Chapman Creates Holocaust Chair

Chapman University’s growing reputation as a center for Holocaust research, teaching and outreach has attracted a financial gift that ensures its efforts will not only continue but can accelerate.

The private university in Orange has received a seven-figure gift from Ralph and Sue Stern of Tustin to endow a permanent chair in Holocaust education. The chair will be awarded to Marilyn Harran, founding director of the university’s Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education.

Stern is CEO of CareCredit, an Anaheim-based health-care consumer-finance company. He and his wife are active in a number of local charitable organizations.

The university would not reveal the exact amount of the Sterns’ gift, but past endowments for chairs have been from $1 million to $3 million.

“What the endowment means is this position, which will be devoted to teaching about the Holocaust and developing a resource center for Holocaust education in Orange County, is now a commitment and will always be done at Chapman,” said Harran, 52, a professor of religious studies and history.

Since 1994, Harran has, with the support of Chapman President James L. Doti, developed the university’s emphasis on Holocaust education. It now includes two courses, two public lecture series, a Holocaust essay contest for middle school and high school students and Holocaust Remembrance Day on campus.

Harran is passionate about Holocaust education and outreach, particularly to schools. For her efforts, Harran received the “Teacher of the Holocaust Award” this year from The “1939” Club, a Los Angeles-based Holocaust survivor organization.

Doti said Harran deserved appointment to the new chair. “She personally has guided our efforts in making Chapman a leading center for Holocaust education and research,” he said.

And, Doti said, it is an honor having Stern’s name associated with Chapman.

Ralph Stern is active in Project No-Gangs and Drug Use Is Life Abuse. He was president of the Jewish Community Foundation of Orange County and co-chairs the capital campaign for Congregation B’nai Israel in Tustin.

Sue Stern was president of the Children’s Home Society and a board member of South Coast Repertory Theatre.

The couple has made donations to Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School in Irvine and Morasha School, another Jewish day school in Rancho Santa Margarita.

Stern became aware of Chapman’s commitment to Holocaust education last October when Harran was guest speaker at a board meeting of the Jewish Community Foundation of Orange County.

Although Stern, 56, has no firsthand memories of the Holocaust--he was born in South Africa where his German-born parents fled in 1935--an uncle and his family perished in Sobibor death camp in Poland.

That, Stern acknowledged, had something to do with his interest in Chapman’s Holocaust education program.

“But another aspect that interested me was the fact that I got the feeling that so much of Holocaust education is directed toward Jewish people, and here I saw a program at Chapman University, a non-Jewish institution with a person as dedicated as Dr. Harran teaching the program. And I thought this is a wonderful opportunity to really promote the education of the Holocaust.”

Harran, who is not Jewish, was hired as an associate professor of religion at Chapman in 1985 and first addressed the Holocaust as part of the university’s freshman seminar program in 1987.

She began teaching a course on the subject six years ago and now offers two: a fall course that surveys the Holocaust and its roots, and a spring course covering several Holocaust topics.

The theme for the two Holocaust lecture series this year is “Voices Across Time: The Children of the Holocaust.” The first lecture, by Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kurt Klein, authors of “The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War’s Aftermath,” will be presented on campus Sept. 14. (For details, call [714] 628-7377).

This year, Harran inaugurated a Holocaust essay contest in which 47 high schools and middle schools in Orange County and three in Los Angeles County participated. She hopes to expand the contest throughout Southern California.

Harran also was a contributor to “The Holocaust Chronicles: A History in Words and Pictures,” published last spring by Publications International.

At about the same time, Barry and Phyllis Rodgers of Santa Ana made a gift to Chapman’s Holocaust Education Center that supports its educational outreach.

One of Harran’s goals is to develop a site on campus that would serve as a meeting place for survivors, Chapman students and others “interested in learning about and discussing the Holocaust and working together to shape a future where the words ‘Never again’ will become a reality.”