Jewish Community Center of Washington, DC

Rita Gabis, A Guest at the Shooter's Banquet

Date:
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Time:
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Location:
Washington DCJCC
1529 16th Street NW
Washington, DC 20036
United States

shooters banquet book cover

Commemorate Yom HaShoah (Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day) with author Rita Gabis' powerful family story.

Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives.

Gabis didn’t know that between 1941 and 1943 her grandfather had been Chief of Security Police under the Gestapo in the town of Svencionys. During the fall of 1941, eight thousand Jews were murdered over the course of three days in the nearby killing field of Poligon and the local Polish population was hunted down over the following year.

Compelled to find out the complicated thruth of who her grandfather was and what he had done, Gabis conducted interviews in four countries and filled in details with original scholarship. A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet: My Grandfather's SS Past, My Jewish Family, and a Search for the Truth is a history and family memoir like no other, documenting "the Holocaust by Bullets" as Gabis learns all she can about a man she thought she knew.


 

rita gabisRita Gabis is an award-winning poet and prose writer. Her grants and fellowships include a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for creative nonfiction, residencies at Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown, MA. She is the author of the poetry collection The Wild Field. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New York City.

 

 

 

Community Partners: NCSEJ, B'nai B'rith, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, Jewish Geneological Society of Greater Washington

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