H eadlines
HOF Continued from Page 1
athletes, men and women,
across all sports,” Rosenberg
said. “When you can induct a
Jewish fencer or a Jewish rower
and put the spotlight on these
people ... that’s great for our
city and our region.”
The changes to PJSHOF’s
model will help build a more
permanent and foundational
support for the organization
after its home in the basement
of the Jewish Community
Services Building was flooded
with 7 feet of water on Sept. 4 in
the aftermath of Hurricane Ida.

“We have this one big event,”
Rosenberg said, referring to
PJSHOF’s annual induction.

“And we get a good crowd of
a couple hundred people, but
every year we’re starting over
with a new audience.”
PJSHOF aims to hold
five to eight events around
the community in 2022, in
addition to the induction.

“Rather than have people
come to a museum, the
museum is going to come to
them,” said Carl Cherkin, the
hall’s head of events subcom-
mittee, 2020 PJSHOF inductee
and an Emmy Award-winning
sportscaster. By bringing a speaker, such
12 JANUARY 20, 2022
as Olympian and lacrosse player
Bonnie Rosen, and memora-
bilia, such as Dolph Schayes’
76ers jersey, to a local commu-
nity center, more people would
have the opportunity to learn
more about a sports history
replete with Jewish protago-
nists, but one that is often not
well-known. “There’s a rich athletic culture
emanating from Philadelphia
that so many kids are so into
today,” Cherkin said. “So many
people are in the hero worship
to begin with, they don’t stop to
think they had their own heroes,
their own Maccabees.”
Rosenberg hopes to hold the
first PJSHOF event of the year
in February with an audience
of a couple dozen people
interested in sharing their
experience at the event with
friends and family, who will,
in turn, attend future PJSHOF
events. In hopes of attracting more
traffic to the hall’s website,
Rosenberg hired a new website
developer, who has worked
with Fortune 100 companies,
to improve the website’s search
engine optimization and
marketing, as well as incor-
porate more videos on the
homepage. “We’re going to spend some
money on having a lot more
Retired Sixers announcer Marc
Zumoff (center) hosts last year’s
Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of
Fame induction ceremony on Sept.

29, where both the 2020 and 2021
classes were honored.

Photo by Paul Joslin
video, so that if you click on
any inductee, you’re going
to actually hear from them,”
Rosenberg said.

Instead of finding a new
campus for all of PJSHOF’s
memorabilia, the hall will work
with surrounding organiza-
tions, such as the Kaiserman
JCC, to have a smaller physical
presence in multiple locations.

In its previous locations in
the Jewish Community Services
Building and the Gershman
Y, the hall attracted little foot
traffic, Rosenberg said.

Additionally, the hall’s
memorabilia is unable to be
displayed and is being housed
in a warehouse, where it is
drying off. Most of the objects
were saved and restored after
the flood, but some of the
paper artifacts were perma-
nently damaged.

Because the basement
of the Jewish Community
Services Building was not
covered by insurance, neither
were the damages to the hall’s
memorabilia. PJSHOF
launched a
GoFundMe page in September
to raise money for restoration
JEWISH EXPONENT
Following the Sept. 4 flood of the Jewish Community Services Building
in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, the surviving memorabilia from the
Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame were packed up, restored and
placed in a warehouse.
Courtesy of Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame
of the memorabilia and the
rebuilding of a potential home
for the hall. Through the
GoFundMe, as well as a handful
of philanthropic gifts, including
one from businessman and
Sixers-superfan Alan Horwitz,
PJSHOF raised
$50,000. Estimated costs to fully restore
the memorabilia will cost at least
$70-80,000, Rosenberg said.

While the money was
instrumental in helping the
hall maintain a presence in
Philadelphia, Rosenberg empha-
sized that the organization needs
to become self-sufficient.

“We really have to come up
with some real revenue oppor-
tunities for ourselves and
figure out what the next few
years are going to look like,”
Rosenberg said. l
srogelberg@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0741
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



H eadlines
Survivors Continued from Page 1
counseling and program
manager at KleinLife, which
provides wellness programming
for survivors. “They are very
conscious of the losses in the
community.” Organizations that work
with survivors emphasize the
importance of hearing survi-
vors’ stories as a vital way for
audiences to internalize the
impact of the Holocaust.

“Just using numbers and dates
and having this kind of distilled
history or scientifically historic
understanding of the Holocaust
— it just doesn’t give the appro-
priate weight to what happened
and to the magnitude of a loss
and of the horror that it was,”
said Sophie Don, senior manager
of programs and operations at
the Philadelphia Holocaust
Remembrance Foundation.

Daniel Goldsmith, a Hatboro-
based survivor, didn’t start talking
about his family’s escape from
the Holocaust until he stopped
working and was approached
by the University of Southern
California Shoah Foundation –
The Institute for Visual History
and Education to record the story
of his family’s survival.

Born in Antwerp, Belgium,
and separated from his parents
and younger sister at the height
of the war, Goldsmith, 90, took
refuge in a series of Catholic
homes until he was reunited
with his mother and sister and
later immigrated to the United
States as a teenager.

Though now eager to share
his story with others, Goldsmith
said his mother never shared
his desire to talk about the
Holocaust, not even with her
children. “Many, many Holocaust
survivors cannot talk about the
Holocaust. My mother was one
of those people,” Goldsmith
said. “It took me a very, very
long time to find a little piece
here and a little piece there to put
together what happened to her.”
Goldsmith felt he had
an obligation to a younger
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM generation.

“Once I stopped working, I
started speaking, and I made
myself a promise: I will speak
as long as I live because it’s so
important to tell the story,”
Goldsmith said.

These days, Goldsmith,
similarly to other Holocaust
organizations, is directing his
attention to a younger audience.

Partnering with the Elkins
Park-based Holocaust Awareness
Museum and Education Center
and Fegelson Young Feinberg
Jewish War Veterans Post 697
in Levittown, Goldsmith mostly
speaks to schoolchildren.

“I cannot tell you how many
times the teachers came over
to me and told me they did not
recognize the children because
they were never so quiet and
never so attentive,” Goldsmith
said. Goldsmith remains “cautiously
optimistic” about the next gener-
ation’s ability to remember the
Holocaust and combat everyday
hatred, which he believes was its
catalyst. A grandchild of Holocaust
survivors, Don believes that the
infrastructure to do this within
Holocaust organizations is
already being prioritized.

“We’ve had so much good
development of partnerships
with peer organizations and
with the Philadelphia School
District and with other districts
in the area that are interested
in doing professional develop-
ments with us and having people
join us for programs, whether
in-person or virtually, who are
really there to learn,” Don said.

To address the fewer oppor-
tunities young people may have
to hear from survivors, the
Jewish Federation of Greater
Philadelphia is replacing its
Youth Symposium on the
Holocaust with a pilot live
theater program that will tell the
story of 10 survivors and will be
viewed by students from six area
middle and high schools.

“By adding a live drama
component (in place of a film),
we will enhance the emotional
and educational impact of the
program,” said Beth Razin, Jewish
Federation’s senior manager of
community engagement. “We
feel this is an important change
to make in regard to having a
smaller number of Holocaust
survivors able to participate in
the Youth Symposium on the
Holocaust programs.”
Though COVID is often
a limitation when planning
impactful programming,
increased use of Zoom has proven
an asset for some survivors.

“We’ve seen it as a barrier, but
also an opportunity to connect
with other organizations and to
be invited by other organizations
nationally and internationally, to
unite Holocaust survivors from
all over the world, especially
all over the United States,”
Keselman-Mekler said.

Goldsmith has been able to
conduct more talks to schools,
including one in Florida earlier
this month. He’s been impressed
by the way technology has
made it easier to preserve
stories of the Holocaust. During
a visit to the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, D.C., he saw
holograms of survivors speaking
at length about their experiences.

“It was just as if that person
was there alive,” he said.

Though some organizations,
such as the Holocaust Memorial
The 1964 dedication of Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial
Plaza on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway by the Philadelphia Holocaust
Remembrance Foundation
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation
Museum, have addressed the
dwindling opportunities to
hear from survivors first-hand,
organizations such as 3G, a
collective of grandchildren of
Holocaust survivors, are finding
new ways of passing down their
grandparents’ stories.

Through the organization’s
We Educate program, 3G has
conducted training sessions to
teach third-generation members
to tell their grandparents’ stories
in new and respectful ways, as
well as partnered with schools to
create opportunities for others
to hear the stories of survivors
through the words of their
grandchildren. “Essentially, it is a way to get
into schools and teach students
who may never even have heard
of the Holocaust or who may
never have met a Jewish person
about what took place,” 3G
Philly founder Stacy Seltzer said.

Seltzer understands that
though she will never be able to
tell her grandparents’ stories in
the same way they would, the
deep obligation to share their
stories remains:
“That’s a conversation I’ve had
to have, to say, ‘I’m so fortu-
nate that you’re here. Are you
comfortable with me sharing this
story?’ And my grandmother has
said to me, ‘I can’t do it anymore.

I’m so grateful you are.’” l
srogelberg@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0741
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