User:Nigetastic/Theodore Zev Weiss

Theodore Zev Weiss (September 12, 1931 - November 25, 2020) was a Holocaust survivor who captured Holocaust survivor testimonies on film and video, an effort that eventually evolved into the Holocaust Education Foundation, which provides teacher training and creates curricula and learning materials related to the Holocaust.

Early Life
Weiss was born in Hungary in 1931 in a traditional Jewish family. In June 1944, at the age of 12 (?? the math doesn't add up here... he was born in '31 so he would have been 14 in June '44, right?), Weiss was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp along with this parents, an older brother, and a younger sister. Weiss was assigned to a work crew of adolescents and was the only member of his immediate family to survive. He was liberated by American forces at Gunskirchen, Austria, on May 8, 1945. He recounted that a Quaker soldier saved his life by compelling a German doctor at gun point to give Weiss medical treatment. Weiss attempted to emigrate to Palestine, was turned back at Haifa by British authorities, and returned to Europe. In 1947, he traveled to Montreal, Canada where enrolled at McGill University and the Hebrew Teachers Seminary. In 1956, Zev moved to the Rochester, New York area and began teaching at a synagogue school, a line of work that would take him from the East Coast to the Midwest and eventually to Wilmette, Illinois in 1971. For 22 years, he would serve as the Education Director at the Beth Hillel Academy in Wilmette.

In his personal life, Zev had met and married the love of his life, Alice, an assistant professor at the State University of New York in Albany in 1962 and they began a partnership that endured for almost six decades.

Career
Weiss founded HEF in 1976 to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. In 1988, HEF provided funding to establish a course at Northwestern University called The History of the Holocaust, and thereafter HEF's mission evolved into the development of Holocaust-related teaching materials. Weiss perceived that, while many states, like Illinois, mandate instruction in the Holocaust, "the state doesn't prepare teachers to teach. This is a very difficult subject, and not having the tools, the teachers are sort of at a loss." On July 9th, 2013 the HEF was integrated into Northwestern University. The HEF donated $1 million to Northwestern University and pledged to donate another $5 million to endow the program permanently.