As part of a trip to Israel to play basketball, the Auburn Tigers, a Division 1 NCAA college basketball team from Alabama, visited Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
Yad Vashem chair Dani Dayan greeted the players and their coach, Bruce Pearl, recounting for them a tour he took of the Civil Rights Trail when he served as consul general for the State of Israel in New York.
He stressed that “today, we must fight hatred and anti-Semitism in all its forms in order to ensure that history is never allowed to repeat itself.”
At the end of the visit, the group visited the Children’s Memorial, dedicated to the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Back in mid-March, an Auburn Tigers’ press conference went viral when Pearl recounted the story of Purim and the heroism of Queen Esther going up against the Persian king and his adviser Haman to explain why he was going “all in to help the Ukrainian people survive … ,” he said. “And I’m very concerned about what’s going on in Iran with the king of Persian now, and if we embody that government … it’s going to put the world in jeopardy.”