Touro College Professor Gives Keynote Address at UN for Holocaust Memorial Ceremony
Dr. Mordecai Paldiel, a professor of history at the Lander College of Arts and Sciences and the Touro College Graduate School of Jewish Studies, gave the keynote address at the United Nations Holocaust Memorial Ceremony.
Speaking to the UN General Assembly, Paldiel described crossing the border of Nazi-occupied France into Switzerland with his parents, grandmother and five siblings in 1943 with the help of a French cleric named Abbé Simon Gallay. In 1990 Paldiel visited Gallay in a retirement home in Annecy, France to award him the prestigious Righteous Among the Nations medal and certificate of honor by the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. Paldiel spent 24 years as the head of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem, identifying and honoring thousands of other non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazis.
