Monday, October 25, 1999
Center for Holocaust Education is planned
Hebrew Union, survivors, kin combine efforts
BY JULIE IRWIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Center for Holocaust Education, designed to teach elementary school students and graduate-level scholars alike about the horrors of the Nazi era, will open at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion as early as next year.
The center is a joint effort between the college and Combined Generations of the Holocaust, a group of local Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, Hebrew Union's president, will announce the creation of the center at a Nov. 7 dinner where Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel will speak.
The center's creation comes at a time when eyewitnesses to the Holocaust are dying rapidly, and their descendants and others are searching for ways to keep the genocide's memory alive. At the same time, interest in the Holocaust is at an all-time high. Books, movies and art exhibits on the topic crowd the cultural scene, and local schools, churches and community groups regularly host related programs and speakers.
“Both my parents are Holocaust survivors. As children, we have been looking both for ways to pay tribute to our parents and find ways to make the legacy of the Holocaust meaningful for contemporary society,” said Jeff Seibert, who is treasurer of Combined Generations of the Holocaust.
“Cincinnati and HUC will become a destination for Holocaust researchers, politicians and community leaders who see the value in Holocaust education in their own communities and what they are doing, whether it's training rabbis or confronting the distribution of hate literature in places like Anderson (Township).”
Organizers have raised about $675,000 toward the center so far and hope to endow its work with an additional $3.2 million. They will launch a search for a director at the beginning of 2000 and anticipate the center will be open by the 2000-2001 academic year, which coincides with HUC-JIR's 125th anniversary.
Mr. Wiesel, whose books on the Holocaust are required reading in many schools, will speak at a tribute dinner sponsored by the Cincinnati Associates of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. The dinner will honor Richard Weiland, the Cincinnati lobbyist who has raised much of the center's funding so far.
“If we do this right,” Mr. Weiland said, “we will be a central force in letting people know what happened, so it doesn't happen again.”
The center will combine the resources of Hebrew Union College — with one of the world's largest collections of library holdings and archive material on modern Jewish history and the Holocaust — with the community outreach that Combined Generations has sponsored for years. It will instruct junior high and high school teachers on how to teach about the Holo caust, provide fellowships for visiting scholars, create a speakers' bureau and resource bank, train graduate and seminary students, and preserve Holocaust-related research materials.
The breadth of the center's planned programs is unusual. Although many schools have established Holocaust studies programs in recent years, and the Association of Holocaust Organizations lists 162 members, the Center for Holocaust Education will be one of only a handful to offer graduate-level classes and research.
“If (the center) had not been at the college, it would have been at a museum, and a museum depicts something static,” said Arthur Grant, vice president for administration and finance at the college. “Being at the college, it takes on a life of its own with different teachers and different student bodies throughout the years.”
In addition to HUC-JIR's resources, the history of the college is well-suited to the creation of a Holocaust center. Its 19th-century founders were all German-born, and for the first third of this century its leaders were mostly the descendants of German Jews. With the rise of Nazism, the college brought German-Jewish scholars to Cincinnati and hired others who had escaped on their own — among them philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel.
While Hebrew Union's resources and history play an important role in the proposed center, the Combined Generations of the Holocaust is its emotional core. The group began in the 1960s as Jewish Survivors from Nazism, a social and support group for survivors living in Cincinnati. The parents of Blue Ash real estate devel oper Sam Knobler were among them.
“Basically these people came here penniless, homeless, stateless. They arrived here and started getting together for holidays and social occasions as they rebuilt their lives. They had children and raised them here in Cincinnati,” Mr. Knobler said.
Members also spoke in public schools and to community groups, and the organization evolved into Combined Generations of the Holocaust. The organization's purpose was to promote understanding of the Holocaust and to sponsor outreach and education programs.
One result was Because They Were Jews, a 1995 documentary that featured local survivors' testimonies and was distributed nationally. Combined Generations also established Teaching the Holocaust, a program that has trained 30 local teachers a year for four years in Holocaust education. The courses end with a trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
The success of Combined Generations' programs began to tax the all-volunteer organization. A few years ago leaders began talking about a center and eventually approached Hebrew Union with a proposal.
“We (wanted) a full-time professional staff that can do this thing justice because we cannot, and if we just stopped there would be a void in our community,” Mr. Knobler said. “We're not just interested in teaching ourselves and our children. We're interested in reaching out to the world around us, and I think HUC is eminently qualified to get this information out to the world. It's pretty much the only logical place to have it.”
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