AQR's Israel Joins With Holocaust Museum to Fight Global Hate

(Bloomberg) -- Ronen Israel, a principal at AQR Capital Management, stood with his son and mom at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s New York gala, recalling their annual visits to see his grandmother in Haifa.

“She’s a very sharp and funny woman,” Israel, 46, said at Monday night’s event. “At her 100th birthday, a friend was giving a toast, and she was talking about my mother, and my grandmother interrupted to say, ‘I thought this was my birthday.’ She’ll correct anyone if they are mistaken.”

Israel’s grandmother Ilse, now 101, fled Germany when she was 20 and made her way to Palestine in 1938. Her parents and sister remained behind. After her father died of pneumonia, her mother was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she died, while her sister and four nieces and nephews were killed at Auschwitz.

“The Holocaust is very personal to us,” Israel said, adding he had survivors on both sides of his family.

Israel and his wife, Mindy Nagorsky-Israel, a lawyer at Skadden Arps, became involved in the museum as they started researching their family histories. The staff was so helpful, they were pulled in to the museum’s mission to educate about the history of the Holocaust and to fight contemporary hatred, anti-Semitism and genocide.

Their friendship with Stacey Saiontz, who’s on the museum’s education committee and a founding member of its New York Next Generation board, also drew them in. With Saiontz being honored, the couple agreed to serve as dinner chairmen of the event, which raised more than $3.2 million and also honored Glenwood Management’s Gary Jacob.

Before going up to the stage, Saiontz posed for a photo with her husband Marc, founder of SnowBridge Capital, sons Jared and Elliott, and grandfather Jack Feldman, 93, a survivor of Auschwitz. Feldman and Elliott are the stars of the HBO documentary “The Number on Great-Grandpa’s Arm,” a role that has resulted in Elliott making the rounds of school and festival screenings.

“Seeing my son teach a new generation in many ways fulfills my mission to make sure that my family’s stories, the stories of all the survivors, and the lessons of the Holocaust are passed on,” Saiontz said.

The lessons include a story of what her grandmother Sally did with her daily ration of moldy bread while in a labor camp. “Each night she broke that bread in half: one half she devoured, the other half she placed under her pillow. Each morning, the bread was gone.”

Why did her grandmother continue like this for three years? “Because this young girl believed that whoever was stealing her bread needed it more than she did,” Saiontz said. “The Holocaust is not just a story of hate. It is also a story of resilience, humanity, love and kindness.”

‘Personal Memory’

During dinner, more than 500 guests at Cipriani 42nd Street learned about the museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, as well as a conference that brought victims of persecution together to support religious freedom and a $1 billion campaign to secure the future of the museum, opened in Washington 26 years ago.

As the clock neared 9 p.m., Israel looked at his son, who had homework and tests to study for. But it was the right decision to bring him and his two siblings.

“We want our children to have a personal memory of the Holocaust, not just what we tell them,” Israel said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill

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