New Jersey Jewish News
Greater Monmouth County Feature
Grads urged to embrace careers in ‘tikun olam’
Receiving an honorary doctoral degree from Monmouth University, the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, urged the graduating class to do their part to repair a broken world.
Sara Bloomfield, who received an honorary doctoral degree in public service, spoke during the West Long Branch school’s 72nd commencement on May 17.
“I encourage you to travel abroad and live abroad if you can to understand what this country is about, what it has been, can be, and must be,” Bloomfield said during the commencement ceremony at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel. “I would encourage you, if you encounter problems in life, and you certainly will, to look for the opportunities that often reside in many problems. We just need a little patience and flexibility to see them and seize them.”
Bloomfield — who joined the museum staff in 1986 when it was a project in development and served in a variety of administrative and programmatic positions before becoming director in 1999 — encouraged graduates to give back to a world full of possibilities and opportunities.
“Because you have honored me with a doctorate in public service, I would ask you to go out and help serve the world,” Bloomfield said. “There is a lovely notion in the Jewish tradition called tikun olam, which means each of us doing our share to repair a broken world. The notion is that the world is always in need of repair and that it is always broken and that each of us in every generation must contribute to the act of repairing it.”
Bloomfield, a Cleveland native, is credited with instituting a number of innovative programs at the Holocaust museum. Among the projects she has spearheaded are leadership training programs for diplomats and law enforcement and military personnel. She also launched the museum’s Academy for Genocide Prevention and established the facility’s National Institute for Holocaust Education and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.
Bloomfield’s work has also focused on the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. In 2004, she encouraged the museum’s Committee on Conscience to become more involved in contemporary crimes against humanity; as a result, the committee raised a national genocide alert about the Darfur crisis, and Bloomfield discussed the issue with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Bloomfield has also served as an adviser to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and the Iraq Memory Foundation. She was also a member of the Ground Zero advisory committee in New York.
Bloomfield often shares her belief in the importance and impact of historical preservation with museum visitors. When she escorts government officials through the museum’s many exhibits, she always leads them past documents written by the U.S. War Department that detail the decision not to bomb the train tracks leading to the Auschwitz death camp.
“Watch what you write,” she tells her guests. “It could end up on the wall of a museum.”
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