Yom Hashoah

Author Katherine Fennelly will share the remarkable story of her grandfather, a foreign-born sailor who overcame a childhood marked by tragedy to become the head of an elite espionage unit for the Allied Forces during World War II. At the OSS he was one of the few foreign-born Americans informed and indoctrinated in what we now know as the ULTRA decrypts, the German Enigma messages that were used to capture or thwart almost all German offensive intelligence activity during the Second World War.

It took several years of reviewing previously unexamined government records and conducting personal interviews and genealogical searches for Katherine to piece together the life of this man who hid his Jewish identity, the nature of his work as a spy, and the murder of his sister and nephew by Hungarian Nazis.