Opinion
OTHER VIEWS
WMU Hillel: Kicked To The Street?
Kalamazoo
J
ews in Kalamazoo? Couldn't be,
but ifs true and soon the Western
Michigan University Hillel will
find itself with no place to call home. WMU
Hillel has had an apartment off campus
that will no longer exist as of this fall. There
is reason to be concerned because the
Jewish students at WMU are growing in
numbers and leadership strength.
The Good
Western Michigan University over the past
decade has seen an increase of Jewish stu-
dents enroll at the university, many hailing
from Metro Detroit. In the 1990s, there were
a couple hundred Jewish students on cam-
pus. Today, the Jewish student community
is approaching 1,000. With this developing
Jewish community on campus, Hillel at
WMU has seen an increase in involvement
that is unprecedented.
This past semester, Shabbat dinners
attracted so many students that the Hillel
apartment quickly filled, leaving standing-
room-only, with more than 35 students in
attendance. Hillel has become a place to see
old friends and make new ones. Ifs about
creating a community for Jewish students
all their own — like a home away from
home.
"I did not know what to expect, but it felt
very familiar," said Amit Harris,
a sophomore next fall. "Through
Hillel, I have gained a lot of
Jewish friends and a sense of
involvement on campus, toe
Hill& activity is broad. This
past year, WMU Hillel brought
the documentary film Paper
Clips to campus. We hosted
two screenings of the film and
attracted more than 100 students
and community members to the
event.
Hillel is represented in the
Western Student Association. And we par-
ticipated in the International Festival, serv-
ing Israeli food to thousands of attendees.
We also collaborated with other student
organizations to bring to campus OneVoice,
an organization that works to end the
Israeli- Palestinian conflict.
This excitement has passed down to the
incoming students. During the month of
June, Hillel set up a booth during freshman
orientation and signed up dozens of new
students who want to be part of Hillel in
the fall.
With the momentum rolling this win-
ter, we plan to send the first group of
Western Michigan University students on
a Birthright trip to Israel. This means not
only will the individuals experience the
opportunity of a lifetime, but they also will
do it together with people they
will be in class with when they
return. We can only imagine
what kind of further growth
in the community this will
develop.
The Bad
This is all very exciting for
WMU Hillel and we expect to
continue to grow. However, this
growth could quickly be stunted
without a place to call home.
With no permanent meeting
spot, we will resort to wandering around
campus from meeting room to meeting
room. We fear the loss of comfort and the
limitations it presents.
The apartment became a comfortable
place that Jewish students could come to
and be welcomed to for the past three years.
Unfortunately, the property management
has changed, is renovating the apartment,
terminating our agreement and increasing
the rent four times the previous rate. Hillel
has a limited budget and simply cannot
afford the higher rent.
This leaves us with no place to go! No
place to store supplies, no place to plan
events and no more hanging out on Friday
night for hours at Hillel, then returning the
next day to enjoy the cholent prepared the
afternoon before.
The Hopeful
The loss of this home could turn into the
something better and we need the greater
community to help make this happen. I am
making the call to the Jewish community
in Michigan and beyond that the Western
Michigan University Hillel needs a place
to call home and we need you to make it
happen.
This is the time to make it happen! The
students are ready for it and have shown it
though their leadership. The community
needs it. WMU students are more likely to
stay in Michigan after graduation when
compared to our counterparts at other
universities. They will, in turn carry on
our Jewish traditions as they take root in
Michigan to start their new careers and
families.
If you or someone you know would like
to help create a new home for the WMU
Hillel, please contact us through e-mail at
kazoohillel@yahoo.com or visit our Web
site at www.wmuhillel.com to learn more
about our organization. El
Jay Pliskow from Huntington Woods is the stu-
dent chair of WMU Hillel. He is a senior majoring
in mechanical engineering.
My Experience At Bad Arolsen
East Lansing
I
was among 15 scholars from around
the world who were sponsored by
the Center for Advanced Holocaust
Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum and who gathered at the Red
Cross International Tracing Services (ITS)
archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, in late
June. It was a gratifying experience.
This archive created from Nazi Germany
camp records and other materials found
by the Allies after World War II was for-
merly a tracing service for information
on individuals open only to requests from
survivors and their families. By interna-
tional agreement today, it is transforming
itself into an historical archive while many
holdings are being distributed in digitized
form to national institutions in several
countries.
Our purpose was to assess the ITS hold-
ings for future scholarly research possibili-
ties. Our group included senior scholars
and an archivist and also junior scholars
A28 July 10 •
2008
iN
from at least six countries. We
were divided into four teams,
each responsible in 10 days
for combing one of four sec-
tions — concentration camp
records, forced labor records,
displaced.persons records and
ITS administrative records.
Our shared judgment was that
the collection is a gold mine
for research although surely
not all kinds, and scholars will
find many new lines of schol-
arly inquiry opened up by
having access to the materials.
Some persons interested in the
Holocaust may have outsized expectations
concerning the promise of the archive.
ITS holdings include mainly Nazi con-
centration camp records from Germany
and Austria, not from Poland, and mainly
from camps that were liberated by the
American and British armies. Hence
there are few records on the Operation
Reinhard death camps (Belzec, Sobibor,
and Treblinka), and only copies
of records from the former Soviet
Union on Auschwitz. Moreover,
the holdings are unequal even
among the camps in Germany
and Austria. As an example, SS
personnel destroyed the records
at Bergen Belsen, so that camp is
poorly represented.
On the other hand, the records
from Buchenwald, Dachau, and
Mauthausen and from several
other camps and sub-camps
are nearly complete, opening up
some possibilities for compara-
tive research and also huge possibilities
for doing social history in the camps. It is
possible with the records at ITS to follow
persons from particular towns or by par-
ticular categories, say women or children,
deep into the concentration camps, using
transport lists, arrivals lists, block books,
and personal cards It will also now be
possible using Gestapo records and camp
records at ITS to historicize the develop-
ment of the camp system, which began in
the 1930s and grew to new size and func-
tion during the war, and it will be possible
to study better the practices of everyday
persecution in the camps. For survivors
and family members, however, there will
be additional information available mainly
only about those who were selected for
slave labor and sent into the concentration
camp system, not those who were selected
to be sent to the gas chambers.
What Is More
The ITS holdings go far beyond
Holocaust-related holdings, though.
Alongside the Nazi slave labor and con-
centration camp system there existed
a forced labor system involving seven-
eight millions of non-Jewish Europeans.
Scholars probing in limited time found
that the system placed foreign workers
under forced contracts deep into the fabric
of everyday German life. Forced laborers
Arolsen on page A29