Meet the Sister of Charity making sure Catholics 'never forget' the Holocaust

GREENSBURG, Pa. (OSV News) -- The third floor of the administration building at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, houses the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.

The exhibits there have successfully engaged dialogue, and one of them, the Typewriter Project -- complete with typewriters on stands -- asks the question, "What is the role of good people in difficult times?"

A repository of photographs that depict the Holocaust or "Shoah," the Hebrew name for the genocide Nazi Germany carried out against millions of Jews in Europe from 1933-1945, resonates with the mission of the center: to promote the teaching on the Holocaust and other forms of genocide at all levels of Catholic education, to counter antisemitism and to facilitate Jewish-Christian understanding.

The center was founded in 1987 by Sister Gemma Del Duca and Sister Mary Noel Kernan, both Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill. It was one of the first of its kind in the country.

"This is a period of history that should never be forgotten," Sister Gemma said. "The tragedy is that so many times the lessons of the Holocaust are forgotten. By having an actual concrete organization on our campus, we are able to keep this memory alive."

Sister Gemma also said that it is important for a Catholic university to have this particular testimony and witness.

"It shows the lessons of Vatican II in trying to reach out to the Jewish people who suffered so much -- such massive persecution and death -- during World War II," she said.

The Second Vatican Council's document "Nostra Aetate" in 1965 addressed the need for the church to condemn antisemitism and clarify the church's teaching about its relationship with the Jewish people. It also encouraged new Jewish-Catholic fraternal dialogues, and led to Catholic scholars engaging in new research into the Jewish roots of Christianity.

Sister Gemma's vocational and professional journey focusing on uniting Christian faith and Jewish spirit led her to co-found the center. Her lifetime accomplishments along the way were recognized when she was inducted into the Distinguished Daughters of Pennsylvania Class of 2024. The award honors women for their outstanding service and contributions to the Commonwealth.

The award cited her collaboration with Yad Vashem, the official world memorial to the victims of the Holocaust located in Jerusalem, in addition to co-founding the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.

"It was a great surprise to me," Sister Gemma said about the award. "I am 92. I am at the end of the journey, and I was not expecting anything like this."

Sister Gemma was 13 when World War II ended in 1945. Although she had Jewish friends in Greensburg, she didn't learn much about the Holocaust until high school.

She joined the Sisters of Charity in 1950. When studying at Seton Hill College (the university's former name) for a class in adolescent psychology, she read the diary of Anne Frank. The Jewish teenager from Amsterdam recorded her thoughts in a diary while hiding from the Nazis for two years with her family, but eventually she was captured, deported to Auschwitz and ultimately died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp around February or March 1945.

"That began to bring home to me the significance and the pain and suffering of the Holocaust," Sister Gemma said.

The religious sister went to Israel in 1975 to study Hebrew and the Jewish roots of Christianity. Two years later, she worked with Father Isaac Jacob, a Benedictine from St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to found Tel Gamaliel near Jerusalem. It is a center for Jewish-Catholic understanding.

"His idea was to have a Catholic community that was very open to Judaism and to dialogue with the Jewish people," Sister Gemma said. "It was during my time there that the Holocaust became a stark and terrible reality, because I could see it from the point of view of people who had family in the Holocaust, and some people who had actually suffered and survived the Shoah, which means 'utter destruction.' There were so many ramifications to that pain and suffering. It really came home to me then."

Sister Gemma temporarily returned to Greensburg in the summer of 1987 for a gathering of more than 300 Sisters of Charity. She planned a Sabbath meal for them with the help of Jewish friends that also commemorated the Holocaust.

"We had six candles representing the death of 6 million Jews, but the meal was very joyful," she said. "We even danced afterwards."

From that grew the plans to develop the Holocaust center at Seton Hill, an idea embraced by the educational insitution's president JoAnne Boyle.

The center has offered studies, trips abroad, exhibits, conferences, forums and a spring Holocaust Remembrance Day. Every November, a program observes the memory of Kristallnacht, or "Night of Broken Glass," when the Nazis launched a coordinated attack on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues throughout Germany and parts of Austria Nov. 9-10, 1938.

"We don't have any more Holocaust survivors in this area, but we have films of their testimonies," Sister Gemma said. "This has been extremely important in making our students aware of a period of history that should never be forgotten. By having this actual concrete organization on our campus, we are able to keep this memory alive. This has opened our students and faculty to areas of interest and concern that probably would have never touched their lives if we didn't have this kind of program."

Antisemitism came close to home in October 2018 when a gunman killed 11 and wounded six worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, about 35 miles away.

In response, Sister Gemma and her fellow sisters and some members of Congregation Emanu-El Israel gathered to pray in the synagogue that's next door to Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, the mother church of the Diocese of Greensburg.

She called the tragedy "a dangerous signal of what seemed to be happening in our country," a shocking event that a human being could be filled with such hatred.

"That's still fresh in our memories," she said. "And it doesn't seem to end. It doesn't seem to get better."

Globally, antisemitism has surged in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war that began Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants entered Israel and killed more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took over 240 civilians and soldiers hostage, in the worst single loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. In a report released Oct. 2, the Anti-Defamation League found that "the number of antisemitic incidents, already at a record high before the attack, skyrocketed." Social media platforms have seen exponential increases in antisemitic posts, said the ADL, with "a 434% increase in violent antisemitic posts" on social media on Oct. 7, 2023 alone.

Sister Gemma believes that Catholics can play an important role in standing up to antisemitism.
"Here in the United States, we could reach out more to our Jewish sisters and brothers," she said. "I think it's something we all can do."

She also noted how people can remember the Catholics and other Christians who suffered during the time of the Holocaust.

"I think even honoring those people in faith -- and some have been canonized by the church -- extends our interest in honoring others," she said. "I think that's a good and holy way to not lose the memory of that time in our history, and the history of the world."