By Susan Danielson
OJMCHE’s new Education Manager is Adriana Reynoso. Adriana joined the museum this spring and brings to this position a wealth of experience: commitment to Holocaust Education, fluency in at least 3 languages, and organizational and digital skills. After graduating from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, she first considered classroom teaching as a career but quickly realized that she was more drawn to finding other ways of bringing history into an educational format. She returned to UBC for a Master’s in History. Her subsequent work has been in both classrooms and museums and the history of the Holocaust.
Adriana comes to Holocaust Education from a non-traditional background. Born and raised just outside of San Jose, California to an American mother and Mexican father, she did not grow up in a Jewish family or community. Her first exposure to the Holocaust was in ninth grade when her teacher, Ms. Weiss, taught about World War II. Adriana found herself curious about how such events could have happened. Ms. Weiss encouraged her curiosity, as did the documentary on Edith Hahn Beer, “The Nazi Officer’s Wife.” When Adriana returned to graduate school, her Master’s thesis focused on German Jewish intermarriage in the Nazi Era.
Over the past decade, Adriana has worked as both a teacher/mentor and in museums where she has conducted oral history interviews, guided tours, and developed and implemented exhibits. When she saw the job description for the Education Manager position at OJMCHE, she said she felt as though it had been written for her. As the OJMCHE’s Museum Education Manager she will develop programs for the museum and help to organize its speaker’s bureau. She sees her job in these early months as defining processes for the expanded work as the education department continues to evolve. Adriana is particularly excited by the opportunity to “give voice to the voiceless” and to meet the challenges of working with such a broad mix of children and adults.