Ron Schirtzer Selected to serve as President of the Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida
(ORLANDO, Florida - February 14, 2024) - Weinberg Wheeler Hudgins Gunn & Dial is proud to announce that Orlando partner, Ron Schirtzer, has been selected to serve as President of the Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida, heading its Board of Directors. The 41-year-old nonprofit has educated thousands of Florida students and countless others about the Nazi genocide of six million Jews in the 1930s and 1940s—and how humanity can prevent such atrocities in the future.
Schirtzer’s connection to the Holocaust is personal. His grandparents emigrated to the United States from Lithuania in the 1920s. Two decades later, after World War II, his grandparents attempted to locate their immediate family members who had remained in Lithuania and were unable to locate anyone. When they reached out to local leaders for assistance, they were told all of his family members had been killed.
Citing recent incidents, the 2017 demonstrations by neo-Nazis in Virginia, the 2018 murderous shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue and the current rise in antisemitic incidents, Schirtzer says the lessons taught at the Holocaust Center could not be more important.
He also emphasizes the Center’s goal to apply the lessons of the Holocaust beyond antisemitism, pointing to its founder, Tess Wise, a Holocaust survivor originally from Poland. “She believed studying the Holocaust would prevent it from being repeated anywhere,” he said, noting how the Center connects German antisemitism to racist laws in the American South, genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, for example, and immigration and refugee crises.
The Center is a partner of the Florida Department of Education, which since 1994 has been tasked by the state legislature to teach Holocaust education. More than 34,000 students have participated in the Center’s initiative, “UpStanders: Stand Up To Bullying,” which is based on Holocaust education.
Schirtzer, who has served on the Center’s board for ten years, said a major goal of his two-year term will be completing fundraising and breaking ground on a new facility in downtown Orlando, on land provided by the city. The new Holocaust Museum for Hope and Humanity will feature 44,500 square feet devoted to a living narrative of Holocaust survivors and a reminder of why we must stand up to antisemitism and prejudice. The Center is currently housed in about 7,000 square feet and is located next door to the Roth Family Jewish Community Center of Greater Orlando.
Talli Dippold, the CEO of the Center, said, “I’m excited to work with Ron on the creation of the Holocaust Museum for Hope and Humanity. Like me, he is a third-generation survivor of the Holocaust, and we’re committed to sharing the stories and lessons of survivors, so visitors leave the museum empowered to be upstanders in their communities.”
Schirtzer grew up in Brooklyn but has lived in Orlando for nearly 40 years. He practices commercial litigation at Weinberg Wheeler Hudgins Gunn & Dial, which has a 12-attorney office in Orlando and over one hundred attorneys across five other offices around the country.
Rick Sager, a member of the firm’s executive committee, said, “In addition to being an excellent litigator, Ron embodies our firm’s commitment to providing leadership in our communities. We are proud of Ron’s decade long service to the Center and excited as he leads its capital campaign and the ground-breaking of a greatly expanded facility.”