By Jacob Kamaras
LA JOLLA, California — Coming on the heels of a major milestone for the school’s Jewish community as well as amid the rising tide of antisemitism on campus and nationwide, International Holocaust Remembrance Day was even more poignant than usual at UCSD this year.
Marking the first large-scale event at the Beverly and Joseph Glickman Hillel Center since its grand opening, Hillel of San Diego on January 27 hosted a Shabbat dinner that honored Holocaust survivor and La Jolla resident Rose Schindler, 92.
As San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria noted in January at the Hillel Center’s grand opening, the new facility is located in a neighborhood that once discriminated against Jews. It opened last month after more than 20 years of legal challenges.
“It’s very symbolic that the first speaker event at the new Hillel Center featured a Holocaust survivor,” Dar Halevy Feldman, the Jewish Agency Israel Fellow at Hillel of San Diego, told San Diego Jewish World.
Rose Schindler’s life story is documented in a memoir titled Two Who Survived: Keeping Hope Alive While Surviving the Holocaust, with the “two” also referring to her late husband, Max. Their son, Ben Schindler, also produced a documentary about their story.
At the Hillel event, which drew more than 150 attendees, Ben noted that his parents were initially silent about their Holocaust survival story for 20 years.
“It took a long time, a long time, for them to recognize that their stories had value with other people — such that they could see that the value was greater than the pain it took for them to tell the story,” he said, CBS8 reported.
In January 2020, San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan presented Rose Schindler with an award naming her as a Community Justice Champion. She has given various talks about her story throughout San Diego County and beyond.
“They would tell me, if they put you in the gas chamber, make sure nobody sees you, get out of the line. And that’s what I did. And then my sisters would do the same thing, because we promised my father that we’re going to stay together,” she said at the January 27 Hillel event, adding, “You cannot imagine how horrible it was. We lived on almost nothing.”
Halevy Feldman — who on behalf of The Jewish Agency for Israel, in partnership with Hillel, is part of an Israel Fellows program that brings dozens of Israeli young adults to college and university campuses around the world to help fulfill those environments’ role as safe spaces for education, tolerance, and diversity — described the importance of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day event in the context of antisemitism on the UCSD campus.
Jewish and pro-Israel students at the school, she said, are confronted with conspiracy theories and tropes such as those that Israelis are white colonialists, that Jews control the global financial system and the media, and that Islam justifies hurting Jews if there is a reason for it.
“There’s always antisemitism on campus, it comes in different shapes…some are trying to disguise it as anti-Zionism. Too often, if you tell someone ‘Shabbat Shalom’ on campus, they’ll yell ‘free Palestine’ at you,” Halevy Feldman said.
She added, “Our students always need staff to be with them for protection reasons. I think it’s super sad that we’re in 2023, and that’s what campus behavior is like.”
But at the Shabbat dinner, Rose Schindler also provided the students with a reassuring message.
“If you have a problem, never give up hope. Okay?” she said. “Everything is going to be fine.”
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Jacob Kamaras is editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World.