Harry james cargas biography definition
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Reflections of a Post-Auschwitz Christian
Essays that challenge Christians to make the Holocaust a turning point in their thinking and in their relations with Jews.
For almost a quarter of a century, Harry James Cargas has been wrestling with the pain and bewilderment he feels about the Holocaust. In a series of essays, Cargas deals with a variety of issues and questions that the Holocaust raises and concludes that Christian churches must accept a major portion of the blame for centuries of Jewish persecution that led up to the massacres of World War II. Further, he criticizes the silence and even complicity of many Christians during the Holocaust. • Zev Garber, Richard Libowitz, eds.Peace, In Deed: Essays in Honor of Harry James Cargas. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998. xii + 253 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7885-0497-6. Reviewed by Jane Calkins Forster (History/Humanities faculty, Northeast Iowa Community College) Facets of Harry James Cargas These stimulating and sensitive essays honor the leading Catholic scholar in Holocaust Studies, Harry James Cargas. The tributes in Peace, In Deed do not narrate the life of the man, but illuminate his spirit, work, and character as seen by colleagues and friends. The breadth of Cargas's life is seen in the variety and scope of the contributors, Christians and Jews alike. The outstanding scholarship and quality of the contributors is in itself a tribute to the memory of Harry James Cargas. In the Foreword, Kurt Vonnegut identifies Harry Cargas as "a person of historical importance for having taken into his very bones, as a Christia • Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania on September 30, 1928. In 1944, he and his family were deported along with other Jews to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. His mother and his younger sister died there. He loaded stones onto railway cars in a labor camp called Buna before being sent to Buchenwald, where his father died. He was liberated by the United States Third Army on April 11, 1945. After the war ended, he learned that his two older sisters had also survived. He was placed on a lära of 400 orphans that was headed to France, where he was assigned to a home in Normandy beneath the care of a Jewish organization. He was educated at the Sorbonne and supported himself as a tutor, a Hebrew teacher and a translator. He started writing for the French newspaper L'Arche. In 1948, L'Arche sent him to Israel to report on that newly founded state. He also became the Paris correspondent for the daily Yediot Ahronot. In this
The essays are wide-ranging, from the silence of the Vatican and Kurt Waldheim's visit to Pope John Paul II to the persecution of the gypsies and the canonization of Edith Stein. Along the way, Cargas arrives at disturbing conclusions and proposes specific actions for both the individuals and the institutional church.
Reflections of
Published on H-Holocaust (May, 1999)Harry James Cargas in Conversation with Elie Wiesel