First and foremost, “I’m a very concerned Jew,” he said.
Though his new job marks his inaugural stint as a Jewish community professional, the Jewish world is not unfamiliar to him. He has served as president and treasurer of his synagogue, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco, and led its campaign to purchase a new building.
“He’s very aware of contemporary Jewish issues,” said Ingrid Tauber, the center’s co-president. “He has a rare confluence of managerial/administrative skills alongside a very solid academic background.”
Stein, who holds a Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Illinois, helped establish the linguistics department at Tel Aviv University.
For the past two decades, he worked in the business world, holding management positions at Decorators Walk, a national manufacturer, importer and distributor of decorative fabrics and furniture.
Management experience was key to picking a new director, according to Tauber. The center’s last director, Paul Hamburg, brought a strong academic background to the job, but had less experience as an administrator. Hamburg resigned in March of last year and the center was without a director until Stein started May 1.
Stein said that after 20 years as a businessman, “I said, ‘That’s it. I want to do something for the Jewish community.’ I heard about the vacancy here, I faxed my resume and the co-president started setting up interviews.”
The 56-year-old San Francisco resident spoke with board members and founders of the center, many of whom asked about Stein’s personal connection to the Holocaust.
He told them he felt connected to the subject as a Jew and had much to offer the center in terms of management, budgeting and public relations acumen. And he touted his networking skills, honed in the business world.
“They gambled,” Stein admitted of the decision to hire him. “This is an introduction to a sensibility I had never had firsthand contact with.”
Already, that is changing.
Stein has dived into the Holocaust, reading studies and first-person and historical accounts. “In the past six weeks, I’ve read more than I’ve ever read.”
And he is speaking to survivors.
“I’m learning that the significance of the Holocaust is so different from one person to the other and the torture was different from country to country, from town to town.”
The suffering is “still very, very prominent in the memories of these people and in their attitudes,” Stein said. “It’s a hard thing for people who are aging to overcome and I don’t expect them to overcome it. I’m beginning to understand, and not to criticize, the anger, the frustration.”
Stein joins the center at a pivotal time in its history. In March, Holocaust survivor Dr. Laszlo Tauber donated $1 million to the center in the form of a charitable remainder trust that will be distributed upon Tauber’s death.
Looking to broaden its reach, the center created a Web page — www.holocaust-sf.org — this year.
Starting in October, the center will put on a series of programs marking its 20th anniversary. The organization was founded by a group of survivors to protest the opening of a Nazi bookstore in San Francisco.
Stein’s goals for the organization include:
*Computerizing the organization’s library holdings so the materials can be connected through the Internet to libraries around the world.
*Providing English translations of the center’s hundreds of yizkor memorial books, which detail the pre-war Jewish life of small towns in Russia, Poland and elsewhere. Penned by survivors and mostly self-published, most are written in Yiddish or Hebrew.
*Extending the center’s educational programming into Marin County and universities.
Though Stein has undergone a major shift professionally — from working with furniture and textiles to probing one of the most profound human tragedies in history — he does not feel oppressed by the subject matter at his new job.
“I don’t think it’s weighty all day long. It’s not totally this horrible, depressing black chapter,” he said. “Its application to contemporary life is obvious. The field is fertile to answering questions about human behavior.”