After Pamela Applebaum attended USC Shoah Foundation’s Ambassadors for Humanity gala in Detroit last year, she knew the Institute was something she wanted to be a part of. 

“We immediately embraced the importance of ensuring the vital preservation of the darkest chapter in Jewish history with the enduring vision of connecting the next generation to a modern perspective of this past to better grapple with today’s complicated, challenging, and belligerent environment,” she said.

Now, Pamela has joined the Institute’s Board of Councilors to further this mission. The board guides strategic direction and policy on the dissemination, scholarship, and educational use of the 53,000 testimonies in the Institute’s Visual History Archive.

“It is my responsibility to enrich what was built for me so that my children and the next generation can better understand and contextualize the past to their current lives,” she said.

Pamela is the daughter of Eugene and Marcia Applebaum, two prominent Jewish philanthropists. Eugene Applebaum is the founder of Arbor Drugs and Arbor Investments Group.

Pamela has been working at Arbor Investments Group for the last decade, and now serves as its President.  Prior to Arbor, she spent several years in working in commercial real estate and is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Georgetown Law School.

The Applebaums also operate The Eugene & Marcia Applebaum Family Foundation, and have given to a variety of causes including Wayne State University, the University of Michigan business school, Beaumont Health System, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the Mayo Clinic. Pamela Applebaum is on the boards of Cranbrook Schools, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and an Advisory Board Member of the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. She believes these involvements and others will allow her to help USC Shoah Foundation with its mission.

In particular, “promoting education opportunities and engagement has long been a central focus of our family’s philanthropy,” she said. “I look forward to enhancing the educational platform of USC Shoah Foundation by building synergies with the broader Jewish community and beyond.”

Because of her devotion to education, Pamela is especially interested in the Institute’s IWitness program and hopes that she can help expand its scope even more.

“Bringing [IWitness] into the schools is vitally important in helping young students (and their teachers) creatively and critically discover how to best articulate the voices of anger, mistrust and hatred into voices of tolerance, compassion and learning,” she said.

Pamela hopes that as a board member, she can help bring a greater voice to the stories of genocide, carrying them to the next generation.

“The teachings are not merely historical; they are timeless, ahistorical, and universal,” she said. “They are too profound not to inspire, instruct, and define what is right and wrong about humanity with the hope that someday — and each day — we learn to embrace our differences as our very own similarities.”