Jim Rostenberg '75 Pays It Forward with Planned Gifts to Music and Study Abroad

With his 50th ReUnion quickly approaching, Jim Rostenberg '75 decided to make his estate gift plans for Union official. He was inspired, in part, by two different Union experiences that were absolutely formative - his term abroad in Germany and his participation in the Union College Glee Club.

Jim had sung casually in junior high and high school, but after joining the Glee Club during his first term at Union he was completely committed to learning and performing under the tutelage of Professor Hugh Allen Wilson.

Known as "Coach" to the Glee Club's singers, Wilson was an "incredibly gifted musician, both as a choral director and as a keyboardist," Jim said. "I've sung in many choirs since my time at Union, but have worked with only one other director who has approached Coach's outstanding talent and abilities."

While touring the Union campus as a prospective student, of course, Jim didn't know that music would become so important to him. "To this day I'm grateful that as an alumnus I had the opportunity to thank Coach before he passed away for accepting me into the Glee Club and getting me hooked on an activity that pervades my life to this day."

"For me, visiting Union was love at first sight," he recalled. "I was impressed by both the beauty of the campus and the warmth of the students I met there."

At Union, Jim continued the German classes he had started in high school to prepare for a term abroad at the Goethe Institute in Schwaebisch Hall, Germany.

That term was particularly highlighted by Jim's first weekend trip to his mother's small Bavarian hometown, Gerolzhofen. Professor Anton "Andy" Warde, who accompanied Union's students in Germany, gave him a ride to the town's center plaza. When Jim stepped out of the car, a small band in the plaza was playing a song that his mother had sung to him as a lullaby! In Gerolzhofen, Jim was able to pay his respects at the grave of his grandmother, who had perished in the Holocaust.

Jim visited Gerolzhofen twice during his time in Germany. Being there introduced him to his own roots at roughly the same time as Alex Haley's book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, became popular.

"My mother fled to America in 1937, and here I was in 1975, visiting her hometown and meeting her neighbors and close friends in the place of her youth. The German dialect spoken there wasn't what I had been taught in school, but with a couple of wine spritzers it became easier and easier to speak and understand!" Jim recalled with humor.

"Being in Germany and visiting my mother's village helped me appreciate some of her personality traits," Jim noted. "I also felt like I had discovered long-lost family members there, among the Catholic neighbors who had smuggled food to my grandfather before his deportation to a concentration camp."

"When I knocked on the door of my mother's best friend from her school days, the first thing she told me was that she still thought of my mother every year on her birthday, though they had not seen one another in nearly 40 years."

"At Union, I had impactful life experiences that follow me to the present day, both the memory of visiting the place of my mother's roots and the musical experiences that continue to nourish me," Jim said. "I would like to help enable similar opportunities for future Union students."

Jim sings with two choirs in the greater Chicago area and is a decades-long Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscriber and supporter. Retired since 2013 from his information technology career with Sears, Roebuck & Company, he has traveled extensively in the U.S. and abroad, photographing many of the world's wonders - from the aurora borealis in Alaska to southern Africa's iconic wildlife to immense icebergs in Newfoundland and Greenland.

Jim has lived in the Midwest since his time as a graduate student at Purdue University, following his graduation from Union.