Investing in Innovation and Relevance: Christine and Todd Fisher

The day before Todd Fisher’s grandparents, Selma and Ludwig Berger, were to set said for the United States in summer 1936, Ludwig was arrested without explanation. He sent this telegram after he was released size months later and had secured a new immigration visa.

Todd Fisher’s personal quest to understand how and why the Holocaust happened has been a defining part of his life.

While his maternal grandparents escaped Nazi Germany, many of their family did not. “There was not a day in my grandparents’ lives that the Holocaust did not influence them — that they did not talk about it. Their deeply felt emotion about the Holocaust and the many that looked the other way had a massive impact on me and formed the core of my worldview.”

“All that I had been talking to my grandfather about for so many years I saw firsthand on a visit to Dachau during college. How could such hatred and evil happen in this so-called peaceful place?” Trying to understand the deadly combination of ignorance, hate, and indifference would lead him beyond the many Holocaust sites he would visit, to Srebrenica, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Goree Island.

Taking their children on many of these bearing witness trips, Christine Fisher explained, “is a way to make them understand that these things continue to happen around the world, and they can act.”

Todd and Christine Fisher piece together his grandparents’ life before the war and their escape from Nazi Germany.

“There are very few institutions in the world on any topic that have a platform to actually change people’s opinions and to influence people to do something,” continued Todd. “The Holocaust Museum is one of them.”

As a member of the Museum’s executive committee, Todd has been instrumental in guiding the Museum’s evolution into a more responsive platform to address contemporary issues like extremism, genocide, and antisemitism. “Todd and Christine’s recent gift will enable us to create a new position for the Museum — a Museum Experience Curator who will develop innovative experiences about contemporary events,” said Sarah Ogilvie, the Museum’s Chief Program Officer. “By immersing visitors in a deeper understanding of the continuing relevance of Holocaust history, we have the opportunity to challenge them in fundamentally different ways to reflect on their own choices and responsibilities.”

“I am constantly impressed with the leadership’s creative and disruptive thinking about how to make the Museum impactful today and to continually evolve it,” said Todd. “Being involved with the Museum is an opportunity to do something that I care passionately about, with an organization that I think has an ever greater potential given the world we live in.”

This article was first published in spring 2016.