Join us for a meaningful Shabbat dinner and commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 3GNY volunteer Julia Mechner and her father, Holocaust survivor Francis Mechner, will share their family story of survival and perseverance. Together with Peter Nelson, 3GNY’s WEDU instructor, they will discuss the transmission of Holocaust legacy from survivors to the next generations.

All are welcome. Kosher dietary laws observed.

Dinner begins at 7:15. All are invited to join Sutton Place Synagogue's Shabbat services at 6:15.

Our Shabbat Dinner has been generously sponsored in celebration of 3GNY’s WEDU Program

About Our Speakers:

Julia Mechner 

Julia Mechner is a senior at School of the Future in Manhattan, and has served for 3 years on the Youth Advisory Board for WNET’s Youth Collective summit on current issues. She works as a teaching assistant for a preschool in Long Island City, and also as a lighting/sound manager for the Secret Theatre in Sunnyside, Queens. She has performed in many stage productions, including Amore Opera’s 2019 Iolanthe and Titan Theatre’s A Christmas Carol (2017-19). She attended Queens Paideia School, where she developed her research and presentation skills. Her participation in 3GNY’s WEDU program, along with subsequent learning, deepened her understanding of the Holocaust’s devastating impact on her family and European culture.

Francis Mechner

Vienna’s pre-WW2 Jewish population was key to its renown as a center of the arts, sciences, and philosophy. That is the Vienna into which Francis Mechner was born in 1931. He was 7 when Germany annexed Austria. Mechner’s five-year odyssey of evading the Nazis brought him to New York, where he went on to earn his doctorate and serve on the faculty in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. Today, he conducts publishing, lecturing, and research activities through his Mechner Foundation, which is funded by technologically innovative enterprises that he founded and built. Foundation projects have included the K-8th grade Queens Paideia School (2009-2021) and its implementation of modern educational theory. Mechner is an accomplished pianist, painter, and chess master, and speaks five languages.