A Tree of Life: Film Screening With Remarks from Scott Miller

Join The Leo Baeck Institute and Center for Jewish History for a screening of the documentary A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting. Directed by Trish Adlesic, the film examines the deadly antisemitic attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The screening will be followed by remarks from Scott Miller, former Director of Curatorial Affairs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and current member of the Tree of Life Memorial Project. The event will be followed by a reception.

About the Film:

On Saturday, October 27th, 2018, a white supremacist, further radicalized by the political climate at the time, walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue with four semi-automatic assault weapons, shouting “all Jews must die.” He murdered eleven congregants, ranging in age from 54 to 97, as they prayed. A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting creates a deeply personal, trauma-informed portrait of the survivors, victims, and victims' family members of the Pittsburgh Synagogue attack, and brings into sharp focus the hate-based crisis that threatens our collective safety and the very social fabric of our society. As the first film to document the survivors' stories and the only documentary with this level of personal access to the survivors and families of the victims, viewers will experience first-hand how the lives of those directly affected have profoundly changed and how the Pittsburgh community and the congregations set out on a path towards healing. (From GoodDocs)

About the Speaker:

Scott Miller was a founding staff member at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he worked for thirty years on the museum’s initiative to rescue the evidence of the Holocaust. He served as Director of the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors – the museum’s names-information and tracing center, as well as Director of Curatorial Affairs, overseeing the museum’s archival, artifact, photo, film, music and oral history collections.

Currently Scott serves on the academic advisory committee for the Tree of Life Memorial Project in Pittsburgh, and as guest curator for the core exhibition at the Hilton Family Center for Holocaust Education in Phoenix. He was also guest curator of the “Human Rights After the Holocaust” exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in Portland, and was a member of the curatorial team for the new core exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.

Scott co-authored with Sarah A. Ogilvie Refuge Denied – The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust, which tells the story of their trek to trace the fate of all the St. Louis passengers. He also co-edited with Randolph Braham The Nazis’ Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary.

(Note: This event will be held in-person at the Center for Jewish History)