Learning Tolerance in a Personal Way

Jack Pariser, who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland by hiding for two years with his parents and sister in a hole in the ground no bigger than a small car, spent Friday telling students at La Quinta High School what it was like to have his life threatened because he is a Jew.

“I couldn’t be on the same side of the street as a German,” without threat of injury because “a Jew was worth nothing,” said Pariser, 66, who now lives in Laguna Beach.

His dramatic account of a six-year struggle to stay alive was part of a daylong symposium at the high school aimed at promoting tolerance of differences in race, ethnicity and lifestyles.

The symposium, sponsored by the school’s Ethnic Relations Council, comes on the heels of a near-fatal stabbing of a Native American man in Huntington Beach that detectives said appeared to be motivated by the attacker’s white supremacist beliefs, and two other recent fatal stabbings where police say race also might have played a role.

The attacks shocked and disgusted many students at La Quinta and prompted one student to join the Ethnic Relations club, which planned Friday’s program to get students talking to each other about their differences.

Students spoke with a married couple from Gardena--she’s African American, he’s white--who work to combat racial prejudice, a man living with AIDS, a hate crime expert and a dozen other speakers who shared the idea that with a little more understanding and compassion everyone could get along.

“It’s meant to reduce tensions and increase awareness,” said Jamie Hamamura, 16, president of the club. “It helps open students’ minds.”

“It cleared up some mental blockage,” said club member Germaine Delgado, 18, of Westminster. Delgado and classmate Sun Dinh, 18, said the firsthand accounts of living with AIDS and surviving the Holocaust made a more powerful impression than anything else they had heard about the subjects.