Braden Hamelin
When Bala Cynwyd resident Barbara Shaiman looks at the coral ring on her hand, she can hear her late mother’s voice in her head, asking if she was a mensch today.
Shaiman, 76, has taken that daily question to heart for 30 years, creating and running a nonprofit organization called Champions of Caring that has mentored more than 10,000 young Philadelphians to empower them to make social change.
“I’m a social entrepreneur. I care deeply about the state of the world. I became a social entrepreneur because of my parents. My parents were Holocaust survivors,” Shaiman said.
Shaiman’s parents met in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the modern-day Czech Republic, narrowly surviving, her mother and father weighing 80 and 65 pounds, respectively, upon their liberation at the war’s end.
Shaiman’s mother was the sole survivor in a 65-person family, and her father lost everyone except his mother, one brother and a cousin.
But one thing that the family saved was the coral ring, which her paternal grandmother gave a businessman for safekeeping before they were sent to the camps. It was passed down to Shaiman’s mother as her engagement ring.
“[She told the man], ‘If I survive, I’ll come back, and we’ll get the ring back.’ So, when my grandmother meets her future daughter-in-law, she is so excited to find family. She says to her, ‘You know what? I have a coral ring for you for your engagement present,’” Shaiman said.
Shaiman was given the coral ring by her mother on her 50th birthday, and it reminds her of her parents, their stories as Holocaust survivors and a promise to do good in society.
Shaiman said that the idea for Champions of Caring came from a trip in 1989 to Auschwitz with her parents, which was one of the places her mother was held.
While at Auschwitz, Shaiman learned about how her mother snuck a toothbrush onto the transport out of the Lodz ghetto and held onto it as the only thing that still made her feel human. The toothbrush was taken from her when she arrived at Auschwitz.
The story helped explain why her mother compulsively brushed her teeth, something that drove Shaiman and her brother crazy as children.
“I said to my mother, ‘Mom, I need a minute. I’m going to just go out in the courtyard, and I’ll be right back.’ I go to the courtyard, and there are about five or six German teenage boys, clowning around. And I’m thinking, how can you clown around at Auschwitz?” Shaiman said. “I approached them, and I said to them in German, ‘Do you know where you are? Do you understand that this was a killing place? How can you behave like this?’ And they started laughing even more and, bam, my whole life changed.”
Shaiman realized she needed to go back to Philadelphia and celebrate young people of all backgrounds performing tikkun olam.
She started the Champions of Caring Recognition program in 1995, which expanded several years later from the recognition of students to providing leadership education and a trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
“We weren’t really celebrating young people that were doing social justice work. If you were an A student, that was great. If you were a great athlete, that was great,” Shaiman said. “But nobody was really shining a light on kids who were doing amazing social justice projects. The name ‘Champions of Caring’ popped into my head. Let’s make them the heroes of our time. Let’s teach kids how to become social activists. Let’s give them the tool kit and skills to become champions of caring.”
The program has provided more than 1 million hours of volunteer service since 1995 on a variety of projects that the champions selected themselves.
The projects break down barriers and give back to the community in ways many might not expect, including one example where a Puerto Rican boy taught salsa to an older, mostly white, senior community.
The champions were even the subject of a longitudinal study at Temple University that showed the program — and especially the trip to the Holocaust museum — made a pivotal impact on their lives.
“These champions understood that they never want this level of hate to happen to any group. And given the hate in our world today, it just fills my soul with joy that these young people are teaching these values to their children and still talking about that trip to the Holocaust Museum and how much they enjoyed meeting kids from different backgrounds [through the program] they would have never met,” Shaiman said.
She added that the program continually expands its reach, now focusing on intergenerational work and creating an international network that stretches to South Africa and Finland.
And it all goes back to that day in Auschwitz and the history that Shaiman has spent her life using as motivation, along with the ring that keeps her mother’s words in her mind.
That coral ring will serve as the namesake for the documentary about Champions of Caring, “The Coral Ring Legacy,” that will be released later this year by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Henry Nevison.
“My biggest worry is for my grandchildren, who are mostly in college already. I don’t want them to live in a hateful world. I want people to be kind and address social issues they care about. And it starts with one person just thinking about what I can do today to make my world and the world around me better. It starts with little things, and it can escalate to huge projects,” she said.
