“The Ipson Saga,” one family’s story of survival during the Holocaust, will conclude Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College and the Center for Creative Partnerships’ Community Cinema social justice film series on Thursday, April 20.
The film will begin at 6 p.m. in Roquemore Auditorium, Building R, on the campus of OCtech. It is free and open to the public.
“The Ipson Saga” by Jay Ipson is the story of the Ipson family’s survival during the Holocaust in Lithuania. Jacob “Jay” Ipson and his family were forced into the Kovno ghetto when he was six years old. One day, he and his mother were in line with his grandparents, two uncles and an aunt to be deported for execution, but he and his mother were sent away by a Jewish policeman who happened to be a friend of his father’s and became the only two people to survive out of the 1,700 rounded up for deportation.
After escaping the ghetto with his parents in 1943 – before the ghetto was turned into a concentration camp – the Ipsons hid with a Polish-Catholic farmer’s family for nine months. Six of those months were spent underground in a potato hole that Ipson’s father dug out with his bare hands and a stick under the cover of darkness.
The Ipsons immigrated via Munich to the United States when Jay Ipson was 12. Ipson later cofounded the Virginia Holocaust Museum, which first opened in 1997. Tens of thousands visit the museum each year, and more than 100 middle and high schools visit annually. The Ipson family’s saga is at the center of the museum’s core exhibits.
A question-and-answer session with Ipson and Dr. Millicent Brown, a historian and civil rights advocate who will relate the Holocaust to the African-American community from a historic and contemporary perspective, will be held following the film. Ellen Zisholtz, CCP co-president, will serve as moderator.
The film series is funded in part by OCtech and South Carolina Humanities and sponsored by Cox Industries Inc.
