the
Justice www.thejustice.org
The Independent Student Newspaper Volume LXXII, Number 16
of
B r a n d e is U n i v e r sit y S i n c e 1 9 4 9
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Waltham, Mass.
RESEARCH
‘I AM A STAR’
Univ. researchers release study on child opportunity ■ The report includes an
updated version of the Child Opportunity Index, which can predict child health and development across the U.S. By GILDA GEIST JUSTICE EDITOR
A Jan. 22 report by the Heller School for Social Policy and Management found that neighborhoods affect children’s health and development, including their education, expectations for the future and quality of experiences. The study, titled “The Geography of Child Opportunity: Why Neighborhoods Matter for Equity," was conducted by Heller’s Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy. The study quantifies opportunity levels for children across the United States and examines how a child’s neighborhood affects his or her future. The report was authored by the institute's and project's director Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, Research Director Clemens Noelke and Senior Research Analyst Nancy McArdle. The Child Opportunity Index
Waltham, Mass.
2.0, which is a crucial part of the report, assigns an opportunity score to neighborhoods based on three domains: education, health and environmental, and social and economic, according to the report. The research team released the first version of the COI in 2014, AcevedoGarcia told the Justice in a Jan. 27 interview. According to the report, the COI 2.0 “focuses on child opportunity in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, which comprise 47,000 neighborhoods where 67% of children live.” It measures child opportunity based on 29 “common conditions,” such as graduation rates, air pollution and homeownership. The data, as well as case studies and other supplemental material, can be found at diversitydatakids. org. By clicking “Child Opportunity Index” and then “Explore metro maps,” users can find an interactive map that includes opportunity levels of all the neighborhoods studied as well as breakdowns of each neighborhood’s opportunity level based on race. According to the website map, Brandeis is located in a moderate-opportunity neighbor-
See COI, 7 ☛
NOAH ZEITLIN/the Justice
'ONLY SPECIAL CHILDREN WEAR A STAR': Inge Auerbacher shared her poetry with the audience, including one she wrote about the cloth yellow star that Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust. She brought her own to show to the audience.
BRIEF Univ. contractor finds water main break, closing nearby walkway; main fixed Tuesday The water main serving the Usdan Student Center, Pearlman and Goldfarb and Farber Libraries broke on the morning of Jan. 27, damaging the surrounding sidewalk but leaving other Brandeis facilities untouched, according to a Thursday email to the Justice from Vice President of Campus Operations Lois Stanley. On Tuesday, the University’s contractor PW Ryan Co found a crack in the main approximately six feet underground and “put a large clamp over the pipe to seal the crack,” Stanley wrote in the email. Soon after the leak was detected, Facilities Services cordoned off the walkway between Goldfarb and Usdan with orange construction cones and caution tape as water began to pool in the area. The entrance to Usdan nearest to the walkway was also barricaded from the inside by a trash bin and caution tape. These measures were in place “so that the crew and vehicles needed for the repair could work a safe distance from pedestrians,” Stanley wrote. Pedestrian access to the walkway was restored by Wednesday. Stanley alerted the community to the leak in an email on Monday afternoon. In the email, Stanley told community members that Facilities Services was in-
CHRISTINA KIM/ the Justice
vestigating “the extent and cause of the leak” and that work would continue through Tuesday. She also urged community members to “take care to observe signs cordoning off areas that are part of that work” and said that she would provide updates on any potential impact the repairs would have on Brandeis facilities. Although minimal repairs were needed, Stanley wrote in her email that the crew was prepared for “more complex situations that may have required water to be shut off to the four serviced buildings.” She credited Associate Director of Campus Services Joe Realejo, the grounds crew and Facilities Services for their “thorough response” to the leak. The University has previously dealt with the impacts of water main breaks, including a pipe rupture in Weston, MA, which left Brandeis without clean drinking water for several days in May 2010, but this is only the third main break to occur on campus, according past Justice articles. In Jan. 2006, a water main burst and flooded the road near the Rabb steps, and in Jan. 2013, a main break on South Street caused flooding in the basement of the Joseph M. Linsey Sports Center. —Emily Blumenthal
Holocaust survivor shares her experiences with Univ. community ■ Inge Auerbacher was sent to a concentration camp when she was just seven years old. She told the story of her survival. By JEN GELLER JUSTICE EDITOR
Thirty-seven miles west of Krakow near the former German-Polish border, on Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz, the largest death camp established by Nazi Germany. Seventy-five years later, people around the globe still remember that day. On Jan. 27, Brandeis’ Center for German and European Studies and the Goethe Institute screened Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half hour documentary “Shoah.” The next day, Inge Auerbacher, author and Holocaust survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp — located in what is now the Czech Republic and liberated on May 8, 1945 — spoke to the Brandeis community in the Shapiro Campus Center Theater about her experiences. The evening opened with an introduction by Miriam Reichman ’21, the event’s planner. Together, students lit six candles to represent six groups that perished during the Holocuast — children, fathers, mothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and brothers
and sisters. Reichman reminded attendees that with so many who did not survive, these stories enable the next generations to put names to the faces of those who suffered. After the audience watched a video and listened to students in the Public School 22 chorus from Staten Island, New York, singing a song based on “A World of Peace,” a poem that Auerbacher wrote, Auerbacher started her portion of the evening by saying that part of what made the children who sang that song so special was that they were so diverse. “We are all a part of the same human family,” she said. She said she speaks for the 1.5 million innocent children who lost their lives in the Holocaust and emphasized that Jews are part of a religion, not a race. “There’s Black Jews, there’s Chinese Jews, Korean Jews. I was in India, there was a synagogue with all Indian Jews,” she said. As Auerbacher, a world-traveler, writer, chemist and photographer, began telling her story, one of her poems was displayed on a PowerPoint behind her. It read, “I am a star: only special children wear a star, I am noticed from near and far. They have placed a mark over my heart. I’ll wear it proudly from the start … I stand tall and proud, my voice shouts in silence loud: ‘I am a real person still. No one can break my spirit or will!’ I am a star!” The star referred to in
her poem is the yellow cloth star that Jewish people were forced to wear on their clothes in Nazi-occupied Europe. Auerbacher brought the star that she wore and, at one point in her presentation, showed it to the audience. “I want to take you today on a journey of my first ten years growing up in Nazi Europe,” Auerbacher began. On Dec. 31, 1934, Auerbacher was born in Kippenheim, Germany. She was the last Jewish child born in the village, and the doctor that delivered her was a part of the Nazi party, though “he still treated the Jews in a decent way,” she said. Later on, he became involved in the Nazi euthanasia program that killed people with mental and physical disabilities. He went to prison for many years after the war. Just six months after her birth, Auerbacher lost her German citizenship. Today, Auerbacher explained, she could recover her citizenship, but does not care to. “I am an American citizen — good enough for me,” she said. Until November 1938, the Christians and Jews in Auerbacher’s village coexisted. However, on Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, between Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, every window in her home was broken and her synagogue was burned down, memories that remain vivid in Auerbacher’s mind. During Kristallnacht, the police arrested her father and
See SURVIVOR, 7 ☛
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By ARI ALBERTSON
By ELIANA PADWA
By MENDEL WEINTRAUB
FEATURES 9
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Recent hardships face women’s basketball
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