BARBARA G. APPELBAUM
Working with Rabbi Kilimnick as its founding chairman, Barbara served as the first Director of the Center for Holocaust Awareness and Information (CHAI) at the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester. She created an oral history archive, trained teachers and hosted annual inter school conferences. Her speakers’ program brought dozens of survivors, rescuers and liberators into junior and senior high schools and college classrooms. Over 100,000 area students heard eye witness testimony through this initiative.
An interviewer for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual Documentation Project, Barbara oversaw the videotaping of local area survivors. She was a founding member of the Courage to Care Project, which launched an Instructional Strategies and Resource Guide offering role models of people who exemplify courage and caring. Working with the Urban League of Rochester and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Education Commission, she helped develop and administer Building Bridges of Harmony, a student essay contest fostering cross-cultural understanding.
Barbara co-edited Perilous Journeys: Personal Stories of German and Austrian Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and oversaw its development into a web book with film clips of survivors. She co-authored Angie’s Story, the memoir of Anna Suss Paull. As a member of the Consortium of Holocaust Educators, she published a chapter in its publication The Call of Memory: Learning about the Holocaust through Narrative.
Barbara received the Educator of the Year Award from the local chapter of Phi Kappa Delta, a national educational honor society, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award from Nazareth College. A graduate of Barnard College, Barbara received her Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. She taught English at the secondary school level and served on the adjunct faculties of MCC and Nazareth College where she taught in the Education Department and supervised student teachers.
Since her retirement in December 2006, Barbara continues as an active volunteer at CHAI. She assists survivors and their families in writing and filming their stories. She is a member of the steering committees of the Brennan Goldman Institute for Catholic-Jewish Studies and Dialogue and the 2000 Year Road to the Holocaust Interfaith Course.
Her family established the Barbara G. Appelbaum Holocaust Educator Award at CHAI in her honor which each year selects an outstanding high school or college educator to attend the International Seminar in Teaching the Holocaust at Yad Vashem in Israel. To date three educators have completed the program.
Barbara and her husband Dr. E. David Appelbaum live in Canandaigua, New York. They have a son. two daughters, and eight grandchildren.
