Discovering Stockton’s Holocaust Resource Center
By Sean Fawcett
New Year’s is a time when most of us will remember the past with optimism for a bigger, better and brighter future. That being said, every day is New Year’s Day at Stockton University’s Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center.
Opened on October 2, 1990, Stockton’s Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center enlightens students and the public, to develop acceptance of diversity and its protection in a free and democratic society. Its mission is to break down walls to appreciate, and celebrate, people’s differences while acknowledging our commonalities and connections to unify so we can defend all our inalienable rights to exist and pursue personal happiness.
“It’s all about making people aware and sensitive to the rights and needs of others,” said Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center Director Gail Hirsch Rosenthal.
Stockton University’s Holocaust Resource Center is a joint project with The Jewish Federation of Atlantic/Cape May Counties and the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center. Located on the second floor of Stockton’s Richard E. Bjork Library, it consists of an office, conference room and a modernized, multi-function classroom with oral and visual testimonies. It carries books, films, pictures and artifacts documenting the unspeakable events of 80 and 90 years ago that need to be spoken about and never forgotten. The Center works with schools on holocaust and genocide themed projects and hosts field trips and seminars with the aim of strengthening minds to fight prejudice.
In 2017 Yad Vashem of The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem chose Stockton to host its first off-campus, two-day, teacher seminar in the U.S.
“Holocaust and Genocide education is more important than ever,” said Rosenthal. “There is bullying and prejudice and all sorts of injustices happening all over the world, even now.”
Reminders of the World War II Holocaust, which took the lives of more than 10 million people including Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, prisoners of war, the physically and mentally challenged, are ever present in Stockton’s roomy HRC lecture space. The walls of the Exedra, or Atrium, display the names of victims and activists like Anne Frank, Miep Gies, and author and political activist Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald and the Nobel Peace Prize winning writer of his unforgettable memoir Night. Humanitarians like Helen Keller, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso and Apartheid prisoner, hero and South African president, Nelson Mandela, and writers and scientists like Albert Einstein, Marc Chagall, Sir Isaac Newton and rabbi Moses Maimonides are also displayed.
Architect Martin Blumberg, AIA, PE, PP constructed The Center’s entrance using early 1900s era railroad tracks with wooden doors and walls. They looked aged like wartime railroad cars to symbolize the trains and tracks which shipped millions to slave labor camps.
The Center is where Stockton’s students, and children and adults of all ages, can come to learn about people who, bravely, stood up to the Nazis and their collaborators to hide friends, and even strangers, or helped people escape, or helped people trapped in the camps and the ghettos, or who tried, and sometimes died trying, to tell the world what was happening. The Center’s goal is to help as many people as they can to want to be, and become, positive agents to help everybody they can to respect, and defend, everybody else.
“We talk about ‘The Power of One’ a lot,” said Rosenthal. “One person can make a difference. It is so important for people to know that because it matters. Everyone matters.”
