Speakers

• Erica Whitford, LL.B Crown Counsel, Crown Law Office - Criminal, Ministry of the Attorney General
  

  Erica Whitford, LL.B

  Crown Counsel, Crown Law Office - Criminal, Ministry of the Attorney General
• Jan Grabowski, PhD Professor, Faculty of Arts Department of History
  

  Jan Grabowski, PhD

  Professor, Faculty of Arts Department of History

  Author, “Hunt for the Jews. Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland.”

• Mark Weitzman Director of Government Affairs, Chief United Nations Representative at Simon Wiesenthal Center
  

  Mark Weitzman

  Director of Government Affairs, Chief United Nations Representative at Simon Wiesenthal Center

  Dr. Weitzman is a member of the official US delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Authority (IHRA) where he chairs the Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial. Weitzman spearheaded IHRA’s recent adoption of the Working Definition of Antisemitism, which is the first definition of antisemitism with any formal status. Weitzman was the lead author of IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion, which was adopted by the 31 member countries of IHRA.
  Currently, Dr. Weitzman is a participant in the program on Religion and Foreign Policy of the Council on Foreign Relations. Weitzman is a board member and former Vice-President of the Association of Holocaust Organizations and was a member of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy advisory board at Yale University. Weitzman is a longtime member of the official Jewish-Catholic Dialogue Group of New York.

  The author of numerous publications, Weitzman co-edited “Antisemitism, The Generic Hatred: Essays in Memory of Simon Wiesenthal,” which won the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in the category of anthologies. He is also the co-author of “Dismantling the Big Lie: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

• Pinchas Gutter Holocaust Survivor and Educator
  

  Pinchas Gutter

  Holocaust Survivor and Educator

  Born into a well-established Hasidic family, who can trace their roots back 400 years in Poland, Pinchas was born in Lodz and was 7 years old when the war broke out. He, along with his twin sister and entire family fled to what they thought was safety in Warsaw after his father had been brutally beaten by Nazis in Lodz.

  Pinchas and his family were incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto for three and a half years until April 1943. During the first three weeks of the Ghetto uprising, his family’s bunker was discovered and they were deported to the death camp, Majdanek. The day the family arrived after a horrendous journey, Pinchas’ father, mother and twin sister were murdered by the Nazis.

  Pinchas was sent to a work camp where people were beaten, shot or worked to death. He passed through several other concentration camps, including Buchenwald, and worked at loading and unloading enormous weights of iron and other slave work. Towards the end of the war he was forced on a death march from Germany to Therenstadt in Czechoslovakia which he barely survived.
  He was liberated by the Russians on May 8, 1945, and under the auspices of United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, was taken to Britain with other children for rehabilitation. After spending many years in South Africa he immigrated to Canada where he resides.

  Pinchas divides his time between speaking out against the Holocaust, volunteering as a chaplain and is an honourary full time Cantor in the Kiever Shul.