Sister Gemma Del Duca will always be a "Greensburg person," but she has found room in her heart for a much different part of the world where she has been working for more than 30 years.
"I love Israel and I love the people of Israel and I feel that living here has been a great blessing of the Lord for me," said the Roman Catholic nun, who teaches Catholic educators about the Holocaust.
As much as Del Duca has embraced Israel, Israel has embraced her.
Del Duca, 75, founder of Seton Hill University's National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, will be honored Sunday for her work in the field by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Authority.
Del Duca will be the first non-Israeli to receive the Excellence in Holocaust Education Award in its more than 10-year existence.
"I was completely stunned because I just never expected anything like this," Del Duca said. "The wonderful thing about it is that it's really a shared prize."
Del Duca will be honored at an awards ceremony, surrounded by friends from the Greensburg university, as well as Israeli teachers and this summer's participants in the Holocaust education seminars Del Duca has organized at Yad Vashem since 1989.
"Gemma has been my role model and my hero for teaching the Holocaust and for building relations with the Christian community and all religious groups," said Dr. Edie B. Naveh, director of the Holocaust Center of the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh, in a statement.
Del Duca, born and raised in Greensburg, entered the convent shortly after graduating in 1950 from Greensburg High School. Her teachers in Catholic elementary school were Sisters of Charity.
"Even though it seemed I wasn't moving very far from family and friends it did take me quite in another direction," Del Duca said of joining the order.
She studied in Rome, then at Seton Hill and then in New Mexico.
She taught at Seton Hill for a time, then worked in campus ministry at various Virginia colleges and universities.
Del Duca moved to Israel in 1975 and has lived there ever since.
"There was a great openness for dialogue that was encouraged through Vatican II," Del Duca said. "I was very interested in dialogue with the Jewish people."
She worked at Tel Gamaliel, a community for such dialogue directed by the Rev. Isaac Jacob, who came from St. Vincent College near Latrobe.
Jacob believed that dialogue with the Jewish people would require that the Catholic Church recognize the Israeli state and that Catholics had to seriously study the Holocaust.
So during a meeting of the Sisters of Charity in 1987, Del Duca presented the idea of Seton Hill working in Holocaust education and the center was born.
Del Duca spent her time focusing on the portion of the program in Israel. She approached Yad Vashem about developing a seminar on the Holocaust for Catholic educators.
In 1989, the groups initiated the Catholic Institute for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem. About 200 educators, mostly from Catholic colleges and universities, have gone to Yad Vashem's center in Jerusalem to learn about the Holocaust.
Educators have participated every summer except for 2002 when the seminar was cancelled because participants were frightened of traveling there during a particularly violent time.
The goal is to encourage educators to develop or expand upon courses on the Holocaust, which is known as Shoah in Hebrew. Shoah means "utter and total destruction."
"I feel that it's really important because the Shoah, the Holocaust, was an event that damaged the history of humanity in such a profound way that we are still trying to recover from the aftereffects of this cataclysmic event," Del Duca said.
"There is an expression in Hebrew that speaks of 'tikkun olam,' which means the mending of the world, so when people begin to study about the Shoah, and especially as they study it in Israel and in Yad Vashem, I feel that they begin to cross borders."
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