A joint program of Congregation Or VeShalom and St. James United Methodist Church

Classes are free of charge.  Dinner is $35 per person, $10 for children 10 & under.

Open to the community. RSVP Required.

RSVP for Classes HERE

RSVP for Dinner HERE

Class 1 | St. James UMC Atlanta | 4400 Peachtree Dunwoody Road

Sunday, January 7 | 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Class 2 | Congregation Or VeShalom | 1681 North Druid Hills Road

Tuesday, January 9 | 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Shabbat Services, Shabbat Dinner, Discussion and Reflections on Classes

Friday, January 12 | 6:00 p.m.

Mr. Brendan Murphy of the Marist School in Atlanta will be at St. James to discuss and teach about this very question from a Christian perspective.

Mr. Murphy is the 2016 Georgia State Commissions Distinguished educator on the Holocaust. In 1996, Mr. Murphy developed a World History and Holocaust seminar “Bearing Witness” which includes a trip to the US Holocaust Museum and a class trip to Europe to visit significant Holocaust sites such as Auschwitz and Dachau. Murphy also conducts evening classes for parents and the community as part of the Marist Evening Series.

In his lecture, Mr. Murphy takes his audience on a journey through history to explain the origins of  Jewish  hatred, blood libels and the myths of deicide and supercessionism. The replacement of the old covenant with the new as taught by the Church, the origins of Christianity and the formation of the first ghetto in Venice. Throughout history and especially during the Medieval  period on churches throughout Europe, architecture and statuary was used as a teaching tool. Or as Mr. Murphy describes it, a  Medieval power point presentation. Supercessionism was illustrated by the double statues of Ecclesia and Synagoga. Ecclesia represented the Church and was crowned and stood upright. Synagoga was looking down and blindfolded with her crown on the ground. These descriptions may sound bigoted to us today but they should be examined in the context of history.

While many countries over the centuries have expelled their Jewish populations, none was so determined to exterminate them than Hitler and the Nazis. Murphy brought us back to the time of the Holocaust with a better understanding of the origins of how this could have happened, in addition to the pure hatred and racism of Hitler himself. Many in the audience both Jewish and Catholic had never heard much of this history.