Son of Holocaust survivor joins state advisory commission on anti-Semitism

HOUSTON. Holocaust Remembrance Week begins in Texas public schools on Monday.

Earlier this month, Houston Gov. Greg Abbott appointed a Houston resident to a commission to educate the next generation about the Holocaust and combating anti-Semitism.

At his company’s Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Houston, built by his company, RIDA Development Corporation CEO Ira Mitzner received a recent call from the governor’s office inviting him to a new, additional position as a member of the Advisory Commission on the Holocaust, Genocide, and Anti-Semitism in Texas. .

“I’m honored,” Mitzner told KHOU 11 News following his appointment. “The work of this commission is very important.”

Its goal is to teach Texans how to deal with hate and prevent atrocities like those that the Mitzner family has experienced firsthand.

Ira’s father, David, narrowly escaped capture by the Nazis in Warsaw in the 1940s before being imprisoned for eight years in a Soviet labor camp. When he returned to Poland after the war, he lost his parents and sister during the Holocaust.

Later, David Mitzner came to America and eventually founded the RIDA Development Corporation.

“He gave back to the country that gave him,” said Ira Mitzner.

David Mitzner passed away in 2016. He was 101 years old.

“My father would often tell public school, middle school, and high school students about his military experience,” Ira Mitzner said. It was clear that they understood.

Education is key to several recommendations in a study the commission presented to state legislators in December 2022.

The number of reported incidents against the Jewish community in Texas was found to have more than doubled between 2020 and 2021.

Recently, KHOU 11 News reported on anti-Semitic leaflets thrown into yards and driveways in the Houston area, the deliberate arson of an Austin synagogue, and a hostage situation at a synagogue in the Dallas area, which the FBI called a hate crime.

“Especially today, with social media, we must do everything in our power to educate the public about what discrimination, and in particular uncontrolled anti-Semitism, can do to society and do to individuals,” said Ira Mitzner.

It is a mission begun by one generation and continued by the next.

The Texas Advisory Commission on the Holocaust, Genocide, and Anti-Semitism is required by state law to submit a study on anti-Semitism every two years before the next legislative session to the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the House of Representatives, and all state legislators.