DENVER (KDVR) — A University of Denver educator is sharing more about one of the victims in Sunday’s attack in Boulder of Israeli hostage supporters, a Holocaust survivor.
Barbara Bandler Steinmetz, in her 80s, is one of the now 15 victims injured in Sunday’s attack in which a man is alleged to have firebombed a group from Run for Their Lives demonstrating peacefully advocating for the release of the hostages in Gaza.
Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at DU, Adam Rovner, spoke with FOX31’s Carly Moore and said he personally knows Steinmetz and actually uses her story to educate students about the Holocaust.
She is featured on their website, Survival & Witness.
Rovner said he called Steinmetz after hearing about the attack, knowing she would be at the demonstration, and she was on her way to the hospital.
“So, she was obviously very flustered, but was also extremely lucid. We’re talking about a woman in her, you know, late 80s,” Rovner said. “Her main response was not fear, but anger, anger that we’ve reached this stage in American discourse where people can violently attack others merely because they have a different view.”
He said Barbara and her family fled antisemitism in Hungary and jumped from country to country, until eventually ending up in Boulder in 2005.
He calls her a passionate advocate for immigration and education.
“She’s a very humane, understanding person of other people’s perspectives, and the fact that she was firebombed by an idealistic, self-righteous lunatic is, obviously, very upsetting,” said Rovner. “So, she is an interfaith, multilingual, and cosmopolitan, lovely woman, and I can’t think of anyone who deserved this less.”
Rovner said now is not the time to hide who you are, he encourages people to continue to stand up for what they believe, though he said he is grief-stricken by the attack.
“As an academic, I can tell you that what we’re doing is we are raising money to hire an endowed chair in Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies. I think that it’s very important to reframe Holocaust education,” Rovner said. “So, we need to take a new tack and the approach that is leading the innovation in education now is to go back and look at the history of antisemitism, look at contemporary antisemitism, and try to explain contemporary manifestations and historical lead ups to the Holocaust, to try to connect what happened then and there with here and now.”
