Family Honors Barbara Rabin Legacy

According to friends and family, Barbara Rabin was an amazing woman, leader and volunteer in the Dallas Jewish community and throughout the city. To honor her legacy, her husband, Stan Rabin, made a gift of $350,000 to The University of Texas at Dallas to name the reference library at the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies and continue to support a distinguished professorship within the center.

A ribbon-cutting for the Barbara Rabin Library in the Erik Jonsson Academic Center was held in late 2022.

“Barbara was an extraordinary woman who grew up in Borger, Texas, a town of about 12,000 people and 10 Jewish families,” Rabin said. “For her growing up in a small town like that and with her family being so involved there since the 1930s, engagement in the general community as well as the Jewish community was so important.”

Stan and Barbara Rabin married in 1965 in California where she was attending the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970 the couple moved to Dallas where Stan Rabin, an engineer, joined Commercial Metals Co. He was later appointed CEO and positioned the firm as an international leader in scrap metal processing. Barbara Rabin actively supported the company, as well as many organizations in her community, including the Ackerman Center, Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, Dallas Symphony Association, Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas and United Way. She died in 2020 after battling pancreatic cancer.

“The word ‘tenacity’ comes to mind when I think about this young woman who left her small hometown of Borger, Texas, and moved to California to attend Berkeley,” said Dr. Nils Roemer, dean of the School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology and director of the Ackerman Center. “She was a person who obviously valued her education together with the importance of community. So, naming this library, which is a place of community for our students, faculty and events for the public, in honor of Barbara is very appropriate.”

Roemer, the Stan and Barbara Rabin Distinguished Professor in Holocaust Studies, noted the importance of the philanthropic partnership between the Ackerman and Rabin families in supporting the Ackerman Center. According to Rabin, his wife’s involvement in the center showed her recognition of the importance of continuous education about the horrors of the Holocaust.

“The concept that you have to teach the past to change the future was so important to Barbara,” Rabin said. “Unfortunately, we’re seeing the rise of antisemitism and other human rights issues, so more than ever the Ackerman Center needs to flourish and keep growing.”