Trustee Emeritus William Cummings (A '58) and his wife, Joyce, recently pledged a challenge gift of $1 million to create a new Holocaust and Genocide Education program through Tufts Hillel, and the Holocaust survivor who partly inspired them to do so will share his experiences at Tufts on Tuesday.
In order to receive the $1 million, Tufts must match the gift with an additional $1 million in new donations and pledges. Hillel and university administrators alike expressed enthusiasm for the new initiative, which will bolster education programming on genocide and the Holocaust.
"Tufts is reaching out to a broad group of alumni, parents, and friends of the university to share the good news of the Cummings gift and to ask them to participate in this challenge," Deputy Director of Development Jo Wellins told the Daily in an e−mail.
"The Tufts community has wholeheartedly embraced the project, and Tufts staff feel confident they can meet the challenge," Wellins said.
The Cummings made the decision to endow the program after they participated in a Tufts Travel−Learn trip to Israel last fall. Travel−Learn is a Tufts University Alumni Association−sponsored program that organizes educational vacations to international locations.
The couple's visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, where they heard the experiences of Holocaust survivor Eliezer Ayalon — an employee of the museum — persuaded them to take action.
"We spent half a day in the museum; it was an unbelievable experience," William Cummings told the Daily. "When we attended a lecture by Eliezer Ayalon, it really capped off the day. We felt as if we just had to do something to make more people aware of genocide in the world."
Ayalon will come to Tufts on Oct. 19 to deliver a lecture on his experiences during the Holocaust.
Cummings, for whom the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine is named, also endowed the Cummings Family Chair in Entrepreneurship and Business Economics and served as an overseer for the School of Medicine.
He approached University President Lawrence Bacow with his new idea for the education initiative, noting that Tufts students would be a receptive and ideal group of participants.
"If you're going to spend a substantial amount of money to try to educate people, it pays to do it for people who are likely to be future leaders," Cummings said. "These are the people we most want to influence."
In selecting Tufts Hillel to administer the initiative, Cummings hopes to prevent it from being overshadowed by other university programs, while allowing the program to benefit from Hillel's existing leadership on raising Holocaust and genocide awareness, Cummings said.
"This program is one that is very manageable for Hillel, but could easily get lost in the larger university," Cummings said. "It's not a big enough program for the university itself to deal with."
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, Tufts Hillel's executive director, said preexisting programming on genocide topics make Hillel a good candidate to administer the new program.
"I think Hillel stood out because we are doing a tremendous amount of Holocaust and genocide education on campus," Summit said. "For example, in 2007, through the Merrin Distinguished Lecture Series program Moral Voices, we brought Nicholas Kristof to Tufts in order to talk about the genocide in Darfur. Hillel has also done a lot of organizing on campus: activism and advocacy to stop the genocide in Darfur."
Hillel in Spring 2009 sponsored an interfaith trip to Berlin that researched the legacy of the Holocaust in Germany, Summit said. For the past two years, Hillel has also sent students to the Agahozo−Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda to examine genocide issues.
Summit expressed excitement at the possibility of expanding these projects with the boost from the Cummings grant.
"With this grant we will bring more speakers to campus, conduct additional trips to Germany and Rwanda and host large−scale educational exhibits on campus," he said. "We want to actively engage students across religious and cultural communities to address issues of genocide, racism, homophobia and anti−Semitism, stressing activism on and off campus. We also hope to fund an annual course that addresses the Holocaust and genocide."
Summit said that while Hillel runs the Holocaust and Genocide Education program, the organization wants to involve the entire Tufts community and not just Jewish students in it.
Hillel has no immediate plans in place for the initiative beyond Ayalon's lecture next week. The organization is currently focusing on raising funds for the Cummings challenge, Summit said.
Senior Lauren Levine, who interns for Tufts Hillel and has worked on the new initiative, said additional programs addressing the Holocaust and genocide would enrich the Tufts academic experience, giving students the know−how to tackle the problem of conflict prevention.
"We are privileged enough to go to Tufts and have a future where we can have an impact and work to prevent all sorts of conflicts from happening," Levine said. "We need to take the time [to] understand them and really look at what's going on around us."
Summit also stressed the importance of renewed educational efforts and their ability to create longer lasting genocide awareness.
"After the Holocaust, in the Jewish community many of us said ‘Never again,' but the fact is that genocide didn't stop, and we have to actively engage with this generation to create an awareness of this issue, as well as the mechanisms for stopping genocide in society," Summit said. "We hope to create students who are sensitized and educated to the point where they can raise an effective moral voice."
