Award-Winning Author To Speak

 At Holocaust Memorial Program

Southbury — The Jewish Federation’s annual Yom HaShoah Commemoration (Commemoration of the Holocaust) is scheduled for Sunday morning, April 18, at 10:30 at the Walzer Family Jewish Community Campus, 444 Main Street North. It is free of charge and open to the public.

The event includes a memorial service led by Rabbi Eric Polokoff of B’nai Israel in Southbury and other area rabbis. Holocaust survivors, children and grandchildren of survivors, and liberators will be invited to light a yellow memorial candle. Wendy Zullo, a resident of Middlebury, will provide musical accompaniment for the candle lighting ceremony. Ms Zullo will be joined by seventh grade students Erin Menard (Wolcott) and Esther Rearson (Waterbury). There will be a special guest presentation by author and Holocaust survivor Trudi Alexy. The title of Alexy’s remarks is, “Living a Double Life as a Crypto Jew — A Contemporary Look at the Marrano Legacy and Other Secret Jews.”

Trudi Alexy survived the Holocaust by hiding her Jewish identity. Her family fled from Prague to Paris and hid in Spain as hastily baptized Catholics. Fifty years later, yearning to reconnect to the Jewish heritage of which she was deprived as a child, Ms Alexy embarked on a four-year-long quest to unravel the miraculous mystery of Fascist Spain’s rescue of thousands of unbaptized Jews, the best kept secret of World War II. Ms Alexy has also done extensive research on the Marranos and their present-day descendants, the Crypto-Jews currently living in the American Southwest.

Ms Alexy is the author of two books: The Marrano Legacy and The Mezuzah in the Madonna’s Foot, winner of the Jewish Book Council Award for Autobiography/ Memoir. Books will be available for purchase at the program. Ms Alexy will sign her books following the program, during the coffee reception in her honor.

This communitywide Yom HaShoah Commemoration is sponsored by Jewish Communities of Western Connecticut, Inc and is made possible by the Fay and Max Katz Memorial Yom HaShoah Fund, administered through the Federationation, Jewish Communities of Western Connecticut, Inc. For more information, call the Federation at 267-3177.