Endowments are often inspired by fond memories of Cornell, but the Paul and Berthe Hendrix Memorial Professorship in Jewish Studies was birthed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Mauthausen-Gusen.

The daughter of Paul and Berthe Hendrix, Marianne Willems-Hendrix, was a sickly 5-year-old when her family was imprisoned in a Dutch transit camp in 1943. Her parents knew she'd never survive the harsh conditions, so they said the blond-haired girl wasn't really Jewish, but the offspring of an extramarital affair by her mother with a non-Jewish man. The lie saved Willems-Hendrix's life.

She established the Hendrix chair as a living memorial to her parents and two brothers, all of whom perished in the Holocaust. She wanted the gift to support scholarship at Cornell into the crucial role Jewish women have played throughout history, although she never attended the university.

Willems-Hendrix, who died in 2004, intended the endowed chair for a faculty member who studies women in Jewish studies as well as for supporting curriculum development to encourage faculty to develop and regularly offer Jewish studies courses about women and gender. But a recent agreement allows the chair to also be used for the Jewish studies program director on a per-term basis.

Ross Brann, the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies, will hold that chair as acting director 2012-13. One of his primary goals is to revise the Jewish studies curriculum to include more courses about women and gender. The spring 2013 visit of noted Jewish feminist and scholar Susannah Heschel will also be supported by the Hendrix endowment.

Next year Lauren Monroe, associate professor of Near Eastern studies, will begin a three-year term as director of the Jewish Studies Program.

"I'm very excited to bring my background in Jewish studies and my interest in gender and society to the position of director. I am grateful to Professor Brann for his work as interim director," says Monroe, who also plans to again teach her popular course on women in ancient Israel. Monroe's research, which spans the Hebrew Bible, archaeology and ancient Israelite religious and social history, has also included an examination into how the roles of women in ancient Israel have been understood and integrated in later Jewish and Christian thought.

Linda B. Glaser is staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.