Michelle Wolfe, M.Div.'14, has been awarded a fellowship by FASPE (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics) to participate in a two-week program in New York, Germany, and Poland in June 2014. The fellowship gives journalism, law, medical, and seminary students a structured program of study that explores the role of their chosen professions in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and uses that historical focus as a framework to engage students in an intensive study of contemporary ethics in their field.

Wolfe is one of 12 seminarians and divinity students who were chosen for the fellowship.

The 2014 program will be led by Kevin Spicer, James J. Kenneally Distinguished Professor of History at Stonehill College; LeRoy Walters, Joseph. P. Kennedy, Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and emeritus professor of philosophy at Georgetown University; and Rabbi Nancy Wiener, clinical director of the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Center for Pastoral Counseling at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Wolfe says she would like to "gain deeper insight into the factors that influenced clergy either to be complicit in the Holocaust or to resist it." In particular, she said she was interested in studying the biblical hermeneutics and corresponding theology that differentiated those who were complicit from those who resisted.
 
The seminary fellows will travel with a similar group of FASPE medical fellows, beginning at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City, where they will meet with Holocaust survivors and work with FASPE staff and guest scholars. They will then visit Berlin, Auschwitz, and Krakow.