A courageous New York mayor with a persecuted sister and Americans who saved painter Marc Chagall will be among the subjects of a conference at Fordham University School of Law on Sunday. Sponsored by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, the event will focus on the efforts of Americans who promoted the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust.

One session focuses on Mayor La Guardia, the son of a Jewish mother and an agnostic Italian father. “Many remember how La Guardia riled Hitler by posting Jewish policemen outside the German Consulate in 1938, after Kristallnacht,” said Wyman Institute director Rafael Medoff. “What is not well-known is that later, during the Holocaust itself, La Guardia was actively involved in pressing the Roosevelt administration to rescue Jewish refugees. The conference will reveal important new information about this neglected chapter in La Guardia’s life.”

“There are very few people who spoke up at the time for the need of the United States to take a stand to assist the Jews. La Guardia was one of those few. And most people are unaware of that today,” said Mayor Koch, who is chairing that session. Recently appointed by President Bush to serve on the council overseeing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Mr. Koch said that this session is very timely today, when “anti-Semitism is skyrocketing in Europe.”

“La Guardia reacted early and with firmness to the emerging cataclysm of the Holocaust,” CUNY Graduate Center professor Thomas Kessner added. “He spoke out against the Nazi depredations when others counseled reticence, and he demanded that the rights of Jews be protected around the world.”

The director of Remember the Women Institute, Rochelle Saidel, will discuss the ordeal of La Guardia’s sister, Gemma La Guardia Gluck, who was married to a Hungarian Jew whom the Nazis murdered. Gluck was arrested by the Nazis and interned about fifty miles from Berlin in Ravensbruck, a women’s concentration camp where she was held for possible exchange as a political hostage, Ms. Saidel told the Sun. Surviving and facing immigration hurdles restricting Jewish immigration, Gluck arrived in America in May 1947, four months before La Guardia died of cancer.

Another session will address how Hiram Bingham, an American vice consul in Vichy France, worked clandestinely with classicist Varian Fry to rescue Marc Chagall and others. This conference will bring together Fry’s widow, Annette, Bingham’s youngest son, William, and Chagall’s granddaughter, Bella Chagall Meyer, for the first time. “It will be an unforgettable moment,” Mr. Medoff said.

“Just as the children of Holocaust survivors are now taking on the mantle of telling what happened to their parents, the Wyman Institute mobilizes the children of Holocaust rescue activists to tell about those Americans who did speak out,” he said.

Bingham, who will be honored as one of six American diplomats on a postage stamp next May, worked with Fry until 1941, when the Roosevelt administration halted their activity by refusing to renew Fry’s passport and transferring Bingham from France to Portugal and Argentina.

Fry, Bingham, and others in their rescue network helped save about 2,000 people, many of whom were famous artists, writers, scientists, and intellectuals – including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Franz Werfel, Arthur Koestler, Walter Gropius, Hannah Arendt, and Andre Breton.

Bingham told his children very little about his rescue work. “The extent of his activities came to light after I discovered a cache of documents hidden away behind an old fireplace in a linen closet in our pre-Revolutionary homestead in Salem, Connecticut,” said William Bingham, an attorney who focuses on human rights and constitutional law. Bingham plans to show brief 16-millimeter home movies that his father took of Chagall in Gordes, France, prior to his escape in 1941.

At the same time, the conference also explores the tragic side of America’s response: the failure to bomb Auschwitz, as described by Senator McGovern, one of the pilots who flew over the area and could have bombed it if he had only been given the order.

Attendees will see the first public screening of a new interview with Mc-Govern. Filmmaker Stuart Erdheim will be on hand to answer questions about the film, which was shown only once previously to the House International Relations Committee’s task force on anti-Semitism.

Information on registering for Sunday’s conference (costing $25 or $15 for students) can be found at WymanInstitute.org or by calling 215-635-5622.

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE ‘NEXT’ KIND Authors, literary critics, and others came out Thursday to celebrate “The Life of David” by poet Robert Pinsky and “Maimonides” by Dr. Sherwin Nuland, the inaugural books of the Jewish Encounters series, a joint publishing venture of Schocken Books and Nextbook, a project devoted to Jewish cultural literacy. Edited by Jonathan Rosen and aimed at the general reader, the series matches writers with key figures and events from three millennia of Jewish history. In her welcome, Nextbook director Julie Sandorf humorously described the organization’s cultural range as extending “from the Dead Sea scrolls to ‘Deadwood,'” the HBO series.

“A literary series of Jewish books is not a certain thing,” said Mr. Rosen, noting Kafka’s famous comment in his journal, “I have nothing in common with the Jews – most days I don’t even have anything in common with myself.” But Mr. Rosen said there was something so recognizably Jewish in the sentiment that it wouldn’t be so terrible if a little of Kafka’s spirit made it into the series. The audience laughed when he said that when he approached the first two writers, Mr. Pinsky and Dr. Nuland, he was pleased by “the fact that they not only said yes, but actually wrote their books.”

Pantheon’s editorial director, Dan Frank, said the collaboration between Nextbook and Schocken “offers the possibility for some of our best writers to write books they’ve always wanted to write but might never have written.”

In the audience were the authors of forthcoming books in the series, including Douglas Century, Jonathan Mahler, Daphne Merkin, Esther Schor, Jonathan Wilson, and Ben Katchor.

Dr. Nuland said his absorption in Maimonides, which began in the 1980s has accelerated, and he plans for it to be a lifelong journey.