Doris L. Bergen, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto

Doris L. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. Her books include Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich and War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. She is the editor of two collections: Lessons and Legacies: From Generation to Generation and The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Centuries. She is the author of numerous articles on religion, ethnicity, and gender in the Second World War and the Holocaust.  She is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Frank Bialystok, Professor, Department of History, University of Toronto; Chair, Canadian Jewish Congress – Ontario Region

Frank Bialystok is a professor of Modern European and Modern Jewish History, and has taught at the Universities of York, Waterloo, and Toronto. His book, Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community, won the Tannenbaum Prize in Canadian Jewish History and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award For Non-Fiction.

Dr. Bialystok is Chair of Canadian Jewish Congress (Ontario Region), and sits on the national executive of CJC; he is also a founding member and past chair of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, for which he was awarded the Cavalier’s Cross of the Order of Poland, and a member of the Canadian Delegation to the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Commemoration and Research.

Guy Broc, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, France

Guy Broc is the interim ambassador and the French Head of Delegation for the International Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education and Research, as well as for the Prague Holocaust Era Assets Conference. He is a public servant for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and one of Canada's liaison partners.

Tal Bruttman, Historian, City of Grenoble, France; Teacher trainer, Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris, France

Tal Bruttman is a Holocaust specialist, with expertise on antisemitism in Vichy France. Since 2001, he has worked for the City of Grenoble. Bruttman has published several books, amongst them La logique des bourreaux (2003), a study of the Final Solution in the Grenoble area by the German police and French collaborators, and Au bureau des Affaires juives (2006), on the promulgation and enforcement of the racial laws by the French administration between 1940 and 1944. In 2009, he co-edited Qu’est-ce qu’un déporté? with Annette Wieviorka and Laurent Joly, a collection on the various deportations policies during the Second World War in Europe and Asia.

The Honourable Irwin Cotler, MP, Special Counsel on Human Rights and International Justice for the Liberal Party of Canada; member, Steering Committee, Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Anti-Semitism

Irwin Cotler, a Canadian Member of Parliament, was first elected to the riding of Mount Royal in November 1999. He currently serves as a member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Human Rights, and is Chair of the All-Party Save Darfur Parliamentary Coalition. A leading human rights advocate in and out of Parliament, he headed the Canadian Delegation to the Stockholm International Forum on the Prevention of Genocide. He is presently Special Counsel on Human Rights and International Justice for the Liberal Party of Canada, and is a member of the Canadian Inter-Parliamentary Coalition against Anti-Semitism. He is a former Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada.


Amanda Grzyb, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, ON

Dr. Amanda Grzyb is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Grzyb’s teaching and research interests include genocide studies, media and the public interest, the representation of homelessness, and African-American literature. She is the editor of a new collection of essays from McGill-Queen’s University Press, entitled The World and Darfur: International Response to Crimes Against Humanity in Western Sudan (2009).  Her current projects include a large study of the representation of homelessness and diversity in Canadian newspapers from 1980 to the present, and a new research initiative on the evolution of Rwandan genocide memorials.  She has also launched a new media studies course called “Community Holocaust History,” which includes a two-week travel component to sites of Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe over Western’s Reading Week.

Alice Herscovitch, Executive Director, Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre

Alice Herscovitch joined the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre as Executive Director in October 2007. She is the former Director of Social Development at the Conférence régionale des élus, and was previously the Executive Director of Project Genesis, a community organization working on issues of social rights and social justice. She lectured for nine years at the McGill University School of Social Work on social policy. She has worked for over 30 years with communities and organizations to promote progressive change on issues of social justice and to sustain non-profit organizations. 

Robert Jan van Pelt, Professor of Cultural History, School of Architecture, University of Waterloo, Ontario

Robert Jan van Pelt has lectured at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture since 1987, and held appointments at many institutions of higher education across Europe, Asia and North America. He is the recipient of many academic honours, including the National Jewish Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has published seven books and contributed chapters to more than 20 books. His most recent books are Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946, co-authored with Deborah Dwork (Norton, 2009), The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Indiana University Press, 2002), and Holocaust: A History, co-authored with Deborah Dwork (Norton, 2002). An internationally-recognized authority on the history of Auschwitz, van Pelt appeared in Errol Morris’s film Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. and contributed to the BBC/PBS series Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. Van Pelt chaired the team that developed a master plan for the preservation of Auschwitz, and served as an expert witness for the defence in the notorious libel case Irving vs. Penguin and Lipstadt (1998-2001).

Ümit Kiziltan, Deputy Director General, Multiculturalism Branch, Citizenship and Immigration Canada

Ümit Kiziltan holds an M.A. in Cultural Foundations of Education from Syracuse University, a B.A. in Economics, as well as a teaching certificate from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on research methods, sociology of education, and comparative education at Boğaziçi University, Syracuse University, and the University of Victoria. He worked for more than a decade in northern British Columbia with Tl’atz’en Nation as an educator and community developer in treaty negotiations, natural resource management and cultural development. Subsequently, he worked for more than five years in the field of international development as the Deputy Executive Director of CUSO, specialising in capacity building, inclusive governance, and health in community-based volunteer development programming in over 30 countries in the south. After a year and a half with the Assembly of First Nations as a senior economist on the education and international relations file, he joined the federal public service as Director of Program Management and Control with a focus on refugee health at the Health Management Branch of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Since, September 2008, he has been with the Citizenship and Multiculturalism Branch as the Deputy Director General responsible for policy, research, and partnerships/engagement.

David Matas, Senior Legal Counsel, B’nai Brith Canada; author and human rights activist

David Matas, Senior Legal Counsel to B’nai Brith Canada, is an internationally-renowned immigration, refugee and human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg. A former President of the Canadian Council of Refugees, he is also active in such organizations as Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists. He has represented B’nai Brith in many international fora, including the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. He is an accomplished author of several highly acclaimed publications, including Justice Delayed: Nazi War Criminals in Canada (1987) with Susan Charendoff; Closing the Doors: The Failure of Refugee Protection (1989) with Ilana Simon; and Bloody Words: Hate and Free Speech (2000). His latest work is entitled Aftershock: Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism (2005). He has received numerous awards and honours, including an honourary doctorate from Concordia University.

Greg Mattson, Special Advisor on Holocaust issues to the US Department of State, Washington, DC

Greg Mattson, a retired senior Foreign Service Officer, has worked as a special assistant in the State Department's Office of Holocaust Issues for the past six years. His main responsibilities relate to the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education and Research. The bulk of his overseas posting were in Europe and Africa. He was the senior professional American diplomat in Greece, Portugal, Denmark and Albania in the course of his career.

Mark Weitzman, Director, Task Force Against Hate, Simon Wiesenthal Center, New York, USA

Mark Weitzman is the Director of the Task Force against Hate and Terrorism and the Associate Director of Education for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and is its chief representative at the United Nations in New York. He is a member of the official US delegation to the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, and the Vice-President of the Association of Holocaust Organizations. A recognized expert in the fields of extremism and cyber hate, he lectures widely on these issues worldwide. His publications include editing and contributing to the Wiesenthal Center’s Kristallnacht: A Resource Book and Program Guide (1988), Dignity and Defiance: Confronting Life and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (1993) and The New Lexicon of Hate (1998).