Summons to Berlin: Nazi Theft and a Daughter’s Quest for Justice

On his deathbed, a New York psychiatrist’s father poses two unsettling questions: “Are you tough enough? Do they know who you are?” Author Joanne Intrator soon realizes that these haunting questions relate to a center-city Berlin building at 16 Wallstrasse that the Nazis ripped away from her family in 1938. But a decade will pass before she fully grasps why her father threw down the gauntlet as he did. Repeatedly, Intrator’s restitution quest forces her to confront her profound fears surrounding Germany and the Holocaust. LBI Executive Director Emeritus William H. Weitzer will speak with Intrator about restitution, intergenerational trauma, and the power of memoir.

Note: This event will take place in-person at the Center for Jewish History and will be live streamed online.

Author: Dr. Joanne Intrator

Joanne Intrator’s life has been shaped by being the daughter of German Jewish refugees. Since childhood, she pondered why people perpetrate atrocities on their fellow human beings. After studying European history at Connecticut College, she received an MD from Columbia University and became a psychiatrist. She did a fellowship in Psychiatry and Law at Albert Einstein. Mentored by Dr. Robert Hare, she spearheaded the first brain imaging research on well-defined psychopaths, published in The Journal of Biological Psychiatry. Following her father’s death in 1993, she took it upon herself to fight for the restitution of a building in Berlin. Her journey has been the subject of news articles, television interviews, and museum exhibits. Joanne practices psychiatry in New York City. She has written for The Journal for The Study of Antisemitism, Ästhetik & Kommunikation (Berlin), Women Writers. Women(‘s) Books, and she writes a blog on psychopathy for Psychology Today.

LBI Executive Director Emeritus Dr. William H. Weitzer

William H. Weitzer, Ph.D. became the John H. Slade Executive Director of the Leo Baeck Institute in January, 2013 and retired in October, 2022. Dr. Weitzer, formerly the Executive Vice President at Fairfield University in Connecticut, has over thirty years of experience in academic administration, budget and finance, fund raising, community relations, and program evaluation. In his role as Executive Director, Dr. Weitzer combined various aspects of his background – being of German-Jewish descent, participating in Jewish communal life, working closely with faculty and scholars, and applying his professional and management skills to the Leo Baeck Institute.