Inspiring stories from unexpected people
At Stockton University, a Latino and a 104-year-old WWII vet add to the mosaic
How was it possible that then Governor Phil Murphy appointed Irvin Moreno-Rodriguez, the 30-year-old son of Mexican immigrants, to New Jersey’s Commission on Holocaust Education in 2021?
And how, in 2023, did he become the first Latino to lead the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton University in Galloway Township, one of 30 Holocaust centers in New Jersey?
“It all began with Betty Grebenshikoff, a Holocaust survivor local to our community, who I met in seventh grade at Ventnor Middle School,” Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez said. Back then, “I didn’t know anything about the Holocaust.”
But when his homeroom teacher came into his classroom to ask if anyone would like to have lunch with a Holocaust survivor, he raised his hand. “That’s how I met Betty and learned her story of courage and survival,” he said.
Ms. Grebenshikoff’s family fled from Berlin to the Shanghai ghetto in 1939. Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez knew that her experience was important and that somehow she was planting a seed for him, but he couldn’t have known how it would impact his academic and professional path.
It wasn’t until he began studying at Stockton College that he started to realize how important it was.
There’s a story about how he got to Stockton. “I’d done really well in school, took many AP courses — United States History AP, European History AP, but any mention of the Holocaust took up less than a page or two in our history books,” he recalls. Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez was following a college preparatory track and applied to many prestigious schools. But because of his parents’ limited income, he didn’t consider the possibility of attending college.
“I didn’t visit the college campuses or go to open houses,” he said. “I chose instead to work in Uncle Gino’s Pizzeria, a restaurant on the Jersey Shore where my father works, to support my family.”
Friends, neighbors and teachers from both middle and high school knew of Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez’s academic abilities and his financial plight. “Unbeknownst to me, they reached out to Ms. Gail Rosenthal, who’d served since 1991 as director of the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton University,” Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez said. He described Ms. Rosenthal as a problem solver, and also as someone who brought light to dark places.
“In August 2011, Ms. Rosenthal went to Uncle Gino’s and asked my father, Nefaki Moreno, for permission to speak with me,” Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez said. “She asked me if I wanted to visit Stockton, and I said yes. The next day, she picked me up, drove me to Stockton for a tour, and introduced me to wonderful people. Stockton is a beautiful campus located in the middle of the Pinelands National Reserve. There are two lakes on campus — it’s an idyllic setting.”
When Ms. Rosenthal asked Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez if he’d like to study at Stockton, he told her that he couldn’t afford it. “I didn’t ask you that question,” she said. “I asked if you wanted to be here.”
Within a few days, Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez received some generous scholarships. He later learned that some funding came from the Holocaust Resource Center and some from the Stockton University Foundation. The foundation offers endowed scholarships from Jewish survivors in the community and their families. “By the next week I was moving into Stockton. I was so grateful to Gail,” he said. “Not many people would go out of their way to help a young Mexican-American.”
Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez visited Ms. Rosenthal’s office every day of his freshman year to offer his help. He answered phones, greeted guests, and stuffed envelopes. “I worked my way up as a volunteer, serving as an informal tour guide for outside groups,” he said. Soon, he became an intern, a student worker, and eventually, in 2022, he became assistant director.
“How can I repay you?” he asked her. “When someone comes to you for help, you will pass it forward,” she told him. “Always remember the Holocaust survivors of southern New Jersey.”
Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice in 2015 and a master’s degree in Holocaust and genocide studies in 2022. “It was both Gail’s influence and mentorship and Betty’s experience of rebuilding her life — first in Australia, then in the United States — learning a new language and embracing a new culture that resonated with me,” he said. “As a child of immigrants from Mexico, I understood the connection and wanted to learn more. At Stockton, which offers more courses in Holocaust and genocide studies than any other university in the United States, I was able to nurture the seed that Betty Grebenshikoff planted. And that led to my master’s studies.”
Ms. Grebenshikoff died in 2023, at 93; Ms. Rosenthal died unexpectedly that same year, at 77. “Neither Betty nor Gail saw that I became the director of the Holocaust Resource Center,” Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez said, but he believes they’d be proud of what the center is doing.
“We started live virtual guided tours of the Sobibor death camp and Majdanek concentration camp,” he said. “We want students to understand how space, place, and location determined what options people had when escaping the Holocaust to a country they’d never heard of. For example, what terrain were they to travel on? Water? Canals? Mountains? Desert? Forest?”
“We host over 400 different experiential programs annually. Hopefully, every student who walks into the Holocaust Resource Center is reminded that every individual possesses the power to make a difference. Having experienced firsthand how survivors helped shape my life, I feel a deep responsibility to carry their stories forward.”
On May 26, Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez; Dr. Michael Hayes, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton; and the world-renowned Holocaust scholar Dr. Michael Berenbaum, who is a mentor of Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez, will lead Stockton’s biannual 15-day trip to two Holocaust sites in Poland and Lithuania.
“We will bring with us two survivors — Maud Dahme, chair of the Commission on Holocaust Education, who was hidden during the war in the Netherlands, and Daniel Kochavi, who was hidden during the Holocaust in France — students, other faculty, and members of the community,” Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez said.
In preparation for this year’s trip, the Holocaust and genocide studies program arranged for a powerful speaker to share his testimony. That was Andrew “Tim” Kiniry of Vineland. For the past 15 years, former sergeant Mr. Kiniry has spoken locally about his wartime experiences in the 45th Evacuation Unit treating soldiers and liberating Holocaust prisoners.
So, on April 16, Stockton Holocaust Resource Center, the Jewish Federation of Atlantic and Cape May Counties, and the Board of Jewish Education of Atlantic and Cape May Counties jointly hosted Mr. Kiniry, a 104-year-old World War II veteran. Mr. Kiniry talked about what he saw as he treated survivors of Buchenwald in 1945.
Tim Kiniry was born in Philadelphia in 1921. “On August 22, 1942, when I was drafted into the service, I knew I wanted to serve my country,” he said
“I was inducted into the Army in Mays Landing and taken to Fort Dix. “About 150 of us were loaded onto cattle cars headed for basic training,” he said. “The army never told us where we were going, but we ended up at a train station in Augusta, Georgia.”
At Camp Gordon, he was told he was now a member of the 45th Evacuation Hospital. He received basic medical training at the camp’s hospital. From April to June, he learned to put up medical tents that could accommodate up to 400 patients. “Our job was to care for servicemen who were physically injured or psychologically traumatized,” he said. “I got basic medical skills training in that hospital; the rest was on-the-job training in barracks, in fields, in make-shift hospital tents.”
When the unit left Camp Gordon on November 7, 1943, and eventually boarded the Aquitania in New York Harbor, they “went by themselves,” he said. These ships were former luxury liners that moved fast, so they could stay ahead of German submarines. “We were not accompanied by a convoy and traveled from New York to Scotland in seven days.” When they boarded a train to England, they were told “you are now part of the war zone.”
The outfit went to an English town called Wooten-Under-Edge and remained there from November 25, 1943, until June 13, 1944. “We were trained to identify wounds,” Mr. Kiniry said. “We learned how to bandage and how to insert a needle into someone’s arm for penicillin injections or the administration of morphine on the battlefield.”
“We moved out of England on June 14 and landed on Omaha Beach, 10 days after D-Day. Every time the front moved, we moved. In Belgium, we put up tents for patients, for officers, for servicemen, and for nurses. After working 12-hour shifts, there was no time to sleep — we’d travel 40 to 50 miles from one location to the next in trucks carrying supplies and make-shift tents. In September 1944, we were set up in a high school.
As his responsibilities on the front increased, Mr. Kiniry was promoted from private to sergeant. His unit was the first evacuation hospital unit to cross the Rhine River. On December 31, it moved out of Belgium to Germany. And on April 21, 1945, the 45th Evacuation Unit was met “with an odor you could never have imagined” as they drove through the gates of Buchenwald.
“The Stars and Stripes newspaper that was delivered to the bases may’ve written articles about what was happening in the camps, but as soldiers, we had no idea of the atrocities,” he said. “The people standing there were skin and bones. They didn’t know who we were or that we were there to help them.
“We set up our hospital to prepare to care for 600 critically ill tuberculosis patients. It took us two days with both our personnel and German civilians to get the hospital cleaned up, sanitized, and ready to treat them. We stripped them of their clothes — or rags — and set up portable showers. We didn’t know why the prisoners were terrified to go inside, but learned later just why. They were washed, dried, sprayed with DDT for lice and given clean clothes. Every one of them had to have an X-ray to find out if they had tuberculosis.”
He recalls that Maj. Gen. Norman T. Kirk, the army’s surgeon general, sent a high-ranking official to assess the work his evacuation unit was doing to care for the prisoners. “He was amazed at how well we took care of these patients — how carefully we handled them, Mr. Kiniry said. “We made mattresses out of GI blankets and provided the patients with sheets and pillowcases — these were luxuries to them. It took four of us to hold the corners of a sheet and lift them gently on a cot. We were so afraid to break through their skin when we moved them.
“We tried to make them as comfortable as we could, but as soldiers, we remained in a state of disbelief that people could be treated with such brutal negligence.”
Mr. Kiniry recalls how difficult it was to introduce the prisoners to food. “We had to build them up slowly — with malted milk, eggnog, and candy bars — so they wouldn’t aspirate on the food.
“My unit moved out of Buchenwald on May 11, 1945,” he said. “The patients we processed either recovered or passed away in TB hospitals throughout Germany. We left Bremen, Germany’s station hospital, a permanent facility where we waited to return to the United States. That happened on September 17, 1945, and I arrived home in New Jersey on November 25. He served as a combat medic for 3 years, 3 months, and 3 days.
“While I hoped to help get the soldiers home, a lot of them didn’t make it,” he said. “Somehow I came back in one piece.”
Within a few years, he went on to earn his GED. He met and married his wife, Helen, when he was 40; she died in 1985. They had no children.
In 2024, Mr. Kiniry and his good friend Albert Battelini were invited to the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. Coordinated and transported by Forever Young Veterans, an organization that gives elderly veterans the opportunity to return to battlegrounds, Mr. Kiniry joined 25 others on the seven-day trip.
After the presentation at Stockton last month, the Jewish War Veterans Garr- Greenstein- Friedenberg Post 39 in Margate made Tim Kiniry an honorary Jewish war veteran.
After they listened to him, “the students knew they were in the presence of a true hero,” Doug Cervi said; Mr. Cervi, who teaches Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton, is a past executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education.
Mr. Moreno-Rodriguez agreed. “I was overcome by the power of sergeant. Kiniry’s words,” he said. “I am honored to serve on the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education. We have a chance to strengthen the commitment of the state to high-quality Holocaust and genocide education. What we are doing today is so important with the rise of open antisemitism.”
Go to stockton.edu/holocaust-resource/ to learn more about Stockton University’s programs or call (609) 652-4699 to schedule a free guided tour.