The Hour Before Dawn 

A programme for wealth holders to explore if/how their ancestors have financially profited from fascism and/or colonialism - including, but not limited to, the NS Regime and German colonialism.

Update Regarding The Hour Before Dawn

We've decided to cancel Cycle One of The Hour Before Dawn as previously scheduled to be starting November 2026.

This wasn't an easy decision. A member of our team needs to step back from these dates due to personal family circumstances, and upon reflection, we recognize the importance of having the full team capacity needed to hold these very sensitive topics with care. We know some of you were planning for these dates, and we genuinely apologize that we can't deliver on what we announced. Additionally, we received feedback that the 8-month programme arc we designed was an intimidating commitment for some; therefore, we are planning less time-intensive offers in the future.

Where our energy is going instead:

We're focused on completing the work with our current cohort in Cycle Two, which runs through October 2026, and preparing for The Hour Before Dawn Giving Cycle, which begins in January 2027.

The Hour Before Dawn Giving Cycle includes learning sessions, one-to-one money coaching, and an individualized giving plan that acknowledges the history of your family wealth, your present-day values, and supports high-impact and underfunded social justice work. The learning sessions with experts from various fields range from organizing against fascism, to migrant justice work in Europe, to supporting political activism in Eastern Europe as one form of repair, to plural Jewish culture building against antisemitism and it's current day instrumentalization. You don't need to have gone through a previous programming to join. If this interests you, contact Iris directly through her “Contact me” page.

Were you hoping to join us in November 2026? Fill out the interest form to advise us on 2027 offerings!

If you were planning to apply to Cycle One, or have simply been curious about HBD, we still want to hear from you! Please fill out the interest form. Filling out the interest form doesn't commit you to anything, it just tells us what the collective needs, interests and capacities are at this time and allows our programming to be responsive and relevant. We'll be in touch as we shape what comes next, and once we have enough momentum, we will come back to you all with a concrete offer.

The Hour Before Dawn was previously only focused on wealth-holders with German NS backgrounds. While the specific focus on this topic was powerful to explore, we are now opening up our work to Europeans more broadly whose wealth comes from any fascist or colonial regimes.

For the time being, we’ll leave up the previous description of The Hour Before Dawn.

Thank you for your patience and for trusting us with this work.
With gratitude,

Iris Brilliant, Teresa Distelberger and Justine Epstein

Facilitation Team 

We are a cross-class facilitation team. Two of us are US-born Jews with ancestors killed in the Holocaust; both are also inheritors of wealth who have spent years reckoning with the ways we have materially benefited from racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and wealth inequality. And one of us is Austrian and working-class, aware that the antisemitism of her ancestors who "just went along" — like millions of others — made the Holocaust and WWII possible.

We come to this work from different positions: as descendants of those who were targeted, and as a descendant of those who looked away. Each of us has spent years reckoning with what that history demands of us — and has taken concrete steps toward repair. We have dedicated ourselves to the personal and collective work of discovering what becomes possible when descendants of those who caused harm and descendants of those who were harmed come together to strive for truth, justice, and repair.

Iris Brilliant is a money coach for inheritors of wealth and has facilitated programs for wealth inheritors for over fifteen years. Iris is trained in Internal Family Systems and has a coaching certification from the Co-Active Training Institute. She inherited wealth at the age of 22 and has since redistributed 50% of it and lives off of her earned income. She learned how to develop transformational programs for people with wealth at Resource Generation, where she was the High Net Wealth Organizer and Family Philanthropy Organizer for five years. Iris is Jewish and is partnered to a German who has Nazi heritage, and thus this work is deeply personal to her. Her work has predominantly been focused on supporting Americans to grapple with the moral and logistical weight of inherited wealth built off of Black and Indigenous communities. She is passionate about supporting perpetrators of harm to reclaim their dignity through rigorous research and courageous action. Iris anchors her career in the longstanding Jewish values of Tikkun Olam (healing the world) and Teshuvah (return to wholeness through acts of repair). She believes that while we cannot change the actions of our ancestors, we as descendants are the only ones who can help heal our ancestors — and ensure the world learns from their mistakes. Iris is based in Berlin.

Teresa Distelberger is a documentary filmmaker and artist based in Vienna, Austria, working at the intersection of commemoration, dialogical art, and social sculpture. She studied Applied Linguistics, Film, and Gender Studies in Vienna, Paris, and Lancaster, and was part of a research project on Austrian identities led by discourse analyst Ruth Wodak — analyzing how perpetrator responsibility was discursively played down in official commemorational speeches during Austria's memorial year 2005. She holds a master's degree in Arts in Practice from the Dutch Art Institute, with a thesis on dialogical art and commemoration, and has completed the Collective Trauma Facilitation Training with Thomas Hübl.

In her site-specific commemoration projects, she works with local historians and the descendants of both victims and perpetrators of the NS regime. After co-directing The Future Is Better Than Its Reputation and directing Save the Village, she is currently working on a documentary about wealth inequality and redistribution.

Teresa comes to The Hour Before Dawn as an Austrian whose own family history is part of the story this programme addresses. Her grandparents were among the millions who went along — not party members, but carriers of the antisemitism that made the Holocaust possible. Her family history raises the questions at the heart of this programme: what does it mean to go along? And what does individual courage — even in small acts — make possible? One grandfather served in the Wehrmacht — while on the other side of the family, people in hiding were sheltered and fed. She brings to this work her commitment to forms of commemoration that move beyond the monument — toward something lived, relational, and accountable.

Justine Epstein is a facilitator and guide for people with inherited wealth. Justine works with clients one-on-one through The Mending Circle and co-facilitates the Ancestors & Money cohort — including as a course at Stanford University. She brings over eight years of experience holding transformative spaces for people to engage deeply with questions of legacy, identity, money, power and belonging. Her holistic approach brings together training from Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education, School of Lost Borders, and Ways of Council.

Justine is a sixth-generation descendant of James Gamble who co-founded multinational corporation Procter & Gamble in 1837. For five years, Justine has been organizing her family to interrupt P&G's harmful practices and take reparative action supporting communities directly impacted by the company's supply chain. Justine is also a member of Resource Generation, the Solidaire Network, and Transition Resource Circle — networks of people reimagining wealth and taking courageous action in these times.

Based in the US, Justine has spent significant time living, studying and working and building long-lasting cross-cultural relationships in Europe. Diving deep into family history has reconnected Justine with the many threads of her European lineage — including ancestors from Germany and Switzerland who immigrated in the 1800s, as well as her Jewish heritage from Lithuania, where her great-grandmother's family was targeted and killed by Einsatzkommando 3. She is honored to be following the stories of her ancestors back to their motherlands and engaging in the complex and necessary work of The Hour Before Dawn. She a senior mentor to The Hour Before Dawn, shaping the programme's curriculum, providing individual mentorship to participants, and supporting the programme from the US.

In addition to the core facilitation team, Julie Weitz joins The Hour Before Dawn to lead commemoration rituals drawing on her artistic practice with archival research and ritual performance. Julie is an artist, writer, and educator whose work integrates archival research, site-responsive performance, and experimental video to engage landscapes and communities marked by historical violence. A recent U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Poland, she has developed a methodology that collapses the sacred and the profane, using ritual, movement, and clowning to create participatory environments where audiences encounter the past as dynamic, relational, and unresolved.

Over the past decade, Weitz has explored cultural practices within her Ashkenazi inheritance that were fractured by genocide and later overshadowed by institutionalized and nationalistic forms of Jewish identity. Drawing on Yiddish performance traditions and her family’s theatrical history as first-generation Americans, she creates works that engage Jewish memory within the Eastern European landscapes from which these cultural forms—and her family—emerged.

Recent projects include Holy Names for Our Dybbuk (2024), presented at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, and The Seven Beggars (2023) at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), ExtraCity Kunsthal (Antwerp), and the Jewish Museum (Amsterdam). She is a Helix Fellow at Yiddishkayt and a contributing writer for Momus and CARLA. View her artist's website: www.julieweitz.com

The Hour Before Dawn is for You if You:

• Have at least one ancestor who lived and built family wealth in a country with a facist regime, in a collaborating country and/or who built wealth through colonialism

• Are concerned about the rise of fascism, and want to take action to protect democracy.

• Feel called to explore your family's past — this can include unease, hesitation, or fear about what you might uncover, but you still want to do the work.

• Have the emotional bandwidth to engage in this work alongside others. This programme involves group-based reflection, family research, and peer support.

• Are a person with wealth or class privilege: you have an anticipated inheritance of at least €500,000 and/or present-day access to at least €100,000, or are a shareholder in a family company with ties to this history.

What You Will Gain From The Hour Before Dawn

A supportive and confidential learning container to honestly confront your family's connection to fascism and/or colonialism

• A library of diverse resources and a strong political framework for understanding the context of history and this present moment

• A community of peers with shared values and experiences

• Tools for researching the history of your family and your money

• Tools, practice, and support for family conversations about your family history — including difficult ones — and strategies for organizing your family into your action steps

• Action steps you can take to offer healing to your lineage and to those your family caused harm to

• Practices and skills to navigate emotions from guilt, shame, and hiding toward grief, truth-telling, empowerment, and action

Our Approach

Our facilitation brings together trauma-informed and somatic methodologies, ancestral healing practices, over a decade of experience in wealth coaching and philanthropic planning, and deep expertise in historical research and archival work. These aren't separate tracks — they're woven together because the work itself demands it: building a giving plan requires confronting the emotions underneath, and moving through grief connects us to a concrete path forward.

Topics We Cover

• Family history research and archival methods

• Navigating shame, guilt, and family silence

• Collective and transgenerational trauma

• Reparative giving and philanthropic planning

• The roots of fascism and the connection between colonialism and National Socialism

• Researching war-related profits

• How to talk to your family — and how to organize them

• Your relationship with money and inherited wealth

• Antisemitism: its history, its forms, and how it's instrumentalized today

• The destruction of Jewish life in Europe and its lasting consequences

• Commemoration meets dialogical art and social sculpture

• Antifascist investing

• Using wealth, class privilege, and one’s story to fight fascism today

What our Participants Say

"I am really impressed how the overall curriculum fit together — many initial topics immensely helped to understand later topics. There was a really good balance of getting contextual input, talking about action steps, and processing the connected emotions. I really appreciated finding community to tackle these difficult topics." — Simon

"I gained important context on how my ancestors' choices created harm during the NS Regime and how I financially benefited from them. All of that has been instructive when thinking about how to resist fascism today." – RENée

"My experience at the HBD program was very emotional, eye-opening, challenging and visionary. HBD has created a safe and honest environment, allowing you to dare to look closely and collectively move through emotions and reflections of shame, guilt, (self-)denial, discomfort, responsibility, confusion and imperfection. You managed to weave history, presence and future masterfully together — setting up a rhythm that was well integratable into our daily lives and didn't feel like pressure, instead made us truly become intrinsically motivated, invested and inspired as a group." — Caro

"It is the first time for me to be in a group with the combination of our social background, which we didn't choose, the interest in social justice, and the willingness to look at things that are uncomfortable in order to do something about them. It was what I was hoping for when I joined, but it felt a bit utopian at the time." — Anonymous

Frequently Asked Questions

What language is the programme in? The programme is conducted in English.

What if my family doesn't know I'm doing this? Many participants are in exactly this situation. All application information and communications are strictly confidential. The programme is designed to support you in navigating family dynamics at your own pace — including deciding if, when, and how to involve family members. You will never be pressured to disclose your participation to anyone.

Do I need to have started researching my family history already? No. Some participants arrive having done extensive research; others have never looked into it at all. The programme includes tools, guidance, and archival support to help you begin — or deepen — your research from wherever you are.

Is this therapy? No. While the programme is trauma-informed and includes emotional support, it is not a substitute for therapy. We provide referrals to a network of vetted German-speaking therapists and coaches, and we encourage participants to have therapeutic support alongside the programme if needed.