A busy schedule of work and volunteer activities intertwine in the life of Samuel Dresel (34), a seventh-semester student in the Bachelor’s Degree in Management and Administration program, who acknowledges that the tools provided by his degree program help him in his professional management work, both in the commercial and institutional spheres, as well as in carrying out the Shoah Project, sponsored since its inception by ORT University, which promotes the universalization of the message of respect and tolerance toward others through the dissemination of the events of the Shoah (the Holocaust of the Jewish people).
Below is a summary of the conversation with the student, who in May assumed the position of Executive Director at theNueva Congregación Israelita del Uruguay (NCI), a socio-cultural-religious institution founded by German Jews in 1936.
What is your role at the NCI?
I started working as Executive Director in mid-May of this year. I am in charge of the entire institution, although it is divided into an Administrative-Accounting department, a Culture department, and a Worship department. In any case, my main daily responsibility is to handle administrative and accounting tasks, which includes everything related to managing numbers and budgets; in short, ensuring that the institution runs smoothly from an administrative standpoint and that the accounting is up to date.
How does the networkcomposed of employees, volunteers, and members of the Board of Directors?
To understand this, we can draw a parallel with a company. The Executive Committee is like the Board of Directors; at the NCI, it consists of 12 people who meet once a week to set the general guidelines for the institution; furthermore, they are volunteers, so each one specializes in one of the areas in which we work; we also have a professional staff of approximately 40 people, 15 of whom work in the NCI building, and others who do so on a volunteer basis.
What is the difference between holding a management position in a private company and doing so in a community organization?
I come from the IT industry, and I have found that all industries share certain commonalities in terms of how they are run and managed. My experience in the private sector, as well as what I learned in my Bachelor’s degree in Management, helped me understand this modern management style, which is what I apply at the institution. Its traditional characteristics are those of formal, orderly, and strict work, in line with the main characteristics of its German-born founders.
What are the benefits of a Bachelor's Degree in Management and Administration?
To me, my degree is like a toolbox: when I was in the business world, I used those tools for sales and management techniques; now I use them for accounting, administrative, financial, and human resources tasks—an area I hadn’t previously explored.
How did the Shoah Project come about?
I was part of a group of young people called the Union of Jewish University Students, which focused on building connections in academic and political circles to discuss issues related to the Uruguayan Jewish community and Israel. At one point, I suggested the need to undertake a project related to the Holocaust, and two members of the group, Patricia Catz and Uri Lichtenstein, agreed. We met at a house to outline what we wanted to do, and that’s how the process began.
What kind of support did the Department of Jewish Studies provide you?
We believed that to carry out this project, we needed to bring together several institutions. We sought and secured the support of the Office of the President, the Municipality of Montevideo, and the Central Board of Directors of the National Public Education Administration (Codicen). On the academic side, we agreed that ORT had to be the partner to convey this message, and in fact it continues to do so annually by offering a course for educators.
They are currently in the process of expanding the project internationally. What does that involve?
While pursuing my bachelor’s degree in management, I learned about the concept of franchising, which I applied to the Shoah Project with the goal of transforming it into a cultural franchise—in the sense of treating it as if it were a product for sale, albeit an intangible one. It consists of ten “deliverables”—which constitute the project’s know-how—that make it possible to stage the exhibition anywhere in the world by adapting the language and incorporating each country’s unique character (for example, by including Shoah survivors who immigrated to that country and addressing domestic issues related to human rights). Over the past three years, we have been traveling to various international conferences to present the project and sell the franchise, with the goal of reinvesting the profits in local, non-profit projects. Six months ago, we began to see the fruits of that labor: in May of this year, we opened the exhibition in São Paulo; in January 2011, we will do so in Bogotá; and in March, in Santiago, Chile.
And what are they doing at the local level?
The Shoah Project isn't limited to the exhibition; we are currently running an educational program in secondary schools that has already reached more than 25 high schools and 2,500 students, though our goal is to reach 6,000 students by the end of the year. Next year, we want to take the project to rural areas of the country, where we have received a great deal of interest.
Interview published in September 2010
On January 20, 2011, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos mentioned the student Samuel Dresel in his opening remarks at the educational exhibition “Shoah: Memory and Legacy of the Holocaust.”