Speakers: Professor Katharina von Kellenbach and Pastor Heidi Neumark

Professor von Kellenbach and Pastor Neumark are Lutheran theologians whose families carefully disguised their connections to Jews and Judaism. Both families tried to rebuild lives by disassociating and denying the trauma and guilt of the Holocaust. Neumark accidentally discovered that she was descended from a prominent Jewish German family and that her grandfather was murdered in a concentration camp. Von Kellenbach became inadvertently aware that her uncle belonged to the SS and was tried for the mass murder of the Jews in Pinsk, Belarus.These revelations compelled both speakers to go on a journey of discovery that led them through archives across several countries and into Jewish-Christian and Jewish-German dialogue.

Heidi Neumark is a graduate of Brown University and Lutheran Theological Seminary. She is the pastor of the multicultural, multilingual Trinity Lutheran Church on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In her book, "Hidden Inheritance: Family Secrets, Memory and Faith", she tells of her discovery of her previously unknown German-Jewish ancestry, as well as antisemitism in the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Katharina von Kellenbach is a Professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary's College of Maryland, the Honors College of the State of Maryland. She completed her PhD at Temple University. Her areas of expertise include Holocaust Studies, Jewish-Christian relations, feminist theology and interreligious dialogue. Her recent book, "The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Lives of Nazi Perpetrators,"uses the archival documents of prison chaplains to examine Christian discourses of forgiveness and Nazi perpetrators' moral self-reflection in post-war West Germany.