally burst into flame.”

Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, associate director of programs and community relations for the VHEC, introduced Holocaust survivors, who lit candles of remembrance.

“Tonight, as we are about to light candles … we vow never to forget the lives of the women, men and children who are symbolized by these flames,” she said. “May the memory of their lives inspire us to live so that we may help to ensure that their memories live on.”

Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked the speaker and reflected on his family’s experience.

“My father left the DP camp and moved to Pittsburgh,” Infeld said. At a party at the Jewish community centre specifically to make shidduchim, marriage matches, for Holocaust survivors, he met the woman who would become his wife and the rabbi’s mother.

photo - Vancouver Deputy Mayor Sarah Kirby-Yung, centre, and councilors Lenny Zhou and Lucy Maloney at the Nov. 9 Kristallnacht commemoration — Vancouver Deputy Mayor Sarah Kirby-Yung, centre, and councilors Lenny Zhou and Lucy Maloney at the Nov. 9 Kristallnacht commemoration. *(photo by Sova Photography)*

Cantor Yaakov Orzech chanted El Moleh Rachamim, the memorial prayer.

Taleeb Noormohamed, member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville, warned of the dangers of ignoring the lessons of history.

“If we don’t take the lesson that remembrance requires us to take, we end up with a quiet normalization of what that night represented,” he said. “This is a fight that we all take on. We take on with responsibility, we take on with conviction, and we take it on to honour all of you who survived and all of you that have relatives and friends and loved ones that didn’t. So, we say, may their memory be a blessing and, indeed, may it be, but may it also be a reminder to all of us that the work that is to be done is for all of us.”

Terry Yung, member of the BC Legislature for Vancouver-Yaletown and a retired senior officer with the Vancouver Police Department, told the audience the future depends on education.

“We cannot arrest ourselves out of hate, we cannot,” he said. “We have to educate people in this world of darkness.”

Sarah Kirby-Yung, deputy mayor of Vancouver, and fellow city councilors Lenny Zhou and Lucy Maloney read a proclamation from the city.

Marazzi at VHEC helm

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 was the first executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society for Education and Remembrance, the not-for-profit organization that operates the VHEC. Ronnie Tessler then helmed the centre, followed by the late Dr. Roberta Kremer, then Frieda Miller. Nina Krieger served more than a decade as head of the institution before successfully running for the British Columbia legislature last fall. (See story, jewishindependent.ca/krieger-takes-on-new-roles.)

Marazzi had been the VHEC’s 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.

The organization’s president, Al Szajman, credited Marazzi’s background as a good fit.

Formally announcing Marazzi’s appointment, Szajman noted her role as “Irwin Cotler’s right-hand person” 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.

“In short, we’ve come to recognize Hannah as a leader, someone with passion, vision and maturity. Her Italian-Mennonite background reminds everyone that you don’t have to be Jewish to stand against antisemitism and advance the lessons that everyone should have learned about the Shoah,” he said.

Marazzi has an undergraduate degree in history, political science and government from Trinity Western University and a master’s degree in public policy from Cambridge, where she served as an assistant editor of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Early 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 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.

She 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’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.

Marazzi returned to the West Coast – she grew up in the Fraser Valley – to be closer to her family when her father faced a health crisis.

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.

She reflected on her first visit to Auschwitz, at age 22, 10 days after graduating from university.

“I 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,” she said. “I 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, ‘No one can say that we did not know. We knew. But we did not act.’ 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.”

The VHEC has become Western Canada’s 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.

Holocaust museums have increasingly used technology to capture and immortalize those stories – and Marazzi credited Krell as a pioneer in that field, having begun one of the world’s earliest archives of video-recorded survivor testimonies, beginning when the technology was fresh.

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.

Marazzi emphasized the importance of partnerships in the VHEC’s 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

Dr. Nataliia Ivchyk – 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 – 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.

Internationally, World Jewish Congress has reached out to borrow the centre’s 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.

Marazzi acknowledged that, when she tells people where she works, they sometimes suggest it must be a depressing daily grind.

“It’s actually the most hopeful place you can be at this time,” she said. “You 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.”

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 to address.

Marazzi 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.

“We are completely inundated and it’s exhausting but it’s delightful,” she said.

The confluence of events – Marazzi’s appointment, the impending expansion of the VHEC and the global increase of antisemitism – place the organization at a moment of challenge and opportunity, said Szajman.

“The moment is – I was going to say big, but it’s huge,” he said. “In my lifetime, I’ve never seen the kind of antisemitism that I’m witnessing now. It sounds horrible, but I’m glad my father, a Holocaust survivor who passed away a few years ago, doesn’t have to see it. I think there’s been a very overt and visible right-wing antisemitism for decades. What we’ve witnessed over the last few years in particular is this explosion of left-wing antisemitism, sometimes overt, sometimes veiled – and thinly veiled at that.”

The organization’s work has never been more important, he said.

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 – both in-person and through virtual technologies even before these became everyday tools during COVID.

Szajman used to call the VHEC “the little engine that could.”

That’s not true, though, he said.

“It’s the little engine that does. It’s 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’s non-Jewish staff, too, that are so committed to this that, as a board member and as president, I couldn’t be any more motivated if you paid me,” he said, adding with a trademark laugh: “And they don’t.”

Editor’s 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.