Toronto, Canada – 79-year-old Holocaust survivor has donated $10 million to rebuild and renovate the Holocaust education centre in Toronto.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Michael (Chaim) Neuberger turned the ground on Monday for the new centre. It is being built on a 27.5-acre site at Bathurst and Sheppard as part of the new National Centre for Jewish Heritage, a campus of buildings that will house a number of community services.
Neuberger, a Polish Jew, lost his parents, four brothers and a sister in the Holocaust. Another family hid him during the Second World War and he survived.
He came to Canada in 1948 while still a teenager and created a building business in Toronto.
The education centre will be called the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, after Neuberger and his late wife.
The centre, created in 1985, currently is visited by about 60,000 people at year. It is housed in the Lipa Green Building for Jewish Community Services, which is also to be renovated and upgraded.
Students of all faiths go on field trips to the centre and it offers programs at schools across Ontario to teach the lessons of the Holocaust and allow students to meet survivors.
The new education centre will be much larger, with more high-tech and interactive exhibits.
“Educating people of all faiths about the Holocaust is so important to me,” Neuberger said in a statement prepared by the UJA Federation.
“We want to build this centre so that all people, of all ages and all nationalities, will learn the truth, and learn from the lessons of the past.”
The centre will also provide outreach and anti-racism training programs for community organizations.
Construction on the campus is expected to be completed by 2011.
Better he should build a yeshiva.
imho..he didnt ask u what he should build, and maybe he did that already. this is very important now, wake up rabbi. smell the hatred and the deniers. its all around you
American Rabbi should do some research into this man and his previous tzedoko before disparaging him. The current generation of American Orthodox Jews, and I include all segments, not only knows very little about what happened to their grandparents and great grandparents during the Holocaust, but actually couldn’t care less. The average non jewish student taking a course in high school or college knows more. That’s a churban norah. Yiddishkeit is all about mesorah and this is an important part of mesorah.
wow american rabbi has got it go lecture to him tell him he did the worng thing for donating money to raise awareness to the sleeping giant HATRED torwards the JEW no where in the torah does it say that you have to donate to a yeshiva first and then to kiddush hashem after all thats what it will be showing there, how the jews lived past all of it and rebuilt and are prospering and teach tollerence and maybe a few un affiliated jews who might go thre will come to religion from it is that not good enough.
For the record:
Mike does donate to many yeshivas. Mike has built shuls in Israel and supports Jewish causes across the spectrum both at home and in Israel.