2026 Mensch Award: Honoring Seymour and Rebecca Fromer

This year’s Mensch Award has been granted posthumously to the founders of the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Seymour and Rebecca Fromer. Join Steven Geiger of the Mensch International  Foundation and anthropologist, author, and award-winning filmmaker Mira Z. Amiras, the Fromer’s daughter, to reflect on their contributions to Jewish education and a more tolerant society. The ceremony will feature a Yiddish Tango performance with Ivan Shvarts and Crystal Johnson.

About the Fromers
The Magnes was founded by Seymour and Rebecca Fromer over 60 years ago, a truly inspired and imaginative couple. In response to what they saw as California and the world’s need to learn more about its proud Jewish heritage, the Fromers dared to answer the call and, in turn, started a movement of cultural preservation by creating the first independent Jewish museum in the United States after the Holocaust. As the museum grew, Seymour Fromer (1922-2009), an internationally known Jewish educator, and Rebecca Camhi Fromer (1927-2012), a gifted author of exceptional breadth, nurtured many young Jewish scholars and artists and were a key catalyst in the Jewish cultural renaissance in the Bay Area. Reflecting the guiding concerns of American Jewry after the Holocaust, they focused the Magnes on preserving the legacy of vanishing communities around the world and expanding the canon of Jewish cultural history, integrating visual, musical and material cultures.

About the speakers

Mira Z. Amiras is an anthropologist, author, and award-winning filmmaker. She was raised on her mother’s accounts of the Inquisition and Holocaust, her father’s tales of the creation and beauty of the universe, and her grandparents’ foods, folklore and music of ancient Sefarad. Mira has lived, studied, and traveled throughout the Middle East and North Africa, camped out 7,000 miles through Africa, and traveled overland from her home in Brussels to the Nepalese border. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and is Professor Emerita of Comparative Religion and Middle East Studies at San Jose State University. She is author of Development and Disenchantment in Rural Tunisia (1992), and other works on North Africa and Jewish Studies. For more see the links below. Mira is past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, and was a member of the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. She lives in San Francisco with her family.

Steven Geiger is the founder and director of the Mensch International Foundation. Steve was born in Budapest, a child of Holocaust Survivors, and first met the Fromers in 1971.

About the Mensch International Foundation
The Mensch Foundation was founded by Steven Geiger in 2002, in his words, “to develop an educational curriculum to stamp-out stereotyping and anti-Semitic and racist thinking.” The Foundation’s goal is “to develop a tolerant social order of values which respects minority rights and freedom of speech and worship.”