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May 14, 2009

Staffer and brother establish fund for Holocaust studies

IMG_5922A new Pitt fund established in memory of a staff member’s father aims to ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust continue to be communicated to future generations of students.

According to Thomas Golightly, senior executive director of development for the School of Arts and Sciences, University Honors College and College of General Studies, 55 endowed funds have been established by 50 current or retired Pitt faculty and staff.

The newest is the Sittsamer Fund for Holocaust Studies. Established by economics department administrator Paula Sittsamer Riemer and her brother, Murray Sittsamer of Farmington Hills, Mich., the gift honors the legacy of their father. A Holocaust survivor, Jack Sittsamer died of cancer Oct. 26, 2008, at the age of 83. The family’s University connections go beyond Riemer’s employment at Pitt. She and her brother both are graduates of the University; their mother, Maxine, worked in Facilities Management.

The fund, to be used at the discretion of the director of Pitt’s Jewish studies program, initially will facilitate bringing Holocaust survivors into classrooms to offer firsthand accounts of their experiences.

Alexander Orbach, Jewish studies program director, remembers Jack Sittsamer as “ready to speak at a moment’s notice about his experience. He was impressive in his presentation to students.”

Through the fund, Orbach said, “Paula and her brother wanted to replicate that as many times as possible.” Given Holocaust survivors’ advancing ages, many no longer drive, Orbach pointed out. Facilitating their presence in the classroom could be as simple as arranging transportation and a driver, he said.

Noting that within a decade or two there will be few, if any, survivors remaining, the fund also may be used to aid students involved in theses or research projects based on the testimony of Holocaust survivors, he said.

Orbach said he hopes to begin utilizing the fund in the coming academic year. He envisions using the fund to reach Pitt students on and beyond the Pittsburgh campus. He plans to distribute information to regional campus faculty to make them aware of the availability of speakers for existing courses, perhaps in history, literature or genocide studies. “If faculty there were aware of the resource, I think we could make a match” with survivors, Orbach said.

 

Although their father said little about his experiences when Riemer and Sittsamer were children, he later began to recount his personal story of internment in Nazi concentration camps.

“There are a lot of Pitt alumni out there who have heard him speak,” Riemer said. She credits Pitt history faculty member Barbara Burstin with prompting her father to tell his story. Riemer said her father and Burstin became dear friends after Burstin interviewed him as part of a 1978 series on local Holocaust survivors she wrote for the Jewish Chronicle. Although Riemer said her father had only spoken about his past “in bits and pieces over the years,” Burstin convinced him to share his story with others.

Murray Sittsamer said he found it somewhat surprising that his father would begin speaking before groups — he wasn’t the type to seek the limelight. Moreover, the emotional impact of the story sent him to the hospital with heart trouble after his first talk. “It’s very fortunate he was brave enough to go do it again,” Riemer said.

He began sharing his story of survival with community groups and students ranging from middle school through college, reaching an estimated 100,000 people over the years.

Burstin said Sittsamer began speaking at Allderdice High School, and later in her classes at Pitt as well as through the Holocaust Center of Greater Pittsburgh’s speakers bureau.

Over the course of some 20 years, Sittsamer addressed thousands in her “U.S. and the Holocaust” class alone, Burstin said.

Students appreciated what it meant to overcome adversity, Burstin said. “One of the things students recognized in his talks was how people go on after incredibly nightmarish scenes and experiences. He saw his father shot in front of his eyes,” she said. “He not only went on with his life, he was able to enjoy life and treasure the good times.”

Burstin said Sittsamer’s humane, caring way was evident in his presentations. “He never hammered, he never yelled, he never said he hated. He said, ‘This is what happened to me and this is what I’m doing now,’” she said.

“He wanted to make a contribution. This was his way. He could talk about his history, as painful as it was. This is what he could do best.”

Murray Sittsamer said his father developed relationships with teachers so that they would be able to have firsthand information from someone who survived the Holocaust — a more powerful resource than from reading or watching a film.

Riemer said he also enjoyed continuing conversations with students who had heard him speak, keeping in touch with some over coffee, for instance.

Active in the local Holocaust Center, Jack Sittsamer had a special affection for the German teens from the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace program, which places German teens in volunteer work at Jewish institutions in America. “He just loved the kids that came,” Riemer said, adding that when her father died, among the many notes of condolence the family received, “We heard from all of them.”

He continued sharing his story even when, last spring, his illness prevented him from coming to Burstin’s classroom to speak. Instead, he invited students to visit in his apartment, Riemer said.

“Telling his story had a cathartic effect,” Riemer said. “It was very emotional information.”

“He drew people in with his story,” she said, recalling the first time she was “brave enough” to sit in on one of her father’s talks. He told his audience of fidgeting middle-schoolers how much his life was like theirs when he was their age. Like them, he played soccer, went to school, did his homework. “Then it all changed,” he told them.

Jack Sittsamer was 17 in March 1942 when Nazi soldiers rounded up his family along with the rest of the Jews in his hometown of Mielec, Poland, and marched them to an airplane hangar outside of town. His father, a World War I veteran with a wounded leg, was among those who were shot when they couldn’t keep up.

Jack Sittsamer was separated from the rest of his family — his mother, two sisters and two brothers — and spent the next years laboring in concentration camps before being liberated on May 5, 1945, by American soldiers. His mother and siblings did not survive.

After several years as a refugee, he came to America in 1949, where he became a sheet metal worker, married and had two children. Riemer recalls how, as an elementary school student, she would study spelling words together with her father, who was learning English and studying for his high school diploma in night classes at Schenley High School.

Murray Sittsamer marveled that he, the younger of the two, was born a mere 14 years after his father had been liberated from the concentration camp.

His father’s presentations went beyond descriptions of his own experiences, Sittsamer said, encompassing the larger lessons of standing up for what is right and eschewing bigotry and hatred.

Although a memorial fund in his honor wasn’t something her father might have envisioned, Riemer said, “As a department administrator, I know that’s a way someone’s name lives on in perpetuity.”

The fund was established through donations from Riemer and Sittsamer and memorial gifts given by family and friends.

“There are so many people whose lives he has touched. We hope that it will continue,” she said. “It’s important that Holocaust education continues.”

In conjunction with their gift to the University, the siblings have requested the opportunity, when possible, to meet with recipients of the funds. “We want to make sure they know about our dad,” Riemer said.

For funds given to support scholars, she said she and her brother want to hear about recipients’ interest in studying the Holocaust. Sittsamer said, “We want the recipients to know the spirit in which it is meant to be used.”

Contributors can direct their gifts to the fund in care of the School of Arts & Sciences, 910 CL.

—Kimberly K. Barlow

 


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