About Us

The Center for Jubilee, Reconciliation and Healing

The idea for the Jubilee Center was created during the Sesquicentennial celebration of the capture of the city of Savannah in December 1864.  The city was occupied by the soldiers of Sherman’s Army.  The city was occupied peacefully on December 21, 1864.  Under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 8,000 enslaved individuals in and around Savannah were freed.  In addition, there were more than 10,000 recently-free African Americans who had accompanied Sherman’s Army into Savannah. 

A program was organized by Patt Gunn and associates at the Mark Ralph Gilbert Civil Rights Museum.  A series of commemorative programs was prepared, including a commemoration of the freeing of the slaves of Savannah.

A committee was formed of African American historians and community leaders, with the idea of doing ongoing commemorative programs.  An outgrowth of this discussion was creating a permanent nonprofit organization that would carry out community-wide programs in the future.  These individuals include Patt Gunn and Rosalyn Rouse.  They were joined by Amy Fiske and Eric Saul.  Amy Fiske is the great great grand-niece of Union General Henry Warner Slocum, who was one of the senior Union commanders under General Sherman, and whose troops captured and occupied the city. 

The committee decided to incorporate as a nonprofit organization.

Since 2014, Patt Gunn and Rosalyn Rouse, of the Center for Jubilee, Reconciliation and Healing, have organized an annual program to commemorate the freeing of enslaved individuals in and around Savannah, which occurred on December 21, 1864.  We also commemorate the issuing of Special Field Order #15, which proposed giving formerly enslaved individuals 40 acres of land and a mule to start a new life.

Committee Members

Patt Guillard Gunn, Savanah, Georgia

Rosalyn Rouse, Savannah, Georgia

Amy Fiske, Morgantown, West Virginia

Eric Saul, Morgantown, West Virginia

Eric Saul Biography

Personal Website: EASaul.com

Eric Saul served as founding curator of the Presidio Army Museum in San Francisco from 1973-1986.  Saul was responsible for the restoration of the historic 1863 Army hospital in which the museum was established.  He designed and installed the original permanent exhibitions of the museum.  They depicted the history of the U.S. Army in the West and in the Pacific.

Saul has designed and circulated a number of exhibits on the contribution of minorities to the US military.  Included among them were an exhibit on African American soldiers, entitled Ready and Forward: The Story of African American Soldiers in the US Army, and exhibits on women in the military, Filipinos in the US Army, and the famous Japanese American soldiers of the 100th/442nd/MIS.  The 100th/442nd/MIS exhibit eventually evolved into an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution entitled A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the Constitution.  For this exhibit, he was a technical advisor and consultant.

In 1980, Eric Saul co-founded of the Go For Broke 100th/442nd/MIS Foundation, later called the National Japanese American Historical Society (NJAHS).  He was curator from 1981 to 1987, producing exhibits including East to America, which chronicled the story of Japanese American immigration to the United States.  Eric Saul has also curated an exhibit entitled Unlikely Liberators on the Japanese American soldiers of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion who liberated the infamous Dachau Death March. In the 1990's, Saul served as a consultant for the Japanese American National Museum.  In 2002, he created a national project, the Kansha Project, to honor people who risked their reputations to help Japanese Americans during World War II.  In 2010, Saul curated the exhibit Go For Broke: Japanese American Soldiers Fighting on Two Fronts for the Ellis Island Immigration Museum.

Eric Saul has been Guest Curator at the Simon Wiesenthal Center - Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles since 1994.  He curated a major exhibit entitled Art in the Holocaust.  In 1998, he curated an exhibit entitled I am My Brother's Keeper on Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal.  He also curated Liberation: Revealing the Unspeakable, an exhibit on the liberation of the concentration camps by the allied Armies, 1944-45.  This exhibit premiered at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance in 1995. 

In 1993, Eric Saul founded the Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats Project to document and honor Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara.  In 1996, the project expanded to honor all diplomats who helped Jews during the war. Under his direction, the Visas for Life Project created six traveling exhibits on the topic of diplomatic rescue, which have been shown in more than 150 institutions worldwide, including: the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust; the United Nations headquarters in New York and Geneva; the headquarters of the European Union, the Japanese Parliament; Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority; and the US Capitol in Washington, DC.

Saul has independently curated a number of additional traveling exhibits.  In 1997, he created a series of traveling exhibits and programs on Chinese diplomat Dr. Feng Shan Ho.  The exhibit traveled to numerous venues in the United States and to China on the 100th anniversary of Dr. Ho's birth.  In 2000, Saul created another exhibit entitled Light One Candle: A Child's Diary of the Holocaust.  The exhibit tells the story of Solly Ganor (Zalke Genkind), who was a survivor of the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania and the Landsberg-Kaufering concentration camps.  It premiered in Detroit, Michigan, in 2001.  In 2006, Saul created the exhibit A Man for All Times: The Story of Mexican Ambassador Gilberto Bosques and the Rescue of Jews in Marseilles in cooperation with the Tuvie Maizel Museum of the Holocaust and the Simon Wiesenthal Center - Museum of Tolerance.  The exhibit opened in Mexico City at the Jewish Community Center, and then toured to the Mexican foreign ministry.

In 2006, the Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats Project became a nonprofit organization under the umbrella of the Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust, a nonprofit corporation (ISRAH).  The mission expanded to document a comprehensive history of rescue, relief and altruism during the Holocaust.  As Executive Director of ISRAH, Eric Saul continues to document rescue, and has nominated many individuals for the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

In 2007, Saul instituted a major research program to document and honor Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.  Saul has created a major database of Jewish rescue organizations and Jewish rescuers.  He is cooperating with two programs in Israel.  He is currently preparing a traveling exhibit on Jewish rescue.  In 2012, Saul launched a website on Jews who rescued Jews in the Holocaust.  It can be seen at www.jewishholocaustrescuers.com. 

Eric Saul has been a consultant on numerous documentary films, including Yankee Samurai (1981), The Color of Honor (1982), Nisei Soldier (1984), and the Holocaust documentaries entitled Diplomats for the Damned (1999) and Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness (2000).

Eric Saul was an early consultant for Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. 

Eric Saul was the co-author of The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 (1982) and contributed to Go For Broke: The Story of the Japanese American Soldier in World War II (1981). He was coeditor of Yukiko Sugihara's memoir, Visas for Life (1995).  He also authored Unlikely Liberators: The Story of Chiune Sugihara and Japanese Americans of the 522nd Field Artillery (1995).

In 2012, in commemoration of the Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, Eric Saul created a comprehensive reference website, www.civilwarlibrary.org.

Saul is presently compiling a database of abolitionist and anti-slavery organizations and individuals for the purposes of recognizing their actions.  This list consists of more than 3,000 abolitionists and 300 abolitionist societies.  He has posted these on a website, American Abolitionists: conscience of the Nation (www.AmericanAbolitionists.com).  This includes individual biographies, timelines, quotes, and a fact sheet on abolition.  Just recently, he has posted an online Encyclopedia of Abolition using historic writings and reference materials.

Eric Saul is presently writing a major new book on diplomatic rescue in the Holocaust.

Amy Fiske Biography

Amy Fiske has been working with Eric Saul for the past 30 years in creating numerous traveling exhibits on the Holocaust, the Japanese American military experience, and most recently on slavery and abolition.  She received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University, a master’s degree in Psychology (Social) from San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. in Psychology (Clinical-Aging) from the University of Southern California.  Amy’s specialty is research into the causes of depression among older adults.  Amy is presently an Associate Professor of Psychology at West Virginia University.  She has been at WVU since 2005.

Amy’s interest in history stems from her great, great, great uncle, General Henry Warner Slocum, who was a commander of three Union Corps and was the commander of the left wing (Army of Georgia) of General Sherman’s March to the Sea and Carolinas Campaign.  Amy has designed and implemented a website commemorating Slocum’s command of the Twelfth Corps in the Army of the Potomac (union12thcorps.com) and the Army of Georgia (armyofgeorgia.com).

During the Civil War Sesquicentennial, Eric and Amy organized a commemorative reading of the names of all the Union and Confederate soldiers killed in the battle of Gettysburg, July 1-3, 1863.  The reading was held in the national cemetery at Gettysburg National Military Park.

In 2014, they went on a historic trip, retracing General Slocum and General Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea.  They met African Americans whose ancestors were freed by General Slocum and his army 150 years prior.  They met families in Milledgeville, Georgia, and in Savannah, Georgia.  These meetings resulted in commemorative programs being established honoring the liberation of slaves by the Union Army.

Before the Civil War, General Slocum was an abolitionist.  His participation in this cause was the genesis for the creation of the abolitionist website and exhibition.