Davidson College Basketball Team’s Visit To Auschwitz, Inspired By Ray Allen
The Davidson College men’s basketball team will fly to Poland on Saturday to visit Auschwitz, in hopes of keeping alive the tragic memory of the Holocaust and its victims.
The four-day trip grew out of an invitation from a Davidson alumna involved with the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust, a non-profit focused on Holocaust education and remembrance. The organization is organizing and funding the trip — which will not involve any basketball — as well as making a documentary about the team’s experience.
Inspired by 10-time NBA All-Star Ray Allen’s visit to Auschwitz last year, Davidson alumna Amanda Caleb thought it would be worthwhile if more athletes could help tell the story of the Holocaust to young people.
MIMEH partnered with CANDLES, a nonprofit organization founded by Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Josef Mengele’s medical experimentation in Auschwitz. She will help guide the team’s visit.
“The volatility of our world today invites a response,” basketball coach Bob McKillop, who visited Auschwitz years ago, said on Davidson’s website. “A trip like this prepares us exceptionally well as … our coaching staff and our players are [granted a platform to be] out front, leading the charge about the dignity of human life.”
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO