Hillel has been foundational to so many Jewish stories over the past century. In the 1930s, it established a student refugee program, saving the lives of nearly 150 young European Jews. In 1947, it helped Hungarian-born Tom Lantos come to the U.S., where he became the only Holocaust survivor to ever be elected to Congress. In the 1950s and ’60s, Hillels across the country organized robust support for the civil-rights movement. In 1960, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Hillel director Max Ticktin addressed 500 students in a march on Library Mall and called for an end to both local and national discrimination, and encouraged students to fight against racist Jim Crow laws.
Office of Strategic Communication