Holocaust remembrance center founded by Catholic nuns plants Anne Frank tree

 

CNA Staff, May 24, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

When Anne Frank was hiding in a secret annex for more than two years in Amsterdam during World War II, she would peer out a small window in the attic at a horse chestnut tree in the yard.

Long after the young teenager’s death in the Bergen-Belson concentration camp in 1945, a Catholic Holocaust education center in Philadelphia has planted a tree grown from a sapling of that very tree in her honor.

The National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University — founded by two Catholic sisters in 1987 — held a ceremony to plant the small tree at the beginning of May.

James Paharik, director of the education center and a Seton Hill professor of sociology and behavioral health, told CNA that “it means a lot for us to have this tree.”

“It’s a living testimony to the memory of Anne Frank and what she experienced,” Paharik said.

Donated by the Anne Frank Center USA, the 6-foot-tall tree sits at a “prominent place on campus.”

“In her diary, she writes several times about the tree and how much it meant to her to see it,” Paharik said. “It bloomed in the springtime, and it was a sign of hope.”

Journey of the heart

The National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education — one of the first of its kind in the nation — is “very unique,” Paharik said. Sister Gemma Del Duca and Sister Mary Noel Kernan, both Sisters of Charity, founded the center in the late 1980s to counter antisemitism, provide education on the Holocaust, and honor Holocaust victims.

Sister Gemma, now 93 years old and unwell, managed to attend the ceremony of the planting earlier in May in spite of her illness, where she was able to see her life’s work culminate in the planting of a tree that will remain for years to come.

When asked what inspired her to found it, Paharik simply said: “Sometimes, sisters get an inspiration and they follow it.”

The center has its roots in the interreligious work that Sister Gemma did. Early on, she began to work with Father Isaac Jacob, a monk from St. Vincent College, a historic Benedictine college down the road from Seton Hill, who was similarly interested in interreligious dialogue.

Sister Gemma and Jacob traveled to Israel in the 1970s where they established Tel Gamaliel, a Christian community in Israel “that promoted understanding between Jews and Catholics,” according to Paharik. There, they translated the rule of St. Benedict into Hebrew and worked with the local community until Sister Gemma’s eventual return to the U.S.

Sister Gemma’s passion to found the center was a surprise to some in her order.

“I don’t think Sister Gemma had a great deal of support at the beginning from her community, and people weren’t quite sure why this was so important to her,” Paharik reflected.

But Sister Gemma thought it was “a moral necessity” for Catholics not only to not demean or stereotype “but, in fact, to learn more about Judaism,” Paharik said.

This was a task she took “quite seriously,” Paharik noted.

She learned to speak Hebrew while in Israel, even attending services at synagogue, while “at the same time, being totally immersed in Catholicism and being a Sister of Charity.”

“I think that for her, it’s a journey of the heart,” Paharik said.

The sisters also took inspiration from the Vatican II document on religious dialogue, Nostra Aetate, which was promulgated about two decades before the founding of the center.

Paharik called Nostra Aetate a “landmark” Catholic document that “encouraged a deeper understanding between Catholics and those of other faiths.”

This coming fall marks the 60th anniversary of the document.

Paharik recalled Sister Gemma’s reflections on deepening her own knowledge of Judaism.

“She said, ‘It’s a journey of the heart. It’s a journey of faith,’” Paharik recalled.

“It’s a mission, really, to unite Catholics and Jews in a positive way instead of continuing the animosity that has marked our relationship for so many centuries,” he continued.

What it means for Seton Hill and beyond

The center, now more than 35 years old, has grown in its influence on the local community and beyond over the years. The center was a founding organization of the Council of Christian-Jewish Relations (CCJR), an association dedicated to interreligious dialogue between Christians and Jews in the U.S., Canada, and overseas.

The center hosts conferences, bringing speakers from around the country, and also does ecumenical outreach, bringing together Catholics and Protestants to pray, learn, and remember.

“We pray together for the victims of the Holocaust but also of other acts of violence and mass murder that have happened and are still happening around the world today,” Paharik said.

“It’s a way for us to affirm our common belief in the sanctity of human life and to pray for peace,” Paharik said.

The center also supports Holocaust education in classes at Seton Hill and at local schools, especially grades six through 12. Students will now be able to visit the tree on campus after reading “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

“It will make it all the more meaningful and vivid to them to see what this tree actually looked like, that was so important to Anne, and that she wrote about so beautifully in her diary,” Paharik said.

Responding to continuing antisemitism

The center also responded to a local act of antisemitic violence known as one of the deadliest antisemitic attacks in the United States. The Tree of Life shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018 — in which an assailant opened fire in a crowded synagogue, killing 11 people — was only about 30 miles from Greensboro, where the center is based.

“All of us knew people who were in one way affected by that terrible event,” Paharik recalled.

Under Paharik’s leadership, the center began to interview victims of the Holocaust, recording the stories of eight survivors who live in the area.

“Those documentaries are resources for the schools that we work with, so they can tell the stories of these local people who actually lived through the Holocaust,” he said.

Being with the survivors is “profound,” Paharik reflected, and “seeing the impact of these documentaries on young people is also very moving.”

One of the Holocaust survivors they interviewed — a member of the Tree of Life Synagogue — had been in the parking lot when the Tree of Life shooting began and only “just managed to escape it,” Paharik said.

“We don’t ever want anything like that to happen again,” he said.

“Scripture teaches us about the importance of respecting all human life, from birth until natural death,” Paharik continued. “To stereotype, to discriminate, to show hate towards people just because who they are or where they grew up or the faith that they have is actually sinful. It’s a violation of our Christian teaching.”