Their goal is to make their dark subject meaningful to young people with limited knowledge of World War II, as well as to those familiar with its atrocities. To that end, she was making sure to alternate horrifying images with lighter ones, and even with humor.

Elaine Durbach, New Jersey Jewish News, Bureau Chief/Central

(See full article to right)

 

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Susanna Rich’s ‘Ashes, Ashes’ tells Holocaust stories through poet’s eyes

A little girl watching a fresh mass grave being dug. A ballerina summoning up her courage and shooting a Nazi officer, just as she's about to walk into a gas chamber. The beliefs and philosophies of a neo-Nazi.  Read more...

Erinn Connor.  The Record

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       Workshop Themes:

• Poetry as antidote to prejudice
• The dynamics of empathy
• Global poetry and peace
• Poetry and truth

Susanna Rich lays bare her soul to see and to speak that which is too hard to see, that which is unspeakable. The poems in ashes, ashes are beautiful enough in form and sound to captivate us, while at the same time providing the catharsis necessary to fully confront reality and therefore to honor remembrance.

~Sister Rose Thering, OP Professor Emerita, Seton Hall University

 

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14 Poems, including:

• "Passover"
  
  
• "Prayer: How it Happens"
  
  
• "In the Cattle Car"
  
  
• "Ballerina in the Changing Room"
  

 

ashes, ashes: A POET RESPONDS TO THE HOLOCAUST

 

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Since portraying Anne Frank in her Pope Pius XII High School senior class play, Susanna Rich has been committed to promoting interfaith understanding and world peace. In ashes, ashes, she embodies and enacts the testimonies of Holocaust victims, survivors, and liberators. Weaving the past with the present; poetry with art, music, and stagecraft; this production is remembrance and hope — a vigil for as well as a celebration of human dignity and love.

 

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   Dr. Paul Winkler, Executive Director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust   

   Education, recommends ashes, ashes as a vehicle for fulfilling the state mandate

   on Holocaust/Genocide Studies.   

                                                

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Out of the ashes

Poet finds bright light in a dark subject

by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

April 6, 2011

The late Sister Rose Thering, the indefatigable campaigner for Jewish-Christian understanding, said, “Our greatest hope is to experience through the arts the realities suffered by those who have been the victims of institutionalized ignorance and hate, so that there will be no more victims and no more perpetrators.”

Her comment was made in response to work by poet Susanna Rich and artist Jo Jochnowitz. The two, both teachers at Kean University in Union, first collaborated in 1994 and are doing so again, this time with Jochnowitz’s stark drawings of Holocaust images setting the visual tone for Rich’s performance of her poems. Read more....