DOREEN RAPPAPORT, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR, IN TALK AT B’NAI SHOLOM

Beyond Courage Chronicles Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust

Before she started her research for Beyond Courage, all that author Doreen Rappaport knew about Jewish resistance to the Nazis came from popular books and movies and was limited to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Sobibor death camp. Over the ensuing five years, she learned of acts of defiance that took place throughout Europe from the beginning of Hitler’s ascent through the liberation by the Allied powers.

On Sunday, April 28, at B’nai Sholom Reform Congregation in Albany, the Capital Region community will have the opportunity to hear the award-winning author describe her new book, her work and her single-minded commitment to telling the stories of Jewish resisters throughout the Holocaust.

Rappaport will speak at 11:45 a.m. at the synagogue, located at 420 Whitehall Road, Albany. Copies of Beyond Courage will be available for purchase and signing. The program is free and open to the public. All ages are welcome.

Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (Candlewick Press, 2012) received five starred reviews from prestigious literary journals and was selected among the Best Books of 2012 by Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Tablet Magazine. Among its other honors are the Sydney Taylor Silver Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries, the Flora Stieglitz Award for Non-fiction and an ALA Notable Book.

Beyond Courage is a stirring chronicle in which Rappaport brings to light the courage of the countless Jews who organized to sabotage the Nazis and help other Jews during the Holocaust. She writes of Georges Loinger smuggling thousands of children out of France into Switzerland; of three resisters in Belgium who ambush a train, allowing scores of Jews to flee from the cattle cars; of four brothers in Poland who lead more than 1,200 ghetto refugees into the forest to build a guerilla force and a self-sufficient village; and of many more brave Jews who acted with courage, ingenuity, the will to survive and the resolve to save others or to die trying.

Rappaport is known to educators, parents, children and young adult readers for 38 fiction and non-fiction books that celebrate multiculturalism, the retelling of folktales and myths, history, the lives of world leaders and the stories of those she calls “not-yet-celebrated.” Rappaport is the recipient of The Washington Post Children’s Book Guild Award for Lifetime Achievement for the writing of non-fiction. Her books have a unique ability to combine historical facts with intimate storytelling and finding “new ways to present the lives of well-known heroes” such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Statue of Liberty. A dynamic writer-teacher-storyteller in the classroom, she is a frequent speaker at state and national educational conferences, universities, libraries, historical societies, book fairs and community centers.  She has been a featured author at the National Portrait Gallery, National Book Festival, the Smithsonian Museum of American History and the White House. Among her numerous other honors, her book, Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., received a Caldecott Honor Award, a Coretta Scott King Award, the Jane Addams Book Award, and an Orbis Pictus Honor Book. It is the seminal children’s book on King’s non-violent philosophy and has been read to children in New York schools by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then-Senator Hillary Clinton.