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Auschwitz railcar finds new home on expanding Jewish trade campus

The 90-foot wooden train car that made its way earlier this month to a dusty hillside in Granada Hills once shipped entire communities of Jews from Warsaw to their inglorious end at Auschwitz.
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June 22, 2016

The 90-foot wooden train car that made its way earlier this month to a dusty hillside in Granada Hills once shipped entire communities of Jews from Warsaw to their inglorious end at Auschwitz. 

But in its new home on the campus of the Jewish Educational Trade School (JETS), it serves a very different purpose: to help inspire the Jewish youth who attend the vocational academy. A June 5 dedication ceremony unveiled the memorial and helped raise funds for a 300-bed expansion project at the live-in trade school, set to break ground in the next two months.

“These walls recorded the cry of our brothers and sisters,” said Toni Luskin, a professor at the school, speaking to a crowd of 500 in the school’s courtyard before black curtains were pulled aside to reveal the railcar. She called JETS a “symbolic repudiation of the Third Reich” for the part it plays in training Jewish tradesmen. 

The school’s purpose is to take young men, mostly yeshiva dropouts or alumni with troubled backgrounds or disciplinary histories, and prepare them to take up a trade. It trains Orthodox youth to be everything from emergency medical technicians to plumbers and programmers. 

The railcar takes its place as the school prepares to erect three new buildings that will increase its square footage more than fivefold, from 18,000 to 100,000 square feet, according to JETS founder and director Rabbi Mayer Schmukler, who started the school in 2005 with seven students.

He said the new buildings would include “all kinds of shops,” including electrical, HVAC, refrigeration and plumbing, as well as a film production wing that includes a movie theater and a state-of-the-art kosher kitchen. It also will add space for 303 people in dormitory facilities that more than triple the occupancy of the current, 82-bed campus.

A digital image of one of the new buildings planned at the JETS campus. Image courtesy of JETS

The former Chabad rabbi operates on the principle that many Jewish youth are not cut out to be lawyers and doctors, and the best thing for those youngsters is to learn a trade while maintaining their connection to Torah scholarship. He’s confident the new buildings are only the first whiff of a boom in Jewish vocational education.

“In 10 years, we’re going to have 50 schools like this throughout the world,” he said in a phone call with the Journal. “We’re revolutionizing Jewish education.”

After the unveiling of the railcar, a tearful affair, guests headed into a tent on the site of one of the future buildings, where the mood immediately flipped as a klezmer band took the stage to play songs from “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Speaking to the black-tie crowd at dinner, Schmukler said the school would integrate the Holocaust memorial into its educational mission by using it as a meditative space where students can go to gain a sense of perspective. He said it had already had the desired effect with one JETS student who had arrived only recently and still persisted in blaming his parents and society for his problems.

“He walked in that train and he got a kick in the pants,” Schmukler said. “He got a lesson in life that changed him.”

The car not only commemorates Jewish blood spilled in Europe, but also stands on the site of the former North Valley Jewish Community Center (JCC) where, on Aug. 10, 1999, a white supremacist opened fire and wounded five. 

Speaking at the unveiling, Los Angeles City Councilman Mitchell Englander, who represents the northwest San Fernando Valley, said he “grew up at JCCs” and considered the JETS campus “holy ground.” He said that as the chief of staff for former Councilman Greg Smith, who represented the district, he fought to make sure the JCC building remained in Jewish hands rather than being torn down and replaced with residential units, as one developer had suggested.

Yet the site was not the first or even the second choice to house the train. Stanley Black, the wealthy real estate developer who paid for and procured the railcar — the last such car in the care of the Polish government, according to Luskin — told the unlikely story of its arrival to the audience at the unveiling.

The developer said that after seeing a Nazi cattle car on display in Mexico City, he felt he had to bring a similar memorial to Los Angeles. When he located a suitable train car, he began to make arrangements for its arrival with the help of fellow L.A. developer Severyn Ashkenazy, who has close ties with the Polish Jewish community.

By Luskin’s telling, the Polish government agreed to part with the train car after “intense negotiations and a significant outlay of funds” furnished by Black.

Before long, the train was on a cargo ship headed through the Panama Canal from Poland to California. Now, Black had a new problem: where to put 90-feet of metal and decaying wood.

At first, he called Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Museum of Tolerance on Pico Boulevard, to see if there was room there. There wasn’t.

“The boat’s still coming through the Panama Canal,” Black said. “I gotta think of something else.”

He tried to involve Hillel at UCLA and the USC Shoah Foundation. No luck.

“Now it’s past the Panama Canal,” he said. “It’s coming fast.”

Finally, he got in touch with Schmukler, who happily offered a spot on the sunny, nine-acre campus. The car came ashore at San Pedro, south of downtown L.A., and proceeded to the JETS campus.

“It ended up coming here for a special reason — because we’re going to take it and make it alive,” Schmukler said at the fundraising dinner.

Black is a major donor to the JETS expansion project, and one of the buildings will be named for him and his late wife, Joyce. Schmukler declined to say how much the school had raised or intended to raise for the construction project. 

But at the fundraiser, Max Webb, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor and real estate developer, pledged to donate $500,000. Another donor, inventor Maurice Kanbar, who had promised to donate $1 million in 10 percent installments, said he had decided instead to write a single $1 million check after being moved by the railcar dedication.

Kanbar wasn’t the only one moved by the event. After climbing a wooden platform to peek into the darkened interior of the railcar, which was adorned with a mezuzah and a memorial lamp, Rita Korn wiped away tears while recounting her father’s journey aboard a similar train to Auschwitz. She said putting her hands on a Nazi cattle car is, in a strange way, “almost like touching my parents.”

“Right now, it hurts,” she said. “I don’t know why. It’s been so long.”

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