Office for Diversity and Inclusion | The Stern Showcase

In Jewish tradition, babies are given Hebrew names that honor someone who has already passed as a way to carry on their legacy. My Hebrew name is דרח אילנח or Dara Elana. I'm named after my maternal great-grandfather Aladar and my paternal great-uncle Edwin. Edwin was my grandfather's identical twin brother and quite literally an extension of himself. Aladar was born and lived in Vac, Hungary, where he died before World War II and was buried in the local Jewish cemetery in town. I went to this small town with my brother and we visited his grave. My brother asked if Aladar ever could have imagined his great-grandkids coming from America to visit him. I said, I don't think he had any reason to believe his great-grandkids wouldn't still be living in Hungary. Because he died before the Holocaust, he could have never imagined the way history unfolded for Jews in Europe.

I am a communications professional currently working for the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business and a part-time MBA student. I also serve on the board of 3GNY, a nonprofit organization made up of third generation descendents of survivors dedicated to Holocaust education. We train 3Gs to tell their family story and send them into schools across the country to teach the perils of intolerance and relate it to hatred in our world today. I am also a proud dog mom and Jeopardy fanatic. I am extremely fortunate to have a very close, very loud family that I love deeply. We are as normal as a crazy Jewish family can be. Despite living all over the country (and in some cases the world), we all make it back together for holidays. I think my entire family feels the weight of our grandparents' experience and are bound to our faith because of it. Not that we all practice in the same way, but we all feel it as a significant part of our identity. Even my dad's side of the family that does not have a direct link has taken our story as their own. 

Fun story-- we found some long lost cousins a few years ago who live in Israel and Australia through a geneology site. We asked my grandmother if the last name meant anything to her and she said yes of course, they were with us in Auschwitz. We had never heard of them before, but were able to meet when they came to New York and now have a relationship with them! While my grandmother came to America after the war, theirs moved to Australia and Israel. While exile is a horrible reality for Jews, it's pretty cool to find Jewish communities and connections all over the world.

I've been doing this work for a long time, but being asked to participate in an article for Teen Vogue was an incredible mainstream platform to reach young, curious, motivated individuals of the next generation with my grandmother's story. In Jewish mysticism, your soul remains alive until the last person who knows your story has died. It is my mission to ensure my grandmother is never gone in this sense, and this was a huge opportunity to contribute to that goal. More importantly, my great aunt who is 94 had a remarkable experience. Everyone involved from the hair and makeup artists, the photographer, writer, and the caterer were doting on her, listening carefully to her, asking her questions, and making her feel like the most important person in the room. At the end of the day, she said she just couldn't believe all of these young people cared so much to hear her story. It was worth it just for that.The most poignant moment in the interview was when my great aunt said she watches horrible things on the news and then sees me trying to change the world, and how much that means to her. 

I love Stern because while you are surrounded by world-renowned experts in many fields, everyone is still on a mission to seek knowledge and learn from each other. The enthusiasm around listening to our colleagues and learning something new is palpable. Even as a university, the culture of education is not top down, but a holistic part of working together as a community.I would focus on justice. I'm a words person, and there is a deep importance of having different words for equity and equality, for each letter in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, for race and ethnicity, etc. But I feel that justice is an inclusive concept with universal connotations. It takes into account, rather than dismisses our differences, and asserts fairness or restitution.