Leon Ullman, seated left, with his brother, Hank, Stockton University faculty, staff and students who worked on the exhibit, and some items from the exhibit.
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP – The story of non-Jewish families who risked their lives to protect a Jewish child and his family during the Holocaust in Amsterdam will be memorialized at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 28 with the dedication of a new room and exhibit at the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton University.
The room was funded by a generous donation by Katherine M. and Leo S. Ullman of Sands Point, New York, who was taken in as a small child by Hendrik and Jannigje Schimmel, who raised him for 796 days while his family was in hiding. Pieter Hoogenboom, a policeman, his wife, Evertje and son Pieter, later provided the family with false identity papers as non-Jews to protect them from deportation and so they could get food-ration cards.
Pieter Hoogenboom’s granddaughter, Marion van Wesemael-Hoogenboom, her husband Peter, and a granddaughter, Julia Hoogenboom, who all live in Holland, will attend the dedication.
Stockton University will dedicate the Schimmel and Hoogenboom Righteous Remembrance Room in a ceremony at 7 p.m. in the Campus Center Event Room followed by tours of the expansion and exhibit.
A short film about Ullman’s experiences, “There Were Good People Doing Extraordinary Deeds,” will be shown during the ceremony and the existing research room will be also dedicated to Stockton’s longtime Holocaust Resource Center director Gail Hirsch Rosenthal.
The event is free and open to the public.
The Schimmel and Hoogenboom families have been honored by the State of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations, which recognizes non-Jews who put their lives at risk to protect Jews during the Holocaust.
“We invite the public to come hear the story of a boy whose family was saved by the heroic acts of people who put their own lives at risk to help them,” Rosenthal said. “Leo Ullman never forgot the kindness and bravery of those families.”
The new museum-quality exhibit is also unique in that it was developed in-house, using Stockton staff and student interns, who helped research and develop the interactive digital exhibit materials with an eye toward attracting a younger generation.
