Rev. Dr. Franklin Hamlin Littell, Holocaust scholar, dies at 91

HOLOCAUST. What does the word mean today?

The Rev. Dr. Franklin Hamlin Littell, a Methodist minister and a world-renowned specialist in Holocaust studies, was concerned that the word had lost its impact - especially among Christians.

"Most gentiles, even church leaders, have not confronted the Holocaust and its lessons for the present day," he once wrote.

And the Jewish community itself, he felt, should be more aware of those gentiles who sacrificed their lives to help Jews during the bitter days of Nazi dominance of Germany and Europe.

"It is important, especially for Jewish children, to know that in those terrible years not all the gentiles in Christendom were either perpetrators or passive spectators," he wrote.

Franklin Littell, former chairman of the Department of Religion at Temple University, who devoted his life to Holocaust studies and to keeping alive the memories and lessons of the Nazi slaughter of millions of Jews and other "undesirables" in the name of a super Aryan race, died Saturday. He was 91 and lived in Merion Station.

"If Christianity is to recover its integrity, and to blow its trumpet again with a clear note, Christians must repent of their betrayals of the faith and turn to works worthy of repentance," he wrote.

Littell spent 10 years in postwar Germany as chief Protestant religious adviser in the U.S. high command.

On his return to the States in 1959, he offered a graduate seminar, "The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust," at Emory University in Atlanta - the first course of its kind in America.

He joined the Temple faculty in 1969 after serving as president of Iowa Wesleyan College. He also had taught at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University and at Chicago Theological Seminary.

At Temple, he established the nation's first doctoral program in Holocaust studies.

Littell also followed his Christian conscience into the civil- rights struggle. He marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in demonstrations for equal rights for all.

In a 1983 article in the Detroit Jewish News about Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Memorial in Jerusalem, Littell described one of its features - the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles, which honors gentiles who saved Jews from the Holocaust with plaques bearing each name and a tree planted in their memory.

"The action for Christians," he wrote, "is to mourn that there were not more of the righteous in Christendom, that apostasy was widespread instead, and to work before the night falls again that our pulpits and Sunday schools instill amity instead of hostility, courage instead of time-serving cowardice."

In 1979, he was the first Christian appointed to the International Governing Board of Yad Vashem.

And in 1983, he gave the dedication address at the Garden of the Righteous Gentiles at Wilmington's Jewish Community Center, the first such monument in the United States.

Littell, an author of 30 books and more than 1,000 articles, was born in Syracuse, N.Y., and received a bachelor's degree from Cornell College in Iowa. He received his master's degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York and his doctorate from Yale.

His 1975 book The Crucifixion of the Jews was the first major work presenting a Christian response to the Holocaust.

Littell co-founded the annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, held at St. Joseph's University.

He was emeritus distinguished professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and a visiting professor in the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem for 25 years.

He is survived by his wife of 30 years, Marcia Sachs Littell, a professor of Holocaust studies at Stockton; three daughters, Jeannie Lawrence, Karen and Miriam Littell; a son, Stephen; two stepsons, Jonathan Sachs and Robert Sachs Jr.; a stepdaughter, Jennifer Sachs Dahnert, and 11 grandchildren. His first wife, Harriet Davis Lewis, died in 1978.

Services: A memorial service will be held in the fall.

Donations may be made to the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, Box 10, Merion Station, PA 19066.