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Transcript of roundtable interview with the Holocaust Resource Center: Myra Berkovits, Susan Dubin and Doug Unger, by Barbara Tabach, September 4, 2014

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2014-09-04

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Interview with Myra Berkovits, Susan Dubin and Doug Unger of the Holocaust Resource Center. In this interview, the group discusses the beginnings of what is now the Sperling Kronberg Mack Holocaust Resource Center. Edythe Katz-Yarchever is discussed as the catalyst for establishing the center and getting others involved with the Governor's Advisory Council on Education Relating to the Holocaust. Berkovits talks about her role as a liason for Holocaust education in the Clark County School District and the student-teacher conferences held each year with funding from Sheldon Adelson. Unger discusses expanding the outreach to the Washoe County School District with assistance from Atlantis Hotel (Reno, Nev.) owner, John Farahi and Judy Mack. They talk about the previous locations of the Holocaust Resource Center on Maryland Parkway, then Renaissance Drive, and the affiliation with the Jewish Federation and the Jewish Family Service Agency. After funding and personnel issues around 2011, the advisory council and the library went through a re-structuring and hired Susan Dubin who organized and catalogued the library collection. The library is now accredited by the Association of Jewish Libraries.

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jhp000173
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Sperling Kronberg Mack Holocaust Resource Center oral history interview, 2014 September 04. OH-02460. [Transcript]. Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. http://n2t.net/ark:/62930/d1k93480m

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2015-09-18

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A ROUNDTABLE INTERVIEW WITH THE HOLOCAUST RESOURCE CENTER (MYRA BERKOVITS, SUSAN DUBIN AND DOUG UNGER) An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach The Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas i ?Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV - University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Stefani Evans ii The recorded Interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iii Today is September fourth, 2014. This is Barbara Tabach. We're in the Holocaust Resource Center at the corner of Tropicana and Eastern. I'm going to let my roundtable introduce themselves. Just spell your last names. My name is Myra Berkovits, B-E-R-K-O-V-I-T-S. I'm Susan Dubin, D-U-B-I-N. And I'm Doug Unger, U-N-G-E-R. Great. We're going to start with Myra. So I got involved when the Holocaust Resource Center?it was the Sperling Kronberg Mack Holocaust Resource Center?was set up in a building on Maryland Parkway between Flamingo and Twain. It was maybe a four-story building and you drove downstairs. And in the same building was Jewish Federation. I think the JCC was on the third floor and there was a big multipurpose room where the JCCs used to play poker; the members would play poker. But those three Jewish organizations were in the same building. And the Sperling Kronberg Mack Holocaust Resource Center was on the second floor. Called just the library. It was just called the library then. Yeah, right. Sperling Library. Sperling Library. No, it wasn't. It was just the library. No. At that time it was all three names. Oh, was it? Yeah, it was all three names at that time. But just, I think it just. Maybe when it was at the Jewish Federation on Twain it was just the library. 1 It was just the Sperling Library. Yeah. And then I think Edythe probably got these guys involved so they would give a little money, and so then it was the Sperling Kronberg Mack. Anyway, I had an interest in the Holocaust and I was going to Amsterdam?I think it was 1992?and I was going to Amsterdam to see family and I wanted to go to Westerbork, which was sort of holding camp for the Dutch Jews before the Holocaust. Somebody said that there was a lady named Edythe Katz who was very involved with Holocaust education and she might be able to tell me how to go about doing that so I could arrange a tour or something. And I was going with my daughter. So I called her up. And she was a very lovely lady. And she said that she had a gift for this lady; her name was Jopie and she was Anne Frank's friend. So anyway, to make a long story short, I never met Edythe, but at where she lived she left this gift for Jopie and when I went to Amsterdam I brought the gift. And I think I talked about this in my regular interview. So now I'm going to skip to the part when I came back. So I came back and I said, "Gee, I've really been interested in the Holocaust for years, but I've never really done anything about it." So she said, "Well, why don't you come into the office?" So then I told you where the office was. And there was Edythe and there was another lady named Shirley Kravitz, who was a volunteer and she's since passed away and she used to help Edythe, and then there was another lady named Roz Sbarra, who also helped Edythe, and she may be another person whom you'd want to interview about the history of the center because she was very involved at the time. So there were the three of them and they were sort of like the Three Musketeers. And I came and I was interested and I said, "Gee, is there any volunteer work I could 2 do?" And so they sort of brought me in and I got familiar with the center. At that time they were beginning to do student-teacher conferences. So the way it was set up was there was a Governor's Advisory Council that was at this pretty new, and then below it there was a Holocaust Education Committee because those were the people?it was a small committee?those were the people that helped plan the student-teacher conference that we had every year. The Governor's Advisory Council was actually funded by the state at that time. Maybe Doug can go into the details of the funding. And so we would get money every year so that with had this one presence in the school district, which was this student-teacher conference. I don't know how it happened, but Edythe, of course, was this incredible person. She connected with Sheldon Adelson, who at that time had just pretty much bought the Sands, maybe a few years earlier. She connected with him and in her magic she arranged for him to give us all the resources of the Sands for free. So that meant that Sheldon gave us the room, the food, and all the facilities for an afternoon so that we could have these four or five hundred students and teachers come to the Sands Expo and have this Holocaust conference. Can I stop you? Yeah. So this is like 2005 or six, I would think; something like that. No. This had to be 2000. What I'm talking about? Yes. You're in 1999 or 2000. No, I'm talking about much sooner. Because I was the [Jewis] Federation president. Right. But, no, we had them sooner. 3 You had them sooner at different places, not at the Venetian. Because when I was the Federation president, I got a call from Edythe who said, "I'm calling Sheldon Adelson and he's not returning my phone calls and I want to go to the hotel. " Right, right. But when I started, which whatever it was, was in the nineties we had it at the Sands. At the Sands, but not Sheldon Adelson. It may have been the Sands. No. Well, he maybe owned the Sands Expo. Right. That's what I'm talking about. Only the Expo. He owns the Sands Expo. Expo. That's right. Remember I told the story about the son-in-law in my last thing? So go ahead. So then when he built the Venetian; that's 2000. That's when I was the president. Right. But this was way before. Okay. Well, I thought that's what you were talking about. No. I was talking about way before. Okay. Then go ahead with your story. When he just owned the Sands Expo. And so he gave us all this stuff. Edythe was?I don't know how she knew him, but she got close with him. She was friendly with his secretary, who I think is still his secretary. She'd go to him every year. She was like the politician. Wouldn't you say that, Doug? If you needed something done, you'd just go to Edythe and you'd say, "I need this." Okay, I'll take care of it. Nobody could say no to Edythe. There was no way on earth that 4 you could refuse anything from her. So when she went there and she said, gee, we want A, B, C and D, no problem. Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, in this particular instance, was incredibly generous to the Jewish community, to Holocaust survivors, and also to us, to the Holocaust Committee. So anyway, every year we would plan and that's really what we did. And then maybe in the middle nineties I started to go with Roz, and then we had a new librarian, Carol Helfan. It was the middle nineties. It was after Schindler's List came out, so whenever that was. We'd go up to Reno and we'd teach classes up there and I would teach classes here, for teachers. It was for credit and so forth. I did that for many years. Edythe was also friends, which I talked about in my own interview, was also friends with the man who had Schindler's List written. And so for some reason?and she was friends with all these incredible people, the lady that?Yaffa Eliach, she was the lady who put all the pictures up in the tower at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. She was the editor, sort of, of that project. So Edythe knew her. And Edythe knew Leopold Page, who was one of Schindler's people. She also had a relationship with, of course, the superintendents of the school district. And so she'd just walk into their office and say we want to do this and that and she would get it done. She was the one, I know I mentioned before, where the teachers were having tests on the Jewish holidays and Edythe would say, "No, you can't do that." And then she developed this Jewish calendar; found it somewhere and gave it to them, and so that kids wouldn't be penalized, Jewish children, if they were left. And don't forget, the Jewish community here, just like in the rest of the United States, was minimal. I mean teeny. I mean it was a very small group of people. But Edythe was, I would say, a leader. I didn't know her husband, but you knew her husband. Did you know her 5 husband? I knew who he was. I wasn't friendly. Because he owned the movie theaters; that's why I knew him. Yeah, he owned the movie theaters. So anyway, Edythe for me was a mentor and just life changing, as far as I was concerned, because she really got me involved. The governor's council granted me two grants so that I could actually get an education in the Holocaust. One year I went to Yad Vashem for a month and it was a summer institute. It was incredible. And then two years later in 1998, I went again, also with a grant from the governor's council, to Poland for ten days and to Israel for ten days. Also, it was a summer institute. We did amazing things. Like the student-teach conferences were amazing because, first of all, it involved students and teachers so that they would come to the conference. At that time all our survivors could actually speak; they were young. They had been interviewed by the Shoah Foundation, many of them, and so they were articulate. Edythe, in her own way, really gave them a voice because the format was that we'd have survivors speak on whatever subject or tell their life story and then we'd have a keynote speaker. And we'd use these survivors every year and she had a really wonderful relationship with them. And she wanted to have a survivors group, but in the early nineties it wasn't possible. And then Henry Schuster came along and there was another man before him. I've forgotten their names; it was a couple. And they started the group, but then they both passed away. And then the Schusters came. That's when the claims conference so that the survivors group was very important because that survivors group gave directions to many survivors here on how to collect reparations from the claims conference, which was something that was run by the German 6 government and it's still run by the German government so that survivors in America could start eventually getting some reparations. Now, many of the survivors, because of the Schusters, they did get reparations, who had never even thought about getting reparations before. So they, too, were very important. And Edythe was this incredible?now she has Alzheimer's?but she was like a ball of fire. She was everywhere. She did everything. She knew everybody. And so she was great for the rest of us to know her. And she was widowed; her husband passed away. So I met her after her husband passed away. So I was a volunteer at the time; I wasn't working at the school district. So there was a very small group of people who actually planned this. Let me see if I can remember. There was Carla McComb, who at the time was the multicultural person for the school district. There was myself. There was Carol Helfan, who was a librarian eventually when we moved. Then there was Sharon Carter; she was a teacher in the school district. There was Mary Ann Core, who was a teacher at St. Viator's, the Catholic school. There was Beth Weinberger, who would always every year arrange for the facilities at the Sands Expo. I don't know; she was magical; she knew somebody. Let me see who else. It will come back to me. But it was this really small group of people and we used to do everything. The only thing we didn't do was to register the kids and the teachers for the conference and that was always somebody in the school district. For many years it was Sharon Carter because Sharon Carter was the grant person for the American history grant. And so she was in the social studies department. So it was just like a perfect melding of people. What age were the students that you were targeting? We originally started with middle school students. And then for a few years we just had high 7 school students, which wasn't so great. And now for many years it's been a mix between the two. But we never did anything with elementary school students because we felt that the subject matter was too much. And since it's not really a subject that's really taught in elementary school, to any extent really except maybe kids read Number the Stars [by Lois Lowry] or something like that. But other than that not really anything. But nowadays, of course, it's a push. So anyway, we did this for many years and it was incredibly successful. Then we branched out. I was still working for the school district. So then I became?maybe in the middle or late nineties, I became the?no. Let's see. It actually was in the 2000s at some point where I became the liaison between the school district and the Holocaust Education Committee. And that was a very busy job. So part of my pay came through the general?well, through the federal government, actually. It was a grant, a hard grant through Title One. And then part of my money came?I was split paid through the general fund because that was the part where I worked as a liaison and I did a lot of things to organize so that we had a presence in the school district. And I had a relationship with whoever was the superintendent at the time. So the general fund is from...? School district. It was just split funding. So we did a lot of things at that time because my job was really?I worked in homeless education since 1999; I was in charge, and also I could be the Holocaust liaison. So it was really a great relationship for the school district. So every year we'd have these incredible speakers. One year was Leopold [Page]. One year was Yaffa [Eliach]. We had Gerda Klein. We had the author. What's her name, the cutie? The Terrible Things. Oh. Eve Bunting. 8 Eve Bunting. We just had some great speakers. One year we actually had newscasters, whoever was here at the time. We had a book, a short story, of each survivor and we gave each student this book. It was Rikki Cheese among other people. So, in other words, she'd read the story about one of the survivors. And the only thing you heard was actually the pages turning. I mean that was a really incredible year. So we did a lot of great things. We really felt like we were right in there as far as Holocaust education here in the state. So I think that was really what happened and I did that for many years with this very small committee. Then the committee changed and the format changed a little bit. And then for a few years I was not well, so I didn't do anything and then came back. Then the chairmanship actually pretty much went to somebody in the school district. But we still had a great relationship and did great things. Then I would say that things really began to happen on a serious level where we did much more than just the student-teacher conference and taught classes is when we really developed the center the way it is now. And that would be what year? 2012. Two thousand twelve is when we really? Well, you jumped ahead a lot of years there. Yes, but it was pretty much the same format, was we'd have a student-teacher conference and we'd teach some classes. Actually, that's what we did. We did it down here and we did it in Reno. But only after I retired did we really do a lot more creative things within this. It was Sue and Doug and I and we put our heads together. Now we have really serious programming all day long. Okay. If we can for just a minute, let's go back. This governor's council, maybe we should 9 fill in some of that history so that our listeners will understand. You can tell the story. That was 1989. Okay. 1989 the council began because Engelstad?his name was Ralph Engelstad?owned the Imperial Palace. Was that maybe '88 or whatever it was? He used to have parties to celebrate Hitler's birthday. And he would make the people go to the parties and the staff would say, "No, we don't want to go." So to make a long story short, he was fined by the state of Nevada a million dollars. In the interim Edythe had Holocaust education things going on, on a much smaller scale, but they were still moving and grooving. She went to the governor, who was [Ross] Miller, and she said, "You know, you're getting a million dollars." And nobody could say no to Edythe, God bless her. "I think we should have some of that money and we shall form a council," if I'm correct, "And the mission of the council should be to educate the citizens of Nevada on the themes and subjects of Holocaust statewide." And so he said, "Okay," and he gave her?how much was the seed money? Remember we read the letter. Yeah. What was it? Fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand dollars. And that was the seed money. That was the first year. The first year. And she developed this council. Doug could actually tell you who was on the council, but I'm only going to tell you that anything Edythe wanted she got. And so even though today the way we do things is a little different, in those days she said, "I want you on the council; I'll have you and I'll have you and you." Nobody's voted in. Nobody had any say. It was just 10 who she wanted. Am I correct? Yeah. I'm assuming there must be a government statute how that came up with eleven people because it was eleven; it's still eleven people today on the council. It's called the Governor's Advisory Council on Education Relating to the Holocaust. The first year was a fifty-thousand-dollar grant. That's right. It had eleven members. And there were eleven members. There were eleven members. And how it worked was the governor actually appointed all the people, all eleven people. At Edythe's request. But Edythe sent the letter to the governor saying, "These are the eleven people I'd like you to put on the council. " And pretty much he did. And do you think there were criteria that he was looking for there or just Edythe's blessings did it? I believe it was Edythe's list. Yes. It was just Edythe's list, just who she wanted. Actually, she was such an incredible person that she knew everybody's strengths, and not only their strengths but how they were connected in the community because that was very important to her. She was a very political person, very, unlike me completely. But she knew that so-and-so on the council could do A, B and C, and this person could bring this to the table, and so forth. And so she jumped on to their strengths and together they melded into this very nice council. Not only that. I can tell you that when she felt like a council member was not a fulfilling duties or 11 usefulness, she also got them taken off the council. Well, I was just going to ask, was there a term limit? Well, yes, there are term limits. It's a two-year term. However, some members got reappointed year after year and some members were asked to resign; you 're off the council. So Edythe really ran the council, not the governor. Yeah. Oh, totally, yeah, yeah. And we would have meetings. Whenever we would have meetings, I would come and give my little report, what we did from an educational point of view for the six months or three months or whatever. And everything we did was okay. Well, she started have meetings of the eleven and I got invited to a couple of those meetings. So I'm talking about now? What year was that? Either in 1999 or 2000. You were invited to be a member or just to be a...? No, just to attend. Not one of the eleven. Just to attend. I remember attending some meetings. For the most part they were actually right next door at Marie Callender's. That's right. We'd have lunch meetings. Right, right. How did you meet Edythe? That was through Jean Weinberger. They were good friends. The lady. Yes, Billy's wife. They started The Reporter together. Edythe took the name Reporter from a San Diego paper. Someplace there's a Reporter; she took the name. And the two of them started the Jewish Reporter and were very good friends. Of course, the Weinbergers were good friends of 12 my parents, helped me out a lot. And so I knew who Edythe was. So I used to see her; when I became Federation president in 1999, I would see her in her office. I would stop every once in a while on the second floor and go in and say hello. Truthfully, I didn't know what she did. I don't think anybody knew what she did, really. She came every day. Every day. With Roz. With Roz. But nobody saw them too much. They didn't do too much. They weren't a problem to anybody. And they were funded. And we gave them money. But nobody really knew what Edythe did at the time from a Jewish Federation standpoint. Oh, so she wasn't?she never had to report to Jewish Federation. Nope. Not at all. Federation never gave her money. They gave her the room and occasionally they gave her grants, but pretty much she went on and got her own money and her own funding. We just left her alone. Right. As I say, nobody ever said no to her. She'd go into the governor. She'd go to the superintendent. Whoever she went. She knew everybody and she would get whatever we wanted. So now I'll tell you the Sheldon Adelson story because now, when I was president, she called me and said, "Sheldon Adelson won't return my calls and I need help. " Oh, yeah, she had a tiff with him. 13 So something must have happened? Yeah, the year before. Maybe. So I called him. I arranged the appointment. We go see him. So she's doing the talking. And I remember sitting next to her for maybe ten minutes or fifteen minutes, telling Sheldon her issues and situation and what she needed. He's listening and listening and listening. He's very patient. Then finally he just said, "Edythe, what do you want? " And she said, "I want the rooms; I want breakout rooms; I want conference; I want you to pay for dinner. " He said, "Okay, goodbye. " That's it. We got up and we walked out. That was, I think, 1999 or 2000, and he's allowed us to come back every year. Yeah, we had a few years? Well, we left a couple years on our own. It wasn't because? Well, it was because the school district people and they didn't know Sheldon. But it wasn't because of him. No, it wasn't because of him. Actually, we'll jump way ahead. We went to the Adelson School and then now we're back at the Venetian. And you went to Northwest Technical before that. See, the thing is...I want to talk a little bit about the Sands venue because we always loved having it at the Sands Expo. Number one, most of these children did not have the experience of actually eating out in a nice restaurant with tablecloths, being served; all that kind of stuff. When children were picked to go to these conferences, there was four children and one teacher, and they usually had to write an essay or something as to why they wanted to attend the conference. And so it was really a privilege for them. It was a very special thing. Everything 14 was done first class. When the kids walked in, Sheldon had a spread so that they had sandwiches and chips and fruit, just before it began. And then they were all organized into their little groups and then they'd move from room to room to listen to different survivors. Then they'd come back and they'd have this incredible dinner. It was all vegetarian, but served. It was all served; there was no buffet at that time. Everything was first class. The kids would then listen to the keynote speaker. Then we had this autograph tables. Then afterwards they'd go to the autograph table and the survivors would autograph their programs. It was just an incredible experience. So I always felt like we should always go there because it was so special. I mean we did the same kind of thing when we went to Northwest Technical and I guess to a certain extent at Adelson School, but the Sands Expo was always much better just because of the atmosphere and so forth. So we always pushed for that. So last year I said, "Doug, you have to go talk to Sheldon because we have to go back to Sheldon," which he's been very nice and very gracious. And also, Sheldon?actually, you should be interviewing him if you could ever get to him. But the other thing he does, which is incredible, is he makes sure that every year the survivors' group has a Hanukkah party that he pays for completely, and he's done that for many, many years. A few years they would go someplace else because it was getting harder for the survivors to walk. And I really don't know where this year it's going to be. But that was part of his thing; that he liked to do that for survivors. So he was very involved in making sure that survivors had what they needed. I think still to this day if a survivor were in need of something massive that we couldn't do for them, he probably would be there for them. Isn't that wonderful? Yeah, I'm sure that he would. So anyway, I'm at the place?I fast forwarded. But let me just say that working with 15 survivors, which I did for so many years, and working with teachers and the school district and working with Susie, of course, and Carol before her and even Shirley and Roz, it was really a high point in my life because it really changed my focus in so many ways. It really has been a privilege to be able to in some small way really help survivors. So that's really been a great thing for me. So I'm pretty much?that's my history. So I'll start now like around 2000, 2002. Right, because I am?yeah. In 20021 moved to Reno. In 2003, I believe, I had this issue with my bookkeeper. And I called Edythe and I remember saying to her, "Edythe, you have to do something up here. You need to do some Holocaust education. I know that's what you do and you should start up here in Reno. " And she was like, "Well, I used to. It's not like I need to start it; I used to do it for years. " And I said, "Well, what happened?" She said, "We lost personnel. We lost our contact at the school district." I said, "Well, let's get restarted; I'll help you." Yeah. And that's when we connected with DiPoli and you helped us start classes. I met Martha Gould, Sue Davis. We went to the superintendent. I went to John Farahi that owns the Atlantis Hotel. We put together our first student-teacher conference in maybe four or five years of a gap; that was all. And this is in Reno? This is in Reno. In Reno, the Washoe County School District. Yeah, at the Atlantis. Then 2000? Who was John Farahi? You need to probably... He owns the Atlantis Hotel. 16 Yes. And he's a Jewish man. Jewish man. Best friends with my friend who passed away. So when I moved to Reno to run his business, I was very friendly with John. Matter of fact, we started our friendship going to Israel together for a week. So he was just like Sheldon; said yes, anything I can do; gave us everything. Still does to this day. So I think that's when I really started to get involved was 2003, 2004. I remember I flew back to Las Vegas from Reno several times to go to meetings, somewhere at Marie Callender's. At the time Edythe had started to become friends with some of the people at the Boyd Law School at UNLV and we started to have meetings at the Boyd School of Law; that was like 2005. Yeah. And then we just had some just at UNLV someplace. Then 2006, I remember all we did pretty much was have student-teacher conferences. I don't think we did too much else. Right. But I have to tell you that what would happen would be Roz and Carol and I would fly up to Reno. And I would pick you up at the airport. Remember that? And Doug would pick us up at the airport. That was in Reno, yeah. He had like this big van. What did you have, a van, a truck or something? I had a big truck, yeah. He would be like, great. He'd pick us up. We stayed at this hotel. We didn't stay at Farahi's hotel; we stayed at another hotel downtown. He would be like, great. He would help us so much. Toastmaster, huh? 17 Well, I open my mouth to Edythe and then I said, "Okay, I'm going to help. " And you're right. For several years, maybe three years I think I picked you all up for student-teacher conferences before I moved back. Oh, absolutely. Oh, yeah. And we would have one conference up there, probably March or April because February was still snowy and all that, yeah. And that was pretty much how we trained teachers up there. And just duplicate what you were doing in Las Vegas. We had the same format; we didn't always have the same speakers, yeah. Well, that was classes. We would do classes up there, but then the conference was a little different. You'd pick us up for the classes, when we'd do a class over the weekend. Oh, the reason we did classes up there is because Judy Mack started a resource center up in Reno named after her father. Her father was a survivor. Shia Szrut. Yeah, Shia Szrut. Were you with us when we went up to Reno to find a location? Were you with us? Martha Gould took us to the library because? Right. She took us to a lot of places. ?because she has a plaque on the wall there. Public library. It's a public library. So what happened was Judy Mack wanted to put something in Reno because originally Judy is from Reno. That's right. Yeah, they had?what did they own? 18 Pawnshop. Pawnshops up in Reno. So she wanted to do something in Reno. It was Judy and Ron Mack, it was you, it was Edythe and I and probably Carol and maybe Martha; and we went to the library at UNR and we went to several places. And then we found this library in the northwest, which had just been built. It was a beautiful library that sort of overlooked the whole city. So we went there. I guess we were up there and it was dedicated. We went up there because the library was dedicated that year, whatever it was. So a portion of the library, which I guess Sue could talk about that, a portion of the library was just dedicated to the Holocaust. Sue, do you remember the librarian before Carla? Dianne. Dianne Varnon. Dianne Varnon was the librarian up there. I was looking to see if there was a date on the plaque, but there isn't. But the librarian up there now is Carla Tronson and she's a public librarian. It is part of the public library system in Reno in Washoe County. They have an area of the library that's set aside as a Holocaust collection. It's maintained by Carla who does other things, but it is her specific duty to maintain that area, to put up displays, and to provide resources for the teachers, just as we do here. When I first started here at the library, I understood that in the past materials for here and the Szrut Library up in Reno were bought together. So if we bought a book here, they would buy a duplicate up there. But when I first started here, I spoke with Carla and she said they had their own budget now. And so they buy their materials separately, but we coordinate. And you started here when? I started here in 2012. After Doug is finished I'll tell a little bit about how I started because 19 that's the later history. Okay. I'm just