(Courtesy of Kehilas Bais Yosef) Dr. Henry Abramson will speak at Kehilas Bais Yosef (580 Broadway) in Passaic on Sunday, Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. Currently serving as dean at Touro’s Lander College of Arts and Sciences in Brooklyn, New York, Abramson is the author of “Torah From the Years of Wrath 1939-1943: The Historical Context of the Aish Kodesh.”

Abramson takes the texts of the martyr Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira of Piaseczno (1889-1943) and maps the text to the historical context in which they were written during the war years. Abramson’s book was reviewed positively by JLNJ contributor Ben Rothke last July. He wrote: “It’s a story that if it were not true, one couldn’t believe it. One of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the past century is martyred in the Holocaust, but leaves his treasured writings in a milk can buried in a devastated city. The can contains a plea to send the manuscripts to the author’s brother in Israel. After the war, the milk can is wondrously discovered in the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto and makes its way back to the author’s brother.”

A native of northern Ontario, Dr. Abramson received his PhD in history from the University of Toronto in 1995 and went on to visiting and post-doctoral positions at Cornell, Harvard, Oxford and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of several books, many articles in scholarly journals, and has appeared in historical documentaries. His research has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and he has lectured in North America, Israel, Europe and Japan.